They Toasted the Happy Couple, So I Bought the Groom novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Visiting Hours

Marigold lifted her face from her hands and saw the way he was looking at her.

"I sent flowers," she said. "People send flowers."

Clive didn't answer her.

He was already walking to my car.

I drove. He held the dash with one hand the whole way down Eastern Avenue, and he didn't say a word.

His mother was in a bed by the window on the cardiac floor, with a monitor beeping and a tube under her nose.

She was sitting up.

She was furious.

"It's nothing," she said, before he'd reached the bed. "It's a squeeze. The doctor says it's a squeeze."

"Ma."

"Don't you Ma me in front of Iris. Look at you. You've got furniture on your shirt."

He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his forehead against her hand, and she let him.

The doctor came in at noon and said it wasn't a heart attack.

Angina, a warning. Two nights for tests, a new pill, no more carrying her own groceries up the stoop.

"I'll carry her groceries," Clive said.

"You'll carry your own," his mother said. "Iris, take that thing out of my bag. I don't want it next to me."

It was a small white card, the kind that comes on a plastic fork in a florist's arrangement.

I read it standing at the window.

Get well soon. Your son is about to lose his license for leaking his client's bank records.

The complaint goes in Monday. It doesn't have to.

If he stands with his family on the 22nd, everything he lost comes home, and so does the money. Love, Marigold.

"I read it on the stoop," his mother said. "And I thought, she can do it. She can take the last thing he's got."

Clive held out his hand for the card.

I gave it to him.

He read it once and put it in his shirt pocket.

"It's not the last thing, Ma," he said.

That night his mother made us go home, and we didn't.

The family room at the end of the hall had a vending machine, a silent television and a split vinyl couch.

I sat on it with my shoes off.

Clive sat at the little table under the television with my laptop and wrote for an hour.

He didn't ask me what to say. He didn't show me until he was done.

Then he turned the screen around.

It was a letter to the state's attorney grievance office, signed Clive James Mercer, and the first line said he was reporting himself.

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