Page 3 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

Every part of my body wanted to keep me outside, just for another minute, but I forced myself to walk in. The lobby was smaller than I remembered and yet, somehow, more cavernous—a vault of white tile and flickering fluorescent light, the air so cold my breath fogged as I exhaled.

I felt as if the place retained every moment I’d ever spent there, the hundreds of visits I’d made over the last six years of my mom’s life: the birthdays and holidays crashed by my mother’s sudden episodes, the endless, helpless afternoons watching her wither toward a finish line we never wanted to believe was coming.

The nurse behind the check-in desk was new but looked exactly like the nurse who used to give me tiny pink bubblegum pops and stickers when I was a child.

“Can I help you?” she asked. There was an accent, not local, but not unfamiliar. I gave her my grandfather’s name, and she gestured me down a narrow hallway. “He’s in the ICU, room 304, sweetie. Just need to see some I.D.”

I pulled out my driver’s license, slid it across the counter, and she printed out a visitor’s badge for me. I followed the corridor, my stomach leaden, my hands cold and prickling with sweat. The scent of overcooked vegetables and bleach grew stronger as I neared the elevator. A volunteer in a maroon vest smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but my face got stuck somewhere between a grimace and a sneer. When the doors opened, I ducked inside, pressed the button for the third floor, then stared at my warped reflection in the doors until they split open.

I got off the elevator and with each step I took getting closer to his room, the more my hands would sweat. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Buddy Shepard was larger than life. He was invincible. He was a beast of a man. It had been a couple years since he’d visited New York, and he refused to FaceTime or Skype, so I wasn’t sure what I would be walking into.

A sudden rush of guilt overwhelmed me as I stood outside Room 304. Whatever my reasons were for staying away, and they were good reasons, I should have come back sooner. Over the phone, a few times a year, anyone could fool someone into thinking they were okay. I should have paid more attention.

The door was open a crack. I stood in the threshold and watched for a moment, anonymous, invisible, as my grandpa squinted at the TV bolted to the wall. His skin looked gray, almost translucent, liver spots blooming up his forearms. There was something so profoundly shrunken about him that I barely recognized the man who, in my memory, had been imposing, almost mythical in his stature. He was the person who’d taught me to shoot a basketball, to gut a fish, to run the bases with my head up and never look back. That man wore the hospital gown like a flag of surrender.

My heart broke, and it was difficult to breathe.

He looked up, and his eyes met mine with a flash of startled, almost guilty recognition. “Sadie girl.” His voice raspy but not fragile. “Well, I’ll be damned. Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes. What on earth are you doin’ here?”

I entered the room and lowered down onto a chair beside him, feeling waves of déjà vu from my visits with my mom. I tried my best to ignore them.

He braced his palms on the plastic rails and tried to sit up straighter, as if that might ward off my worry. “You didn’t have to come all this way for an old man’s indigestion.”

“You had a heart attack and a stroke,” I replied, my voice flat. I was careful not to sit too close, careful not to touch anything—him, the bed, the emotional possibility that this would be the last time we spoke.

That’s how fast it happened with my mom. On Friday I visited her, she was up and talking, and Saturday morning I woke up to the sounds of Buddy sobbing downstairs. I knew, without anyone telling me, she was gone.

Her body, which had fought for years, had finally given up on her. When I was little, I used to tell people that my mom had Julia Roberts disease, because she suffered from the same complications from her Type 1 diabetes as Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. Like Julia’s character Shelby in the movie, having me put a lot of strain on her body. Her kidneys failed. She was on dialysis for years.

I got more time with my mom than Shelby’s fictional son, and the woman the movie was based on, did. My mom passed away a week before my twelfth birthday. Birthdays were still tough for me.

“How did you find out I was here? Was it that Rita? She can’t seem to keep her mouth shut.”

Rita Burrows, local rumor dispenser, was a human antenna, always tuned in and picking up even faint signals of drama. She liked to say she didn’t repeat gossip, so you have to listen closely the first time.

“The hospital called me. Next of kin,” I explained.

He grunted, “They had no right.”

The silence between us bloomed like a bruise. I counted the seconds, waiting for him to crack a joke or ask about my job or who I was dating, something to reset the energy. Instead, he picked at the edge of his blanket with a trembling hand.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, softer than before.

“I’m fine,” he dismissed. “Don’t let them tell you otherwise. I’m just here for the Jell-O and the nice nurses.”

“They don’t keep you in ICU for Jell-O.”

He waved his hand at me, shooing away my comment, and I noticed just how thin his skin looked. The last time he’d visited was three years ago. I’d noticed he’d lost a little weight, but he told me he’d just gotten over a stomach bug, and I didn’t question it. But he looked frail now, scarily thin.

A knock at the door interrupted us, and a nurse came in with Buddy’s breakfast. He fussed at her as she tried to convince him to eat it, I could see that he was exhausted. I worried he was acting up because I was there. Maybe he’d rest if I left.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a doctor in blue scrubs and a sharp white coat walk in, carrying a clipboard like an old-fashioned prop.

Even in my peripheral vision, he looked familiar in the uncanny way of someone from a previous life, but it wasn’t until he said, “Sadie?” that I turned and saw his face.

“Giovanni Russo?” I said. “You became a doctor. I always figured you’d end up in politics or…prison.”

Giovanni Russo and my ex, Dawson Lockhart, had been best friends. The two of them were inseparable, which meant once Dawson and I got together, the three of us became inseparable. Gio and Dawson were opposites in nearly every way. They were the yin to each other’s yang.