Chapter 3 - The Fourth Floor
We wedged Addie's bike into the cab's trunk. On the ride over she mentioned, offhand, that Walter had given her that bike not long before he died. It knocked the wind out of me a little.
Diana lay in a narrow bed on the fourth floor of Mercy General, pale and thin, a line running into the back of her hand. She looked younger than her situation, the way sickness can peel a person down to something raw and unfair.
"She's been here two months," Addie said quietly from the foot of the bed. "Walter used to stop by and check on us. The last time I saw him, he gave me the envelope and made me promise."
"Did he say why?"
Addie shook her head. "I asked where he was going. He just smiled and said his health wasn't good anymore."
I stepped out into the hallway and found the attending doctor at the nurses' station.
"The surgery can't wait much longer," he told me. "Without it, I won't lie to you — her odds aren't good. The obstacle is cost. The hospital doesn't have the funding to move ahead right now."
I stood there and thought about Walter in his last months, sitting up in bed, writing a letter, choosing a key, trusting a child to carry it to me on one specific day.
He had known. He'd known exactly what I would find in that unit, and exactly what he was asking me to do about it.
I went back in and took Addie's hand.
"I'll be back in two days," I told her.
I came back with the money.
Walter and I had pinched pennies our entire married life. What I spent was what the two of us had saved together, decade after decade. Handing it over didn't feel like a decision. It felt like finishing a sentence Walter had started.
The operation took six hours. It went well.
When Diana was strong enough to sit up and have visitors, I came to her room and told her who I was — Walter's wife, Eleanor.
She stared at me a long moment. Then her face came apart. "Your husband saved us," she said. "My girl and I wouldn't be here. Not without him."
I held her hand and didn't say much, because the question was still there, still unanswered.
May you like
Walter had carried these people his whole life. He had loved me, faithfully, for sixty-two years. And he had never breathed one word of it.
Why?
