Two Days Before Our Divorce Was Final, He Wrecked His Car, and the Hospital Called His Wife and Not the Fiancée He Left Me For novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ask Me Nicely

The surgeon speaks to Claire only; Patty gets a visit, Mandy gets to ask for coffee, and Will waits in the ambulance bay with something Dean said.

Mandy opened her mouth, closed it, and smiled.

It was a very good smile.

I've seen patients smile when I tell them they have eleven cavities.

"Of course," she said. "I understand. Rules are rules."

Then she went back to the waiting room and sat down with her coat still buttoned.

She didn't take it off for the next five hours.

The surgery took four hours and fifty minutes.

I know, because I watched the clock over the fish tank the whole time.

At 4:50 a.m. a surgeon came through the double doors with his paper cap still on.

He looked around the room and said, "Mrs. Colvin?"

Patty and I both started to rise again.

I put a hand out, flat, the way I do when a patient tries to sit up too early.

"I'll go," I said.

"I'm his mother," Patty said.

"I know. I'm the one he's allowed to tell."

She sat.

Mandy didn't stand, but her whole body leaned toward us.

The surgeon took me three steps away and spoke low and fast.

Dean had a titanium rod in his left thigh now, from hip to knee.

The bleed was his spleen, and they'd repaired it without taking it out.

Three ribs were cracked, his head was bruised, and he'd be asleep until morning.

"He's lucky," the surgeon said. "Another few inches to the left, and we'd be having a different conversation."

I looked back at the two women watching me from their chairs.

Neither of them was pretending to read a phone anymore.

I could have kept every word.

Instead I walked over and told them all of it, in order, without adjectives.

It took less than two minutes.

When I finished, Patty put her face in her hands, and Mandy gave a ragged shudder.

Then they both looked at me.

I knew what they were waiting for.

The nurse had explained it at two in the morning, in the same patient voice she'd use on a toddler.

One visitor at a time, and the person who signed decided who.

"Patty," I said. "He's your son. Go on up."

Her mouth trembled.

"Thank you, Claire." She stood, smoothing her skirt. "I'll tell him you stayed."

"Please don't."

She went, with her good knee leading.

Mandy was left alone with me and the fish.

"And me?" she said.

She'd gotten her voice back.

It had the sugar in it again, thick enough to stand a spoon in.

"When he wakes up and says he wants you there, you're in," I said. "That's all. It's his room."

"I'm the one he's marrying."

"In December."

"I'm the one who's been with him every single day for a year."

"I know," I said. "I was there for the first five months of it."

The sugar went out of her face.

She stared at me.

Then she looked at her own hands.

"May I wait outside his door?" she asked.

It was the first honest thing she'd said all night.

"Yes."

"Thank you." Then, very quietly, to the floor: "May I get you a coffee? I'd like to do something."

I should have said no.

"Black," I said. "Two sugars."

She nodded and walked away without a single click of her heels.

I took the elevator up to the fourth floor and found Dean's room at the end of a hallway so quiet I could hear the monitors.

Patty sat beside the bed with her rosary out.

She looked up, and I shook my head, and she stayed where she was.

I stood in the doorway for a full minute.

He looked smaller with a tube in his throat and a rod in his leg.

His hands lay open on top of the blanket.

The left one was bare.

The pale stripe where his wedding ring had been was almost gone.

His mouth was open a little around the breathing tube.

I looked there, because teeth are what I look at.

His left front tooth had been chipped since a hockey game in 2016.

I had asked him to fix it for six years.

It had a brand-new porcelain crown on it now, perfect and white.

Mandy had gotten him to do in four months what I couldn't do in six years.

I didn't know whether to laugh or sit down on the floor.

I went downstairs instead.

It was nearly six, and the lobby had gone gray with the first light.

Mandy's coffee was on the chair I'd been sitting in, with a sleeve and a lid and, I noticed, two sugars.

I picked it up.

Through the glass doors to the ambulance bay, Will Barrett was still standing there with the same paper cup, gone cold in his hand.

I walked out to him.

"You're off at midnight," I said. "It's six."

"Shift ran long."

"You brought him in."

"I did."

"Did he say anything?"

Will looked at the coffee, and then at me.

"One thing," he said. "Do you want it now, or after you've slept?"

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