I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 20 of 76

Chapter 20: The Same Hospital

Damiano got to him first.

He rolled his grandfather onto his back on the kitchen floor, between the table legs, and put two fingers under his jaw.

"Nonno. Nonno, look at me."

Pasquale's eyes were open. His lips were gray.

"Don't shout," he whispered. "I'm right here."

"Call it," Damiano said to me without turning around.

I already had my phone at my ear.

Dad was holding on to the edge of the table with his good hand, white to the mouth.

The ambulance came in six minutes.

Damiano rode in the back. I drove Dad behind it in Pasquale's Buick, with a cousin following us in a black car.

I knew where we were going before the ambulance turned.

The county hospital on the Near West Side. The cardiac tower with the glass bridge over the street.

I hadn't been inside it in seven years.

The waiting room on the seventh floor had new chairs.

Damiano stood at the window with his back to the room and didn't move for an hour.

At ten a surgeon came out in blue scrubs and asked for the family.

"The replacement valve is failing," she said. "It's a tissue valve, and they don't last forever in some people. His is leaking badly. His heart's been working too hard for months."

"He didn't say anything," Damiano said. "He never said anything."

"They often don't. We'd like to go in tomorrow morning and replace it."

"At eighty-four."

"At eighty-four. He's strong."

Damiano sat down.

He sat in the plastic chair nearest the door, the one right under the TV.

He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

His shoulders started shaking.

He didn't make any sound at all.

Dad looked at me across the room.

Then he stood up on his cane and said he needed coffee, and the cousin went with him.

I sat down in the chair next to Damiano's.

After a while I put my hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, the way the therapist had done for me.

He didn't move away.

"This chair," he said into his hands.

"I know."

Seven years ago he had slept in that chair with my coat over his knees.

Now, in the same chair, he lifted his head out of his hands.

His face was wet. His eyes were red all the way around.

"I can't sit here again," he said. "I can't do this chair again."

"You don't have to do it alone this time."

"You did it with me last time."

"I know."

"You put your coat on me."

"I didn't think you knew that," I said.

"I woke up under it. It smelled like your studio. Spray starch and that terrible radio."

He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

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