Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [58]
“I’ll take you.”
“You?”
“Horace Lester. Let’s go.”
Huddie left Elizabeth a note and put an overcoat on Max, who insisted on slowly buttoning his shirt and zipping his pants to hide his nearly tearful longing for his blue sweatpants and his soft, mothering sweatshirt.
Everything in the emergency room happened quickly and efficiently. Huddie decided to say he was Stone’s son-in-law, which could be, and that way they’d let him take care of him, or sit with him, until they did whatever they did. He apologized mentally to June and her father.
There wasn’t five minutes of sitting, and the triage nurse didn’t give a fuck who Huddie was. Max slapped down an insurance card, put his fist to his chest again, and in ten minutes Huddie was cooling his heels in the waiting room, Max had an IV dripping into his veins, and they’d hooked two monitors to his chest. Two white doctors bumped into each other behind a pale green curtain, and after the EKG one of them stuck his head out and nodded to Huddie.
Finally, the fat doctor said, “Let’s play it safe. It’s not an emergency, you’re okay.” He raised his voice to reach the nurse back at the desk. “Let’s just say a soft romey and follow up tomorrow.”
The nurse nodded, typing slowly onto pink paper.
A tear ran from Max’s eye into his ear.
“What’s a soft romey?” Huddie asked, as any good son-in-law would.
“Sorry. It’s just ‘Rule out myocardial infarction.’ I notified his doctor. We’ll get him to his room in a little bit, as soon as we get things calmed down again.”
A white, limp girl was carried in, blood streaming down her forearms, and Max and Huddie watched, slightly ashamed of their relieved curiosity, like people with a flat observing the eighteen-wheeler flipping over in front of them.
They leafed through magazines until the nurse, whose white uniform was now lightly red-speckled, came over with a pair of orderlies.
Huddie rose as they put Max on the stretcher.
“Subacute c.c.u. Room 146,” the nurse said.
In the elevator, the black orderly and the white orderly checked out Huddie and Max. Their relationship is not obvious. They might be old white employer, young black employee. Possibly, the black man’s the boss and the old white guy’s been working for him for years, but the old man doesn’t look like he’s been able to work for years. They don’t look like friends, like poker buddies. It does not occur to the orderlies that the men might be lovers, or family. Neither of them would like those possibilities.
Max saw the grey elevator walls, the distorted reflections in the dented steel ceiling, the green sheet, Horace’s hand, his fingernails smooth honey-colored ovals, longer than Max’s, and Max wondered if all black men wore their nails long; he’d never looked at any man’s nails before. He put his hand on Huddie’s wrist and squeezed it. The orderlies took this in too, looking at each other sideways and then straight ahead.
The nurse hung a long grey rectangle around Max’s neck on a cheap cloth band and stuck two new wires into the tabs on his chest. She smiled at the doctor walking in, and he gave back a small smile beneath his big moustache, showing that it was a serious business—don’t even hope otherwise—but they were in good, even excellent, hands. He was visibly intelligent, arrogant, not unkind, taller than average. Max and Huddie thought only one thing: black. Max thought, Good. It will make Horace Lester feel good, and furthermore, he’s not a young man, he probably had to be smarter than everyone else to go to medical school and become a cardiologist back then.
Huddie knew it was stupid to be pleased, but he was, and inside he’s six and the Alabama kitchenware Aunt Les brought with her flies past him as she calls out, after each pot, lid, and saucepan hits the back door, “Lift up the race, child! Lift up the race.” She lived with them for only three years, his Great-aunt Lessie, and moved back home, saying Gus was doing fine, Huddie was doing fine, and the cold was killing her. She prayed conversationally and constantly: instructing,