Tonight sleep is like a treasure that’s just out of reach. The light from the alarm clock seems magnified in my room, and the green light from my DVR shines like a beacon. I throw washcloths over both of them to block out the light and try again. But sleep won’t come.
What if Callie isn’t okay? What if the doctor’s office hasn’t called Sydney, and Callie is stuck in bed, sick, with no one to take care of her? What if the news was bad? What if she’s terminal?
I get up at three a.m. and make eggs Benedict, something I only do when I can’t quiet my brain. The act of cooking calms me, but I can’t get Callie out of my mind. What is wrong with me? I’m the prince of a guy who ignored his mother when she was dying and pushed away the guilt.
But you’re thinking about it now.
Where do these thoughts come from? Maybe they’ve been lodged in some corner of my brain for years. Maybe the guilt has metastasized until it’s popping up like a tumor, and I can’t push it away.
Maybe Callie is my chance to set things right.
I eat the eggs Benedict without even noticing the taste, and tell myself I’m losing it. Callie is driving me insane. She’s just an old lady who has wedged her way into my life, not some cosmic do-over that will absolve my sins.
Still, I can’t get her out of my mind.
Hours later, when I’ve logged in with LuAnn, I decide to go by Callie’s house and see if she’s okay. The front door is still closed, and I knock loudly enough for her to hear. I wait, but there’s no sound inside. I test the knob, but it’s locked.
I start to return to my cab, but then turn back. I bend and look for the key under the mat. There it is, right where I left it.
I unlock the door and step inside. “Miss Callie?” I call. “Hello? It’s Finn, the cab driver. I just wanted to check on you.”
When there’s no answer, I step into the kitchen and see that there’s a plate in the sink and a pot of coffee that’s still warm. That’s enough, my gut tells me. She’s fine. Go now! But I can’t make myself leave. “Miss Callie!”
No answer, so I move cautiously up the hall and peer into her bedroom. Her bed is made, and there’s no sign of her.
Where could she be?
Could Sydney have taken her somewhere? Doubtful. I go back outside, lock the door, and return the key to its place. As I walk to my car, I see her neighbor in the yard, on his knees in the dirt. “Excuse me,” I say.
The man looks up. “Yes?”
“I’m looking for Miss Callie. She doesn’t seem to be at home. Have you seen her this morning?”
The old man struggles to his feet, dusts himself off. “Yeah, I saw her wheeling off down the street on her scooter this morning.”
“Down the street?” I ask. “Really? How long ago?”
“Couple of hours,” the man says.
“Does she do that often? Wheel off like that?”
“Never saw her do it before, but you know Callie. She gets her mind set on something, and there’s no stopping her.”
I get back in my cab and drive slowly up the street, looking for her. There’s no sign of her. I go around the block, then drive up and down the surrounding streets. She’s nowhere.
Okay, this isn’t my problem. I need to stop this right now. But she’s clearly sick, and maybe out of her mind. She could be hurt or in trouble. Her phone battery could have died—or her scooter battery—or she could be lost.
When I finally give up looking for her, I find Sydney’s number. Of course it goes to voice mail. I wait for the beep. “Voice mail, who would’ve expected that?” I say. “This is Finn, your grandmother’s personal driver. Your grandmother seems to have disappeared. She was seen wheeling off down the street on her scooter a couple of hours ago, and I can’t find her anywhere. She obviously shouldn’t be out by herself when she can’t walk and she’s sick and probably doesn’t know her own name, but hey, maybe you disagree. If you have any idea where she might have been trying to go, how about giving me a call? But if the whole job thing is just too much of a priority, we’ll wait until someone notifies you of what became of her, since you are her only family.”
I’m talking way too loud as I finish the voice mail, and I catch my image in the mirror and realize my face is red. I click off the phone and try to calm myself. I picture Callie out on the street, confused, trying to find her way home.
Maybe I should call the police.
