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)
His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “Who would you call.”
There’s the answer. There’s no one. No wife. No friend killing time in the waiting room with a bad coffee. A country club’s worth of men who’d shake his hand and not one who’d sit up the night for him. He built that. A little more every year, on purpose. And this is what it got him. Four walls and a monitor and a son who should’ve stayed home.
“Get some rest,” I tell him, because I’ve got nothing better and because I need the hall.
Out past the door I put my back to the wall and take out my phone and stand there with my thumb over her name longer than I want to admit. He ruined my mother, just like he tried to ruin me.
He told my mom once that her own mother was dead when the woman was alive, living, and wanting to know her family. She’s got more right to hate him than anybody else. I call her anyway. She should get the choice. He never once gave her one.
She picks up on the second ring, glad, because she thinks it’s a regular night.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s about Sterling.”
The glad goes out of her voice. “Tell me.”
“He’s dying. Tonight, tomorrow, they won’t say. He collapsed.” I keep it flat, because any emotion I have for him, needs to be shared in the confines of my home. Not here. Not near him. “I thought you should know. That’s all. You don’t have to do a thing with it.”
She’s quiet a long time. Long enough that I check the screen to see if the call dropped.
“I’ll come,” she says.
“You don’t owe him that.”
“I know what I owe him,” she says. “I’m not coming for him.”
“Harrison will bring you,” I tell her and hang up.
I call my best friend because I can’t drive back to my house and then come here again. I won’t. Once is enough.
“Hey, Josie said you went to the hospital. Is everything okay?”
“Not really. Can you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Drive around back and pick my mother up and bring her here.”
“I’m on my way.”
I pace the halls and ignore the nurses when they ask me if there’s anything they can do. A few of them know me and the history I have with my father. It’s not a secret. Most of the town, the country club, and every place in between knows we had a falling out thirty-some years ago. It wasn’t until my mother left him that he moved out of town, out toward the college where he taught.
Harrison escorts my mom down the hall. We hug tightly and then I show her which room is Sterling’s.
“You want me in there with you?” I ask.
“No, baby.” She pats me on the chest. I can’t even tell you the last time she ever called me baby. “This one’s mine.”
She goes in. The door eases shut behind her.
Harrison finds a vending machine with coffee and brings me a cup. It’s times like this when I wish I had a flask of something good to ease the thoughts in my mind. We don’t talk. We stand in silence or he watches me pace.
When I’m near him, he says, “You don’t have to know if it’s the right thing. You just have to do the next thing.”
His words give me pause. They’re deep, meaningful, and very much Harrison. He lost his dad early, like the twins, and can barely remember a thing about him.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I know,” he says. He waits with me, thumbing through his phone and pretending the whole time he isn’t watching me. Down the corridor a machine chimes and goes quiet. A man works a mop across the far end and never looks up once. I text Josie an update and tell her to go to bed. She sends one back telling me she and Katelyn are watching a movie.
The clock on the wall barely moves. I don’t know when I arrived, but it’s long enough that a nurse changes shift, long enough that I read the fire evacuation map on the wall until I could draw it from memory.
When the door opens, my mother comes out with her eyes red and her chin level. She isn’t falling apart. I’m happy to see it. He doesn’t deserve her kindness.
She takes both my hands. “Thank you for calling me,” she says. “You didn’t have to. He wouldn’t have.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” I say. It comes out harder than I mean, or exactly as hard as I mean. I can’t tell anymore.
“No,” she says. “He doesn’t.” She squeezes my hands once and lets them go. “But I didn’t go in there for him. I said goodbye for me. I’ve been waiting a long time to be the one who got to walk out of the room.”