Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 91783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
“Is this Liam Westbury?” The woman says my name with some hesitation.
“It is.”
She tells me her name and where she’s calling from, and then she says my father’s name. Sterling. She says a neighbor found him on his kitchen floor and called it in, that he’s stable for now, that he’s asking for no one. But my name is the one on his chart.
“You’re listed as his next of kin,” she says.
There it is. Not a wife. Not a friend. Me. The son who quit speaking to him a lifetime ago is the only name he wrote on his medical records.
I stand there with a dish towel in my hand.
“Mr. Westbury?”
“I heard you.”
I hang up, set the phone face down, and go back to drying the pan, because it’s easier than thinking about the phone call. Josie’s watching me. She doesn’t ask.
She waits until I’m ready.
“That was the hospital,” I finally say. “Sterling collapsed. A neighbor found him.”
“How bad.”
“I don’t know. He’s stable.” I put the pan in the rack. “He’s got me down as next of kin.”
She dries her hands and stands in front of me, close, not touching yet, letting me get there on my own.
“I’m not going,” I tell her, and I hear how fast it comes out, which is how I know I’ve been arguing it in my head already. “He doesn’t get to do this. Fall down and have me come running because he has no one else. He had my whole life to pick up a phone, and he fucking waited until I was vulnerable.” I push my thumbs into my eyes.
Josie wraps her arms around my waist and rests her head against my chest.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t,” she says, adding nothing else because what else is there to say.
“I hate him.”
“I know,” she says, hugging me tighter.
I clear my throat, kiss her forehead and then her lips. “I don’t want to do this, but I have to.”
She nods. “Do you want me to come?”
“No.” I kiss the top of her head. “Stay by the phone.”
She almost laughs. She walks me to the door and watches me pull out of the driveway.
The hospital at night is buffed floors and a smell that reminds you nothing good happens after midnight. A nurse walks me back and tells me things in a low voice, careful with every word. Her tone is soft, caring as she says the words I don’t want to hear.
Heart failure.
Advanced.
“We’re keeping him comfortable.”
Then she opens a door and there he is.
Sterling was always a big man. A man who filled a doorway on purpose, who used to press the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades to steer me through a room I could’ve walked fine on my own.
The man in this bed is none of that.
He’s gone small under the blanket. There are tubes taped to the back of a hand spotted with age, the wrist above it thin, a monitor over the bed counting and beeping. His eyes are open.
They find me and they hold.
For a second neither of us has a thing to say.
“You didn’t have to come,” he says. His voice comes out rough, barely there.
“I know,” I say.
I don’t sit. There’s a chair pulled up close, somebody’s idea of comfort, and I stand behind it instead with a hand on the back of it. He watches me not sit and doesn’t say a word about it. The room is quiet except for the machine and, somewhere down the hall, a television blares.
His breath comes in short pulls, working for each one. There’s a cup of water on the tray, a straw bent toward him, sitting out past where he can reach it. I move it in. He gets his mouth on the straw and takes a little and eases back into the pillow, spent by the effort. I don’t make anything of it. Neither does he.
A nurse comes in and does quiet work on a bag hung from a pole, writes something on the whiteboard, and goes out again, and none of it moves the green number over the bed. His eyes track her out and come back to me. He’s working up to something. I can see the cost of it in his throat before he gets to it.
“I called your show,” he says. “A few times.”
“I know.” I found that out from my mother, who picked his voice out of a thousand callers because she spent a lifetime learning to read him. I don’t tell him that. I don’t tell him what it did to me, hearing my own father ask a stranger with my voice how a man goes about making amends. “I know you did.”
He nods, once. It takes more out of him than it should.
“Is there anyone I should call,” I ask. It isn’t kindness. It’s a thing a person asks.