His Lifelong Pleas Got Nothing novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Lemon Scones

Bancroft kneels on a friend's kitchen floor and begs her home but will not cancel Monday, and then two police officers arrive with the Huntington doctor to take her in for a welfare check.

I slept in a recliner in the clinic's staff room, with a blanket the nurse brought me and my phone face down on my chest.

It buzzed nineteen times before dawn.

Bancroft. Bancroft. Bancroft. Odile. Bancroft.

I didn't answer any of them.

At seven, I called the one person I could think of, a woman who had run the school library beside mine for eight years.

She lived in Cranston, and she picked up on the first ring.

"Tillie? Honey, where are you?"

"Can I stay with you for a few nights?"

She didn't ask why.

"The room over the garage is made up. Come now."

By eight I was sitting at her kitchen table in a pair of her old slippers, with a plate of eggs I couldn't eat.

Sam had written his cell number on the back of a clinic card and told me to use it for anything.

I had tucked it into my bra for safekeeping.

My friend was pouring coffee when the doorbell rang.

She looked out the front window.

"There's a man on my porch in a very nice coat," she said. "He's holding a bakery box."

I knew before I looked.

Bancroft stood on the mat with his shoulders hunched and a white box in both hands.

He looked like he had not slept.

I opened the door but not the screen.

"How did you find me?"

"She's on your Christmas card list, Tillie. Please. Five minutes."

I let him in, because my friend was standing right behind me with a spatula in her hand, and because I wanted to see what he would do.

He sat at the kitchen table and set the box in front of me.

Inside were two lemon scones from the bakery on Bellevue.

They were the ones I ordered every Sunday of our marriage.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I should have walked out of that room with you. I froze."

I said nothing.

"My mother froze your cards. I didn't know. I'll have them back on by noon."

"That's not what I'm angry about."

"I know." His voice cracked. "I know it isn't."

He slid out of the chair and knelt on her linoleum.

He put his forehead against my knee.

"Come home," he said into my leg. "Please. I'll move us out of the house. We'll go to Maine. I'll talk to her."

Six years I had waited for him to say a sentence like that.

I put my hand on his hair, the way I always did.

"Will you cancel the Monday appointment?"

He went still.

"Tillie."

"Will you cancel it? You tell your mother the baby is staying, and you cancel it."

He lifted his head.

His eyes were wet, and I thought about how many times I had seen him cry, and how he had never once changed his mind.

"If it's cursed," he said, "and it goes wrong, I lose you. You don't understand. I would rather do it ten times than bury you once."

"Then you don't believe the scan."

"I believe Mr. Faulk. I have believed him my whole life."

I took my hand off his head.

"Get up, Bancroft."

"Tillie, please, I'm begging you."

"I begged you in a hallway yesterday. You walked me in to dinner."

He didn't have anything to say to that.

He stood up slowly and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

"I'll give you today," he said. "To think. I'll call tonight."

"Don't."

"I love you," he said.

He walked out and shut the screen softly behind him.

My friend waited until the car was gone.

"That man cried real tears," she said. "And he still has not said he'll cancel it."

"No."

"Eat something."

I broke a scone in half.

It tasted like every Sunday, and I put it down.

At ten, there was a knock again, much harder.

She went to the window and didn't say anything for a moment.

"Tillie," she said, "there are two police officers on my lawn."

Behind them, in a gray sedan at the curb, I could see a thin man in the passenger seat with a black medical bag on his lap.

It was the Huntington doctor.

One of the officers held up a paper.

"Ma'am, we're doing a welfare check for a Matilda Huntington. We have a signed request from her husband and her physician. They say she's unwell and may harm herself."

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