Daisy Tucker and Mr. NYC novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Eighth Avenue
Willa steps off the bus, saves a collapsing old man on the sidewalk, and says yes to his grandson's proposal in a hospital hallway; the clerk calls her Mrs. Hargrove.
I had been in New York for ten minutes when a man fell down in front of me.
The bus from Cheyenne had let me off at the terminal with a canvas coat, a duffel and two hundred and twelve dollars.
My cousin had promised me his couch.
He had left for Denver and put a note on the buzzer that said, "Sorry, Willa. Good luck."
I stood on Eighth Avenue in the cold and stared at it.
Then I picked up my duffel and walked, because standing still in a strange city looks like a question.
A man in a long wool coat was ahead of me, outside a deli, waiting on a light.
He was old, with white hair and a good scarf.
He put one hand flat against his chest.
Then his knees went and he sat down on the sidewalk, and then he lay down.
Everybody walked around him.
I dropped the duffel and ran.
I have been a volunteer firefighter since I was seventeen.
I have pulled calves, drivers and one very large uncle out of worse places than a sidewalk.
"Sir," I said. "Sir, can you hear me?"
He could not.
His lips were gray and he was not breathing.
"Call 911," I told the first boy who stopped. "Tell them a man's heart quit, Eighth and Thirty-Fourth."
The boy dialed.
I put the heel of my hand in the middle of the old man's chest and started to count out loud.
"One, two, three, four."
Somebody's shoe kicked my elbow.
"Move," I said, and they moved.
I counted to thirty and tipped his head and gave him two breaths.
He tasted like peppermint.
I went back to the chest and counted again.
I do not know how long it was.
My arms burned.
A woman held an umbrella over us and told me I was doing great.
I said, "Don't talk to me, ma'am, I'm counting."
When the ambulance came, the old man had a pulse, a thin one.
The paramedics took over and I stood up with my knees soaked and my braid full of street water.
One of them said, "Ride with us, you're the only one who knows what happened."
So I left my duffel with the umbrella woman and climbed in.
In the back the old man opened his eyes once.
He found my wrist and held it with a grip that surprised me.
"My coat," he said. "Don't let go of my coat."
"I've got it," I said, because it was folded across my lap.
He closed his eyes again.
At the hospital they took him through a double door and a nurse put me in a hallway with a paper cup of water.
I sat there smelling like a bus and a deli.
I did not know his name.
I had never been so far from a horse in my life.
Forty minutes later a man came through the doors at a run.
He was tall and dark-haired, in a gray sweater with no coat, and he was soaked.
He looked at the nurse.
She pointed at me.
"You," he said. "You were with him."
"I was," I said. "He's alive. They took him in for his heart."
The man put his hand over his mouth and sat down hard on the plastic chair next to mine.
His hands shook.
"They said a woman did CPR for ten minutes," he said. "On the sidewalk. In front of everybody."
"Somebody had to," I said.
He laughed once, an ugly little laugh that was mostly breath.
"Nobody stopped," he said. "Forty people walked by and you stopped."
"That's your granddad?"
"Amos," he said. "I'm Rhodes."
"Willa Cartwright."
I held out the folded overcoat.
He took it, and the smell of it went across his face.
He pressed it against his chest.
Something clinked in the pocket.
A doctor came out and said Amos needed surgery within the hour, and that the next few hours would tell us a lot.
Rhodes asked every question a person can ask.
Then the doctor left and he sat there with the coat.
"He asked for one thing," Rhodes said, to the floor.
"Before he went under, he said he wants to see me married."
"He wants something to live for."
"That's sweet," I said.
"Marry me," he said.
I looked at him.
He wasn't joking.
His expression was dead serious, desperate.
"Tonight," he said. "Downstairs, with the chaplain."
"It's a signature and a few sentences."
"When he's well, we end it quietly, and nobody is out anything."
"I've known you forty minutes."
"I know."
"I don't have a place to sleep," I said, because it was the truest thing I had.
"I have six rooms," he said.
I thought about the old man's grip on my wrist.
I thought about my cousin's note.
I have said yes to a lot of foolish things in my life.
Nearly all of them turned out to have a good story in them.
"All right," I said.
At two in the morning, in a family room with a fake plant, I married a stranger.
The chaplain read the vows, and the clerk yawned through them.
Rhodes took something small from the pocket of his grandfather's coat.
It was a gold ring with a square diamond.
He slid it onto my finger and his hand was cold as a gate latch.
"Mrs. Hargrove," the clerk said, and went back to her phone.
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