Chat - Archer Mayor [49]
“Everything all right?” his mother asked from beside him.
He looked down at her, her face upturned from her permanent perch in the wheelchair, and he bent over to kiss her cheek. “Yeah. I just have a brain teaser cooking in Brattleboro—seems to be getting weirder.”
“Was that Sammie?” she asked.
“It was,” he admitted, surprised. “How did you know that?”
She laughed. “I’m your mother. I’ve been watching how you react to people your whole life.”
He joined her. “Good thing, too. Keep me flying straight.”
She squeezed his hand. “I do what I can. It’s not difficult.” She gestured toward the cafeteria. “Did you get enough to eat? You didn’t have much.”
“I’m all set,” he answered her, stepping behind her chair. “You ready to go back up?”
“Yes,” she said, and faced forward, but in that one short word, he clearly heard her sadness. Leo remained inert, attached like a chrysalis to his attending instruments. Dr. Weisenbeck was still counseling them not to be alarmed, but Joe could tell that his mother was tiring of hanging in limbo.
He leaned in over her shoulder as he pushed her down the hall. “What do you say we catch a movie?”
“In the middle of the day?” she asked, startled.
“Why not? We could both do with a break.”
He wheeled her over to a small bookshop off the hospital’s central hallway and found a newspaper, after which they pored over the movie ads, found a comedy she’d heard about, which started in under an hour, and headed out into the parking lot after collecting their coats from upstairs and checking in on Leo one last time.
It was a bittersweet outing for both of them, playing hooky for each other’s sake, not really absorbing what flickered across the screen, and yet acknowledging the moment’s nostalgic richness. Only rarely had Joe and his mother ever done anything social together without Leo. He was always the glue that united them for such occasions. Now, in the movie theater, there was the lingering guilt, not only of enjoying themselves behind his back but of practicing their own companionship in his absence, as if hedging their bets against his survival.
They barely spoke on the way back to the hospital afterward.
There, they split up, returning to their separate jobs, Joe to Burlington, and his mother to her vigil. Before they parted, however, she took hold of his sleeve and gave him a long look.
“Don’t keep too much of this inside, Joe. It doesn’t do any good.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You’re all alone now. If Leo doesn’t make it, it’ll get worse.”
He thought of her in the exact same terms, of course, but couldn’t utter the words.
He didn’t need to. She added, “It’s not the same for me. I have my own world, and not much more time to worry about anyhow. But you, now with Gail gone . . .” She hesitated before asking, “How’s Lyn?”
He straightened, surprised. “Fine, I guess.”
“When did you last see her?”
He reddened slightly. “I visited the bar she’s setting up a couple of days ago.”
She nodded and smiled. “Good. She likes you very much, and I think you could do a lot worse.”
He laughed to cover his embarrassment. “I gotta go, Ma.”
But she didn’t let go of his sleeve, not quite yet. “You like her.”
He let the smile fade from his face and considered her implication for a moment, before admitting, “Yes. I do.”
The drive to Burlington was under ninety minutes from the hospital in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and cut through one of Joe’s favorite scenic corridors—a meandering diagonal across the state’s famous Green Mountains. It was a trip he’d made a thousand times since the interstate was laid out in the 1960s, and it took him by the front doors of both his organization’s headquarters in Waterbury and, just southeast of there, the capital city of Montpelier, where Gail now lived full-time.
In the past he would have at least considered stopping by both places, but since, technically, he was still on leave, and, emotionally, he had no reason to see Gail, he stayed on the road. But he couldn’t avoid pondering the latter situation, especially in light of his mother