Sixty Days Left, So He Asked the Deacon's Son for Every One novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: Chair Four
The dialysis clinic had a dozen chairs, and Cooper had the one by the window.
He had picked it a year ago because the window looked at a parking lot full of trucks.
He sat with the line in his arm and the machine humming beside him and Jonas Brannen in a plastic chair at his feet.
"You don't have to stay," Cooper said.
"I know."
"It's four hours," Cooper said.
"I've sat in worse. I sat in a ditch outside Kandahar for nine."
"That's not the same as watching blood go through a machine."
"No." Jonas opened a paperback. "It's more interesting, and the ditch didn't have a vending machine."
He started to read aloud.
It was a Western with a cracked spine, something about a horse thief and a widow.
Jonas read it in the same flat, steady voice he used for invoices.
Cooper meant to say he didn't need to be entertained.
Instead he put his head back against the chair and listened to a big, scarred man read about a widow with a shotgun.
Somewhere in the second chapter he realized he was smiling.
A nurse came by to check the pressure.
She looked at Jonas, and at the book, and at Cooper, and wrote something on her chart without saying a word.
When she left, Cooper said, "She's going to tell the whole plaza."
"Let her."
"Rule two."
"The rule was nobody finds out. She isn't finding out anything. She's seeing a man read a book." Jonas turned a page. "The widow's about to shoot a hat off somebody. Pay attention."
Cooper paid attention.
It was in the third hour that the waiting-room door opened and Lester Brannen walked in wearing a pale yellow polo and a smile.
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