He Gave Her My Hospital Wing novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Brannon Dock

Della takes Junie to her father's shrimp dock, and Gene asks one question: did she ever see the check? At dawn on Mother's Day Colt comes with white roses, admits he did not ask her, refuses to say why, and tells her Camille has been living at their beach house since March.

My father was sorting the day's catch on the dock when I came down the ramp in my navy dress with the baby on my chest.

He looked at the dress, and he looked at my face, and he put down the shovel.

"Hand her here," Gene said.

I unclipped the carrier and gave him Junie.

She was awake now, and she put one fist on his gray beard and held on.

"Hey, little shrimp," he told her. "Rough day for your mama."

"You saw it," I said.

"I saw it on a phone at the bait shop." He rocked her on his forearm. "Half the creek saw it."

"Then you know."

"I know a man pulled a cloth off a rock and read somebody else's name."

I sat down on an overturned crate and took off my heels.

The dock smelled of diesel and salt and ice, as it had every day of my childhood.

The shrimp were still jumping in the baskets.

For three years I had come down this ramp every Sunday and sat on this crate and told him what the foundation needed that week.

He had always listened, and he had never once said it wasn't my fight.

"You want to eat?" he said.

"I want to know how it got on that stone."

"Eat first."

He fried shrimp in the dock kitchen with too much pepper, as always, and he fed Junie a pinch of rice on the tip of his finger.

I told him all of it, in order.

The drape, the check, the nod Colt gave the board.

Gene chewed and did not interrupt.

When I finished, he wiped his hands on a towel and asked me one question.

"Did you ever see the check?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

"The ten million," he said. "Did you hold it, or look at it, or sign for it?"

"The foundation's lawyer handled the last gift. Colt told me in March it was done."

"Colt told you."

"He's the board chair, Daddy. He doesn't lie about money."

"Didn't say he did," my father said.

He picked up the shovel and went back to the baskets.

I put Junie down in the portable crib in the dock office, the one he'd bought the week she was born and never told me about.

I slept in my old bed in the house behind the dock, with my dress on, and I did not sleep much.

At dawn there was an engine in the gravel lot.

I knew the sound, because it was Colt's old black truck.

By the time I got to the window, Colt was already on the dock with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the creek.

He had not shaved.

He looked at me through the glass, and he did not wave.

I went out in my father's old rain jacket and stood three feet from him.

It was the morning of Mother's Day, and the sun was just coming up gray over the boats.

"I brought these," he said.

They were white roses, the kind he had brought me every time we fought for four years.

I did not take them.

"Did you ask me?" I said.

It was the second time I'd said it, and I wanted him to hear that I could say it all day.

"No," Colt said.

That was all.

He did not say sorry, and he did not say there was a reason.

He set the roses on a piling and looked at his hands.

"I thought you'd say no," he said finally.

"Then you knew it wasn't yours to give."

"Della."

"You handed my wing to Dean's wife, in front of the whole city, and you knew I'd say no."

"It isn't the way it looked."

"Then tell me how it was."

He took a breath, and I watched him decide against it.

His jaw set, and he said, "I can't. Not yet."

"Can't," I said. "Or won't."

"Camille needs this to stay standing," he said. "She hasn't got anything else."

"She has a house."

Colt did not look at me.

"She hasn't been in her house since March," he said. "She's been staying at ours, at the beach."

The creek slapped the pilings.

I thought of the beach house, and of the guest bed I'd made up for his mother two summers ago.

"Since March," I said.

"Don't make it what it isn't."

"Colt, you've been telling me what things aren't since Thursday."

He picked up the roses again and put them down in the same place.

Behind me, my father's screen door opened, and Junie began to cry for her breakfast.

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