Ten Years of Public Breakups, Then He Ran After My Bus novel · Chapter 14 of 40

Chapter 14: Waiting Room

The surgical waiting room at Maine Medical Center was on the third floor, with a window over the parking garage and forty chairs bolted to the floor in rows.

I knew the room.

I had stood in the garage below that window on a January afternoon six years ago, with my phone in both hands.

I walked in at ten past five on Friday morning, in a navy blazer under my winter coat, and my interview folder in my bag.

Eben was in the fourth chair of the third row.

He had a paper cup of coffee on his knee.

He did not look surprised to see me.

"You came," he said.

"I was in Portland anyway."

"At five in the morning," he said.

"I wanted to be early."

He moved his jacket off the next chair.

I sat down.

Linwood had gone back with a nurse twenty minutes earlier, in a gown, waving over his shoulder with his thin white hand.

"I'll see you boys on the other side," he had said.

He had kissed my cheek on the way.

"Don't let him sulk, Bernadette."

Now the two of us sat in the fourth and fifth seats with nothing between us but an armrest.

I knew without asking that it was the same row.

I did not say so.

"They said ninety minutes," Eben said.

"That's right for a stent. Radial or femoral?"

"They said wrist," he said.

"That's good. That's the easy one."

"You'd know," he said.

"I know a little."

A television hung from the ceiling with the sound off, showing a man making an omelet.

I watched the omelet.

Every few minutes, Eben took his phone out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and put it away.

He did it without seeming to know.

The first time I thought it was a habit.

The fourth time I understood.

He was checking for a text.

He was sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital, with his father somewhere behind a set of doors.

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