Page 68 of Patch

Fox was beside me against the wall before I heard him arrive. No sound. No shift in the air. Just a man who had been President nine and a half years and had stopped needing to announce it. His shoulder settled against the drywall an arm’s length from mine. His hands went into his jacket pockets. His eyes found the middle distance where the hallway met the dawn light at the windows.

He didn’t speak.

The silence built. Not the empty kind. The pregnant kind. He had questions and was waiting for the room to be ready for them.

Fox’s voice, when it came, was low.

“What do you actually want?”

A question from a man who had been watching another man stand at a gate for twenty years and had never asked why he never wanted anything on the other side of it.

Not what does the club need. Not what are the logistics. Not the rotation or the headcount or the forty acres of fence that I had run since I was twenty-nine because running the fence was the thing I could actually do.

What do you want.

Personally.

Mine.

I looked at my hands. The long fingers. The scarred knuckles. They had held pressure on a gunshot wound through forty minutes of gravel road without wavering.

I wanted something, and my hands had known it longer than I had.

“I want her beside me.” The words came out rough. Lower than I meant them to. The struggle of a man whose functional vocabulary didn’t include the things he needed to say. “Not forty minutes out on a county road with the last light in the building hers. Beside me. Where I can see her. Where the gate rotation runs past the window and she can hear it and know it’s running for her too.”

Fox listened without interrupting.

“There’s an old woman at Maple Grove,” I said. “Her grandmother. Memory care, the building with the buzzer and the front desk and the camera that’s been down since spring. Somebody has to sit with her on Sunday or she’ll sit by that window and wait for a person who isn’t coming.”

Fox didn’t say anything.

“Maren goes at the same hour. Same route. Parks in the same spot every week, because the routine’s the last thing that woman’s mind can still hold.” I heard my voice do something and let it. “That’s three thousand two hundred dollars a month and a Sunday gone every week for however many years she’s got left, and Maren has never once described any part of it to me as hard.” I stopped again.

“I want in on it. That’s what I’m telling you. Not the fence and the rotation. The Sunday.” My breath came slow. “I want that too. The routine. The same spot. The thing that holds.” The sentence cost me more than shouting would have cost anyone else.

Fox nodded. Once. Knowing.

The acknowledgment of a President who had watched a brother stand at a gate for all these years. His hand came out of his pocket. Found my shoulder. Squeezed. Then back to his pocket. The gesture contained more than any elaboration could have held. Then he was gone.

I pushed off the wall.

Boots on linoleum. My own sound now. The door handle was cold. Metal. I turned it. Pushed.

The room inside was quiet. Dimmer than the hallway. A single lamp near the head of the gurney. Maren lay on her right side. Left flank elevated. The bandage was fresh. White gauze. Dread’s work, neat and exact. An IV ran into her left arm. Clear fluid. The drip counted seconds. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was even. Fourteen per minute. Steady. Steady, out of a body that had decided for now it would keep going.

I sat in the chair beside the bed. Didn’t touch her. Didn’t reach for her hand. Didn’t do any of the things a normal person would do in a room where someone they loved was sleeping off trauma. I just sat. Boots flat on the floor. Hands on my knees.

Her dark blonde hair was loose on the pillow. The disarray of someone who had been through something and hadn’t had time to put herself back together. A strand lay across her cheek. I didn’t brush it away. Didn’t need to. It would be there when she woke up, and she would push it back herself, and I would watch her do it, and that would be enough.

The room held us. The dawn light through the windows. Her breathing. My hands on my knees, and steady, and nobody in the room but me knew what that had cost.

The numbers had stopped running.

For now, I let them.

Epilogue

Maren