Page 56 of Patch

“Then what are you telling me?”

“I am telling you that when you arrive, you will have a reason for it, and the reason will be a good one.” Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “Mine was that I did not want anybody hurt for me. It sounded like courage. It was not.”

The engine ticked. Somewhere behind us the clubhouse door opened and shut and neither of us looked. “He didn’t tell me about the car,” I said.

“No. He is an idiot. They are all idiots. It is a condition of the patch.” Something crossed her face that wasn’t quite a smile. “And you are going to go anyway, because your grandmother is your grandmother, and I would go too. I only want one thing from you.”

“What?”

“Put his number where you can find it.”

I looked at her.

“That is all. Not a man in the car. Not an escort. I know better than to ask you for that tonight. But you’ll put that number where you don’t have to go looking for it, and you’ll keep the phone where you can reach it.” Vasha’s palm finally came off the window. “Because in about an hour you may want to make one call, and I do not want you to be a woman who decided in advance that she would not.”

I got in and started the car, and before I pulled out, I took the phone from my jacket, put his number on the screen where one press would dial it, and set it in the cup holder face up.

She watched me do it through the windshield. Then she stepped back and let me go.

The headlights swept across the gravel. The gate stood open. Leo watched me drive through without raising the radio. His face said he had been told something and wasn’t sure what to do with it.

I hit the county road. Both hands on the wheel. The speedometer climbed. Forty. Fifty. The trees pressed close. My headlights pushed against the black.

The car in the lot wasn’t confirmed.

I drove toward it anyway.

* * *

I made the drive to Maple Grove with both hands on the wheel and my shoulders set in the rigid line of someone running on forward motion because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant the sound the waiting room made and Patch’s unfinished sentence, and I had used up my allocation of hard truths for one week.

The facility stood lit and quiet against the dark. Porch lights on. Walkway swept. The front desk was staffed by the same aide who always worked Sundays.

She nodded when I came in. Didn’t check the clipboard. Didn’t ask for ID.

The hallway smelled. Industrial cleaner underneath. Lavender plug-ins on top. The common room television murmured from behind closed doors. Some program with laughter that sounded canned even through walls. I counted the doors to Ruth’s wing. Twelve. The number hadn’t changed. Some numbers didn’t.

Ruth’s room was at the end.

She sat on the edge of her bed, immaculately dressed in a blouse she had chosen thirty years ago. Pale blue. Button-front. The staff had put it on her that morning the way they put everything on her. With care, with patience, with the tenderness of people who understood that dignity lived in details even when the mind that requested those details could no longer explain why.

Her hands were never still. They moved across the bedspread now. Folding the edge. Smoothing it. Folding it again. The continuous motion of work that no longer existed in the world but lived in her fingers the way habits live in bodies long after the reasons for them have gone.

She looked up when I came in. Her eyes, my coloring in a faded register, found my face and held. “Maren.” My name. Delivered with warmth and recognition. A good stretch of evening. It happened roughly one visit in three and never on a schedule anyone could predict.

“Hey.” I sat in the vinyl chair beside her bed. The chair creaked. It always creaked. “Drive was fine. No traffic.”

“That’s good.” She smoothed the bedspread. Folded the edge. “The roads get narrow past the mill, don’t they? I always thought they should widen that stretch.”

“They should.” I didn’t correct her. The mill had been closed for fifteen years.

Her hands kept moving. Fold. Smooth. Fold. The rhythm had its own gravity. I watched it the way I watched vital signs. Noting, not intervening. Some tremors were worth leaving alone.

“How is he?” she asked.

The question came out easy. Warm. And rehearsed in the quiet parts of her mind where the lucid stretches lived. She smoothed the bedspread. Didn’t look at me.

“How’s who?”