I drive around some more, not wanting to take another fare that might tie me up. Finally, my phone rings. I don’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Finn? This is Sydney, Callie’s granddaughter. We just recessed for lunch and I got your message. Have you found her yet?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I’m on my way over,” she says. “Where could she be? She’s not in her right mind. I saw her this morning, and she was confused and weak. I don’t know how she would have even gotten that thing out the door without help!”
“According to her neighbor, she was alone.”
“Are you sure he’s in his right mind?”
“I don’t even know the guy!” I yell.
“Well, what are we going to do?”
“We? Lady, I’m not responsible for her. I was just checking on her because she seemed so weak last night, and it was clear she got bad news at the doctor.”
“Please. Meet me at her house. I might need to call the police. I need you there because I don’t know where you’ve looked.”
I let out a hard, loud sigh and turn my car around. “All right. I’ll be there in a few.”
Sydney’s car is in the driveway when I get there, and she’s sitting on the porch steps. She’s dressed in a severe navy-blue jacket and matching skirt that looks binding and restrictive on her.
Why do professional women so often think they have to dress like men?
I get out of the car and walk across the yard. “How ya doing?”
“I’m worried,” she says. “I talked to her neighbor, and he told me what he told you. At least he’s sticking to his story. I guess he wouldn’t do that if he had short-term memory loss or something.”
“You have a nice way of giving people the benefit of the doubt.”
“Hey,” she says, getting to her feet. “I didn’t want it to be true, that she wheeled off down the street on her scooter that hasn’t been charged in days. I wanted to think that maybe she got another cab and went somewhere.”
“She didn’t. I checked with dispatch.”
“Maybe she got an Uber.”
“Seriously? You think she could navigate an app on her phone?”
“Maybe. If her mind is lucid.”
“Sorry. Not buying that. She would have called me.”
Her voice is getting weaker. “Well, maybe not, if she wasn’t lucid.”
“Make up your mind. Was she making sense at breakfast?”
“I couldn’t tell. She was quiet. I got her up and dressed and fed her. Then I put her in her chair and turned the TV on. She wasn’t herself.”
“So you left her there? Nice going.”
“I had court today! I’m trying—”
“She needs full-time care. You know that, don’t you?”
“She hasn’t been this bad until recently, and there’s not much money. I’ve been trying to do it myself, but I’m obviously doing a horrible job.”
“Always some very good reason,” I say. “Take it from me. You can always justify not being with someone who depresses you because they’re not how you like to see them. But one day they’re just gone, and then there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She clearly doesn’t appreciate that. “I don’t need to be lectured.”
“I’m not lecturing you. Just sharing some experience.”
She bursts into tears now, something I didn’t expect from someone who has tried so hard to look tough. I don’t know what to do. Do women want to be held when they cry, or do they want you to pretend you don’t notice? Do they even want you to look at them?
I don’t know, so I go with my gut. I sit down next to her. “She’s probably just visiting a friend.”
She wipes her tears. “She’s outlived all her friends, except for the ones at church. She’s home-bound, so she doesn’t see them that much, and I don’t think any of them live near here.”
“Maybe she forgot someone died and went to see them anyway. Want to go look?”
She nods. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
She clicks to my car in her heels and gets into my passenger seat.
“So where should we go?” I ask, getting behind the wheel.
“What do you mean?”
“Which friends? Where did they live?”
Tears well again, and she shakes her head. “I don’t even know.”
I pull a tissue out of my console and hand it to her. “No one? You didn’t know a single one?”
“Stop judging me!” She dries her eyes and pulls herself together. Taking a deep breath, she says, “I remember some man who lived down the street. He had all this yard art. Trolls and stuff around a fountain.”
“Her boyfriend?”
“No. He was the widower of a good friend of hers. But he died a couple of years ago. I guess she could have gone there to visit either one of them. Someone else lives there now.”
I pull away from the house and head slowly down the street, looking for the yard art.
“There!” she says about ten houses down. “That’s the fountain. They got rid of the trolls. I’ll go to the door.”
She gets out, and I watch her knock on the door. She talks to a young woman who answers with ankle biters clinging to her legs and a tiny dog yapping at Sydney.
