“What did you tell him.”
“Go home and see her, see her the way he did on the day they got married.” I lift a shoulder, keeping things short. “He rang back the week after to say it worked.”
He’s quiet for a while. “I never once saw the day coming,” he says. “Any of them. Birthdays. School things. I was always somewhere else, doing something I’d told myself mattered more.” His eyes close. “It didn’t.”
“You could always talk to anybody,” he says after a while. “Even small. I thought it was a weakness in you. Something soft that wanted toughening out of you.” His eyes hold mine. “It was the best thing about you. I had it backward, along with the rest.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I do nothing with it.
“Can I ask you something,” I say. He waits, because talking costs him and listening doesn’t. “All those years, you knew where I was. Why this? Why a hospital, and not a phone, any of the ten thousand days before this one? Why not in the grocery store after you berated my daughter-in-law?”
He’s a long time answering. “Because now there’s nothing left to lose by it,” he says. His eyes hold on me. “Don’t wait for the day it costs you nothing, son. There isn’t one. You just get old enough to quit pretending there is.”
“You married the Preston girl,” he says.
“Josie. Yeah.”
“I told you not to.”
“I remember.”
“She was always the right one.” He says it to the ceiling, not to me. “I was wrong about her. I’ve been wrong about most things.”
I can’t get anything up past that. I sit with my elbows on my knees, my hands hanging between them, and look at the floor until the burn behind my eyes eases off enough to be sure of my face. When I can talk, I say, “She forgave me things I never earned. She’s better at it than I am. Better than you ever managed.” It comes out harder than I plan. He takes it. He doesn’t argue.
“Do something for me,” he says. It’s the first thing he’s ever asked me for. His jaw works around it, this man who never in his life had to work for a word. “Tell your mother I’m sorry I wasted her life.”
She was in this room last night. Maybe he tried and couldn’t get it out, or she didn’t stay to let him. Either way it falls to me to carry. I think about the red in her eyes, the level of her chin, and how she walked out of here on her own two feet.
“I’ll tell her,” I say. I nod on it, so he knows I mean it.
I stay until the light goes down. He drifts, comes back, drifts again, the stretches of talk getting shorter each time he surfaces, until the quiet runs longer. When a nurse comes in for her round I take it for what it is. I stand. I put my hand on his shoulder, a thing I have never once done. He brings his up over it, cold and with almost no weight in it. Neither of us says the word for what this is.
“Go home to her,” he says. “Don’t sit here on my account.”
So, I go. At the door I look back. He’s watching me. I lift a hand. He gets his up off the blanket, barely, and that is the last of it.
The house is dark when I pull in. I sit in the truck a minute in the cold before I can make myself go inside. Josie’s awake when I come up, sitting in our bed with the lamp on and a book. She doesn’t ask how it went. She pulls back the covers on my side. I strip out of those hospital-smelled clothes and climb in, and she folds herself against my back and holds on. I don’t cry. I don’t do a single thing. I lie there in her arms and let the night run out.
The phone goes before the light. Josie’s hand gets it first and passes it to me.
It’s the night nurse. She’s kind about it. He went sometime before dawn, she says. In his sleep. She uses the word peaceful, and I don’t argue with her, though I sat in that room and I know what it was. He died a few hours after I walked out. Alone, in a room with no one in it. That’s not peaceful. That’s just what he had left.
I set the phone on the nightstand. Josie doesn’t tell me she’s sorry. Sorry isn’t the right word, and she knows it. She fitsherself against me and we lie there while the room goes from black to gray.
There’ll be calls to make once the sun’s up, but first I’ll walk to the end of my property where my mom has been staying and knock on the door. She’ll know as soon as she opens it, and I tell her what he said.
To me.
Not to her.
I’ll tell the kids after, though there’s not much to tell them. They never had a grandfather in that man. There will be no grief for him. The rest of the world will go on not knowing, which is how he must’ve wanted it.
I keep coming back to the chair I finally sat in, the thing he finally said, and how all of it turned up a lifetime too late to do either of us any good.
We got what we got.
It’ll never be enough.
