The hymnbook slid off my knees with a sharp slap against the linoleum floor, but I didn’t reach down to pick it up. My hands were flat on my thighs, trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the morning chill coming off the church windows and everything to do with the flat, empty space twenty feet to my right. For forty years, Eunice Mercer had occupied the outer corner of the third pew left at Grace Baptist, her hymnbook always held at chest level, her thumb marking the corner of page 214 where the binding had frayed back in the late nineties.
Last Sunday, that corner of the pew was just polished oak and dust motes catching the 10:00 a.m. light. Pastor Hill cleared his throat, adjusted his bifocals behind the pulpit, and read down the cream-colored paper of the weekly prayer list with the steady, practiced cadence of a man who had buried half the county. When he reached the bottom name, his voice dropped an octave, losing its professional Sunday ring. Eunice Mercer, he told the room, was down at County General, admitted through the emergency bay forty-eight hours prior, and the doctors were telling the family she was not expected to last the week.
The silence that followed didn’t feel sacred. It felt heavy, airless, and entirely too loud. Nobody turned around to look at me, but I could feel the invisible weight of forty years of habit pressing down on the back of my neck. Across the center aisle, in the third pew right, where Eunice had banished herself three years, two months, and fourteen days ago after a stupid disagreement about who was supposed to bring the potato salad to the deacon’s luncheon, her empty space mirrored mine.
We had spent over fourteen hundred days singing the exact same verses of the exact same hymns, standing twenty feet apart like two stubborn telegraph poles refusing to lean. I had told myself a thousand times that it was her fault for snapping at me over a Tupperware bowl. I had convinced myself that my pride was a sturdy enough thing to keep me warm through the winter months. But sitting there with the hymnal resting near my left shoe, watching the dust settle in the empty space where she used to tap her small leather-shod foot in time with the organ, my chest felt like it had been cinched up with baling wire.
By the time the final benediction was spoken and the congregation began shuffling toward the double doors with low murmurs about the weather and the upcoming church bazaar, I hadn’t sung a single note of the closing doxology.
I stayed in the pew until the ushers started folding the bulletins left behind in the racks, my cane gripped in my right hand so hard the polished maple was slick with sweat. Outside on the gravel parking lot, the midday sun was glaring off the hood of my grandson Leo’s gray sedan where he was leaning against the passenger fender waiting for me. Leo is twenty-four, all lanky limbs and quiet patience, the kind of boy who doesn’t ask questions when he sees his grandfather standing frozen on a church porch with a face the color of wet limestone. He pushed off the fender the second I reached the bottom step, his hand coming out instinctively to steady my elbow before I even asked.
I didn’t tell him where we were going until we were already past the grain elevator on the edge of town, the tires humming a steady rhythm against the patched asphalt of Route 4.
I just pointed my thumb toward the south end of the county and said County General, and Leo didn’t blink, just flicked his turn signal and took the overpass without a word about Sunday dinner waiting on the stove back at my place. The drive took twenty-two minutes, every single one of them filled with the rhythmic click of the turn signal relay and the rattle of loose change in the console tray. I watched the roadside telephone poles flick past one by one, counting them in my head the way I used to count fence posts when I drove a flatbed for the co-op back in the seventies. My mind kept looping back to the last time Eunice had spoken to me directly, right beside the coat rack in the church fellowship hall, her finger tapping against the rim of that plastic bowl while she told me I was entirely too stubborn for my own good. She had been right, of course, but the realization had come about three years too late to do me any actual good.
County General smelled like floor wax, boiled cabbage, and old antiseptic on a damp Sunday afternoon. The front desk clerk didn’t even look up from her crossword puzzle when Leo and I pushed through the heavy glass double doors, just waved a hand vaguely toward the bank of elevators down the hall and muttered that visiting hours ended at five. We didn’t take the elevator because the smell in those small metal boxes always turned my stomach, so we took the stairs up to the second floor, my knees popping with every concrete landing like dry twigs under a boot heel. Room 214 was near the end of a long, bleached-white corridor where the only sound was the rhythmic whoosh of an oxygen machine coming from behind a closed door three numbers down. I stopped dead six feet short of the doorframe, my palm flat against the cold cinderblock wall, suddenly feeling every single one of my eighty-two years in the marrow of my bones.
Through the narrow wired glass window in the door, I could see the edge of a metal bed rail and a patch of white pillowcase, but nothing else. I stood there for what must have been five full minutes, wrestling with the kind of cowardly panic that only old age can breed, wondering if I had waited too long, if the distance I had kept out of sheer bloody-minded pride had finally become permanent. Leo didn’t push me or try to hustle me along; he just stood back near the ice machine alcove, his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets, staring out the tall wire-reinforced window at the gravel parking lot below. I took a deep, shaky breath that tasted of stale peppermint and hospital linoleum, squared my shoulders the best I could manage, and pushed the door open just enough to slip inside without making a sound.
The room was tiny, dominated by the high-low frame of the hospital bed and the complicated nest of clear plastic tubing running up to a wall-mounted flow meter. Eunice looked terribly small under the cotton-blend blanket, her white hair fanned out across the pillow like frayed cotton twine, her breathing shallow and whistling slightly with every rise of her chest. On the bedside table, right beside a clear plastic cup filled with melted ice and a bent straw, sat a worn, imitation-leather Bible with the corners curled up from years of being shoved into the bottom of a church tote bag. I walked across the slick tile floor, the rubber tips of my cane making a dull squeak with every step, and pulled out the metal folding chair pushed against the wall. I sat down so slowly my joints cracked, reaching out with a hand that wouldn’t quite stop shaking to rest my palm over the back of her thin, cold hand lying exposed on top of the blanket.