She doesn’t look happy as she comes back.
“No luck?”
“No. They haven’t seen her.”
I sigh. “Okay, where else?”
“I don’t know. Wait, there’s a house on the main road. Turn left up here.”
I follow her directions. “The house up here on the corner. She’s mentioned that she used to have a good friend who lived there. I don’t even know her name.”
I pull to the curb in front of the house, and Sydney gets out again. She goes to the door, but no one answers. She’s about to come back to the car when a woman comes around from the backyard. I roll down the window and hear Sydney asking if an old woman on a scooter has been here. The woman says she hasn’t seen her.
Sydney is angry and red-faced as she gets back in. “Nothing. You would think that someone would have seen her rolling down the sidewalk on her scooter.”
“Any other ideas?”
“No! I don’t know who her friends were before I reconnected with her. I don’t know where she would have wanted to go!”
“Take it easy,” I say. “We’ll just drive around and we’re bound to spot her. She can’t have gotten far.”
I go up and down the streets parallel to and adjacent to her house, but there’s no sign of her. We stop every time we see someone out and ask if they’ve seen her. She’s vanished into thin air.
The longer we look, the more upset Sydney gets. My idea that she didn’t care about her grandmother was wrong. She’s about to lose it.
“I don’t know what to do. Maybe we should call the police.” She checks her watch. “Oh no. I’m going to be late for court. I’ll lose my job.”
“If someone fires you because you were looking for your missing grandmother, you shouldn’t be working there anyway.”
She turns to me. “Really? You think so? Do you know what would happen if I lost the first job I’ve had in a law firm? After all that education, all that hard work, all the student loans that I’ll work for the rest of my life to pay back . . . ?”
“So you said there were layoffs, right?”
“Yes. And I’m next. When my current case is over, they’ll decide whether to keep me. But if I don’t show up to court, it’s over.”
“Surely you don’t think all those who were downsized are going to have to find another line of work. They’re attorneys, too. They’ll get hired by other law firms. So would you.”
“I’m in the middle of the stupidest case in the history of lawsuits,” she mutters. “It’s a losing battle. I can’t possibly win, and just by representing this guy, I’m risking my reputation. But I have no choice. This guy got drunk at a dorm party—which he provided the alcohol for—and then he crashed into a Burger King. He’s suing the college and the Burger King. Two separate cases.”
“No way.”
“Yes.”
“And you agreed to take that case?”
“I wasn’t given a choice. He’s the son of one of our biggest clients. If I win, I’ll be a hero.”
“But it can’t be won.”
“Not if the jury’s sober. And when this case is over, if I don’t get laid off, I’ll have to do the second case—against Burger King.”
“That’s insane. Why would a judge even allow this case?”
“I was hoping he wouldn’t. See what a terrible lawyer I am? I was hoping my case would be dropped. But this case is the only reason I wasn’t laid off with the others. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of a mudslide.”
“How’s that?”
“I feel like I’m hanging on to a stump for dear life as the mud just slimes down around me. Uprooted trees are drifting down in all that mud, hitting me in the head and knocking me black and blue, and I’m still hanging on, covered with mud and slime . . .”
“This is some analogy.”
“And any minute the ground below my stump is going to turn to mud and my stump will go under, and I’ll go down with it into a pile of mud.”
“Probably wouldn’t be a pile. More like a swamp or lake. Maybe a pond.”
“It’s my metaphor. Do you even hear anything I’m saying? Do you understand it?”
“Of course I do. I used to be in the restaurant business.”
“How does that have anything to do with this?”
“I understand the desperation of feeling like everything is crumbling. Or sliding . . . as it were.”
I turn onto another residential street about three blocks from Callie’s house. Still no sign of her. “That’s the reason I’m driving a cab now. All that stress and craziness. It was killing me. Owning a restaurant—”
“You owned a restaurant?” She looks shocked.
