He Waited for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 47 of 48

Chapter 47: Sentencing

He was waiting for me to flinch.

I stood up from the bench, slowly, with one hand under my stomach.

"Nobody here calls me Tina," I said. "Not in this one."

The officer moved him on.

He went through the side door without looking back, and it swung shut, and that was the last thing he ever said to me as a free man.

On October seventeenth the dome on the ridge was open again.

My doctor had let me fly at thirty-five weeks on two conditions.

I had to be back in New York by Monday, and Nicholas had to stop asking her about cabin pressure.

His grandmother had set out folding chairs on the observatory floor, four rows of them, for no reason anyone could explain.

"It's an anniversary," she said. "People sit down at anniversaries."

There were eleven of us.

My father sat in the front row in a heavy coat, with his feet on the rung of the chair in front of him, because the floor was cold.

My mother sat beside him with a thermos of hot chocolate she wouldn't share.

The mechanic's son leaned against the doorframe in a clean flannel shirt, because the grandmother had told him he was family now and he couldn't think how to argue.

The white cradle stood by the telescope with a red bow on its hood.

It had a new coat of paint.

"I said I'd do it myself," my father said.

"I held the ladder," my mother said. "He painted the hood in the garage with the door open and the doctor's number on speed dial."

The grandmother banged her cane on the floor.

"If that baby comes tonight, I'm delivering it," she announced to the whole dome. "I've done calves in a blizzard. I'm not afraid of a Ferraro."

"Nobody is delivering anybody," Nicholas said. "We have a plan. The plan has a hospital in it."

"Plans," she said, and snorted, and pointed her cane at the sky.

Nicholas had a present for me.

He handed it over in front of everyone, which was unlike him.

It was an old cloth-bound notebook, its corners soft with use.

The first page said, in a plain square hand that wasn't his, Observing Log.

"My father's," he said. "He wrote down every clear night. What he looked at, the temperature, who was with him."

I turned the pages.

Saturn, the first one said, in 1996. Then the cold. Then, with my wife.

Toward the back were fifteen years of blank pages.

Then one new line, in Nicholas's small handwriting, dated tonight.

October 17. Clear. Thirty-four degrees. With my wife, and one more.

My mother made a sound and pretended it was the hot chocolate.

I closed the book and held it against my chest.

"You could have told me it was sentimental," I said. "I'd have worn better shoes."

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