Her skin felt like old parchment stretched over dry wood, startlingly fragile, but the second my thumb brushed across her knuckles, her eyelids fluttered once, twice, and then snapped open with a sudden, startling clarity. She didn’t look confused or drugged up the way people told you dying folks were supposed to look; she just stared at me with those sharp, faded blue eyes that had glared across the center aisle of Grace Baptist through three presidential administrations and four different church building campaigns. For ten seconds neither one of us breathed, the only sound in the room being the mechanical hiss of the wall oxygen and the distant rumble of a truck shifting gears out on the highway. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but my mouth was too dry, so I just sat there like a fool holding her hand while she looked me over from the top of my bald head down to my scuffed Sunday shoes.
Her voice wasn’t the strong, carrying alto she used to anchor the soprano section during the doxology; it came out like dry paper sliding across a rough wooden table. You took your sweet time getting here, Leo, she whispered, her fingers twitching just enough to catch my thumb. I corrected her right then, my voice cracking right down the middle like cheap pottery. It’s not Leo, Eunice. It’s just me. Her lips twitched at the corners, a dry, ghost of a smile that didn’t reach her eyes but was enough to let me know the old engine was still running underneath the rust. I know who it is, she breathed, her grip tightening just a fraction against my palm with a strength I wouldn’t have guessed she had left in her. You always were slow on the uptake, Leo. Especially when you had a notion in your head that you were right and everyone else in the township was an idiot.
I let out a wet, ragged sound that was half-laugh and half-sob, leaning forward until my forehead was nearly touching the cold metal rail of the bed. I’m sorry, Eunice, I said to the floral pattern of her hospital gown, the words feeling clumsy and small after letting them sit in the dark for three whole years. I’m sorry about the casserole, I’m sorry about the aisle, I’m sorry about being a miserable old bastard. She let out a soft, wheezing sigh that rattled deep in her chest, turning her head slightly on the pillow so she could look out the window at the gray November sky hanging low over the treeline. It wasn’t ever about the casserole dish, Leo, she whispered, her voice dropping so low I had to strain to catch the syllables over the hiss of the machine. We both knew that. We were just two lonely old fools who got scared because the world was changing too fast and didn’t know how to say we needed each other without feeling small.
We sat there in that small, sterile room as the afternoon light slowly faded from the window, turning the gray sky into a deep, bruised purple that signaled the end of another Sunday. She didn’t let go of my hand, and I didn’t move my chair, even when my lower back started screaming from the hard angle of the metal seat and my knees felt like they had seized up for good. We didn’t talk about the church board or the weather or the state of the county roads; instead, we just talked about the small things, the ordinary, forgotten pieces of forty years spent sitting twenty feet apart across an oak floor. She remembered the exact Sunday in October of 1984 when the furnace went out during the morning service and Pastor Miller preached his entire sermon wearing a woolen barn coat. I remembered the way she used to hum the third verse of Amazing Grace just under her breath when the rest of the choir was lagging behind on the tempo. Every memory was like pulling another loose brick out of the wall we had spent three years building between us, until the room didn’t feel so cold and the silence didn’t feel so heavy anymore.
Around five o’clock, the door clicked open a couple of inches and Leo poked his head in, his face tight with concern as he looked from the bed to my red eyes. I gave him a small nod and told him to go down to the cafeteria and get himself a cup of black coffee and a sandwich, that I wasn’t going anywhere for a while yet. He closed the door quietly, leaving us alone again in the dimming light of the second-floor room. Eunice’s eyes were closed now, her breathing slower and deeper than it had been when I first walked in, but her hand was still locked around mine like she was afraid if she let go I might scurry back across the center aisle and hide behind my hymnbook. I sat there in the gathering dark, listening to the steady click of the wall clock and the quiet rustle of her blanket, feeling a strange, hollow sort of peace settle down into my bones for the first time since that Sunday morning three years ago when the music stopped making sense.
She didn’t wake up again before the nurses came in around seven to check her charts and adjust the flow on the wall, but when the nurse tried to gently pry her fingers loose from mine to take her pulse, Eunice made a soft, rumbling sound in her throat and held on tighter. The nurse gave me a long, knowing look over her wire-rimmed glasses, shook her head once with a tiny, tired smile, and left the room without saying a word about visiting hours being over. I stayed until the clock on the wall hit eight, my hand growing stiff and numb inside hers, watching the rise and fall of the pale blue blanket until the shadows in the corners of the room blurred together into one solid block of night. When I finally stood up to leave, my legs trembling beneath me like a newborn calf, I leaned over the metal rail and kissed her dry, paper-thin forehead, whispering that I’d be back before the first bell rang on Wednesday night.
She didn’t answer with words, but her thumb gave my hand one last, weak press before her fingers finally went slack against my palm, heavy and warm in the dim light of the ward. Leo was waiting by the nurses’ station with my winter coat over his arm, and he didn’t say anything as he helped me into the sleeves and guided me back down the stairs toward the automatic glass doors and the cold night air outside. The drive home was entirely silent, the headlights cutting a yellow tunnel through the damp autumn fog rolling off the river bottoms, but for the first time in thirty-six months, the quiet didn’t feel like an empty room. Next Sunday, when I walk through those heavy double doors at Grace Baptist and take my usual spot on the end of the third pew left, I know the space across the aisle won’t be an accusation anymore; it will just be a place where someone I loved spent forty years keeping time with my life.