“Yeah. I was St. Louis’s Chef of the Year for three years in a row. Success went to my head. I decided I had to have my own restaurant, so I opened one, hired a new chef, and suddenly I’m working eighteen-hour days and juggling bills and staff and customers, instead of cooking. Did all right for several years, but then the economy tanked, and people preferred burgers to haute cuisine.”
She pulls her chin back and frowns at me. “You cook haute cuisine?”
“Did. If I’d been cooking all the time, I might have been happier. But I was doing things I hated. Got to the point that I wanted to run away. Somebody offered to buy it, and the price was enough to pay my debts. And I never want to go back into that business. After all the training, all the experience, all the passion. I put my life and relationships on hold, and in the end, the business failed me.”
“But . . . you could have just gone back to being a chef. Worked for someone else.”
“Burnout is a real thing. You should take my advice. Get out while you still like your profession. Don’t let yourself be stuck with something you hate.”
“I can’t quit, and I don’t want to be fired. I have goals. There’s a lot at stake. You don’t understand.” She gets her phone out of her purse and tries Callie’s phone again. “Still voice mail!”
I hear a thud—a sound no driver wants to hear— from my right front tire. “What now?” I get out of the car. Leaving my door open, I go around to that tire and stoop down. It’s flat. There’s a brick a few feet behind it.
Sydney gets out of the car.
“A brick,” I say. “Who leaves a brick out in the street like this?” I stand up and look around for the culprit. Maybe he’s hiding in the bushes, laughing his head off. Probably some sadistic kid.
“We don’t have time for this,” she says.
“Ya think?” I fling back. I go to my trunk and yank up the rug over the spare. “Just shoot me. The spare is flat.” I slam my hand against the fender. “I’m gonna have to call a tire service.”
“We can’t wait for that! Finn, I have to find her! I need to call the police.”
“Just hold on,” I say. “Let me call dispatch, see how long it’ll take for them to get someone to help me.”
She gets back into the car and texts frantically, tapping her foot on the floorboard as I call LuAnn. “I’m sitting here on Cooper Road, and my tire is flat,” I tell her. “And guess what? The spare is flat, too. Who was responsible for getting it fixed?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll have to look back through my records.”
“No, don’t bother, LuAnn. I don’t have time. Callie is missing. I have to find her.”
“Callie, the old woman? Where did you lose her?”
I exhale heavily and look at Sydney. “I didn’t lose her. She’s just lost.”
“I can get a service to you in about an hour.”
I groan. “LuAnn, her life could be at stake. Please, can you send me a cab to take us back home so we can get another car?”
Sydney’s poking at her phone. What’s she doing? Checking Facebook?
“I’ll send you a cab,” LuAnn says. “But the closest one I have is about twenty minutes away.”
“What? Twenty minutes? No! You don’t have anybody in this part of town?”
“I had you there,” she says.
“Well, I would pick myself up, except I have a freakin’ flat tire!” I yell.
“Finn, you don’t have to get huffy.”
Sydney holds up her phone for me to see a map with a little dot moving. “Don’t worry about it,” she whispers. “I got an Uber. He’ll be here in three minutes.”
She might as well have slapped me. I gape at her.
“I’m not waiting twenty minutes,” she says. “You don’t have to come with me, but I’m taking an Uber back to my car.”
I’m livid now. “This, LuAnn, is why people use an app to get a ride. Send someone to change my tire. He’ll have to bring a spare. I’m not going to be here. I have to go help find her.”
“Will do, Finn,” she says. “I’ll forgive you for your tone because you’re the only one I have who works the geriatric crowd.”
“There it is now,” Sydney says, pointing as the car pulls up.
I set my chin and click off the phone, and stare at the tiny ten-year-old Civic that idles in front of us.
“His name is Jeff,” she says.
Something about that makes me even madder. I lock my car and stroll toward the Civic. I open the front door as she gets into the back. “Hello, Jeff.”
“How ya doing?” he asks.
“Not great.”
“This is really funny,” he says as I buckle myself in the passenger seat, in case this kid runs off the road. “An Uber driver picking up a cab driver.” He leans into me and lifts his phone for a selfie. “Can I take a picture to post on Instagram?”
I push his hand away. “No, Jeff, you cannot. Now, do you want to know where we’re going?”
“No, I already know. It’s in the app.” He snaps a pic of my debilitated cab anyway, still chuckling. “This is classic.”
Sydney isn’t bothered by this at all, and why would she be? She clearly doesn’t know the difference between a cab and an Uber. Try getting Callie into the back seat of one of these.
She calls the police as we’re driving, reports Callie missing, and asks them to meet us at her house.
“They should be there shortly,” she says when she hangs up. “I have to send someone to court to tell the judge I have an emergency. Who’s at the courthouse?” She apparently comes up with someone and gets them on the phone.
I check out Jeff’s phone as he follows its GPS to Callie’s street, and I watch the little dot of our Civic crawling through the map. I hate this guy and everything he stands for as we turn into her driveway.
I reach for my wallet.
“Don’t,” Sydney says. “I already paid him on the app.”
“I can at least tip him,” I mutter.
“I did that, too.”
I frown back at her. Seriously? She can do all that on her phone? I look at Jeff, who’s smiling with oblivious naiveté. How many people are actually going to tip if they don’t have to look a driver in the face as they hand it to him? How many will even remember to do it?
“We’re way more convenient than cabs,” he says, chuckling. “No offense. You should get the app.”
“No thanks.” I get out and open the door for Sydney. She’s enjoying this. I’m glad my discomfort has given her a distraction from her mudslide.
“Don’t even,” I say as we go to her car.
“I won’t,” she says. “But oh, I want to.”
Thankfully, a police car pulls up as Jeff backs out of the driveway. Sydney tells them her grandmother has vanished. The cop goes back to his car and radios something in. As we wait, she takes off her jacket. She looks more relaxed, even though I know she isn’t.
“You should lose those jackets for good,” I say. “You look better without them.”
“It’s not a beauty contest,” she shoots back. “I have to look professional.”
“You’re not going to look like a man no matter how hard you try. You can be a professional woman without following the male dress code.”
“So I’m supposed to take fashion advice from a guy in a backward baseball cap?”
I grin.
The cop gets out of his car and walks back up the driveway. “I found her.”
“What?” Sydney says. “Where?”
“At Missouri Baptist Medical Center. She collapsed on Torrence Drive and someone called the hospital.”
“Torrence?” I ask. “How did she get that far?”
“Is she all right?” Sydney asks.
“She was taken by ambulance. I can put you in touch with the EMTs who transported her.”
Sydney is about to collapse herself as I usher her into her car. As we head to the hospital, she calls one of the EMTs and puts it on speakerphone. “Hi,” she says when he answers. “I was told you transported my grandmother to the hospital this morning? Callie Beecher?”
“Yes, I transported her a couple of hours ago,” he says.
“Is she all right? Is she alive?”
“She was stable when we got her there.”
“What happened?”
“It looked like her battery died on the scooter, and she was trying to walk away from it. The lady who saw her fall said she was very unsteady. She saw her faint.”
“She’s too weak to be walking,” Sydney cries. “She’s been really sick.”
“She was still on the ground when we got there,” the EMT says. “I don’t think she’d hit her head, but she was in and out of consciousness.”
Sydney is quiet as she gets off the phone and stares through the window as she drives to the hospital. I take a stab at making her feel better. “The other day, when she was locked out, I took her to eat lunch at Lulu’s. We sat down and she said, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ I thought she was confused about who I was.”
She smiles a little. “She loves Jesus. She talks to him a lot, right out loud. She did that even before she had this . . . confusion.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t one of the first signs of it?”
“Yeah. It was just her way of praying. Jesus was . . . is . . . very real to her.”
I get quiet, not wanting to make a joke of that. I’m not sure why.
We’re silent as we get to the hospital, and she pulls into a space near the front door. I get out when Sydney does.
“You don’t have to come,” she says. “I know you have to get back to work.”
“I want to make sure she’s all right,” I say. “I’m coming in.”
I follow her to the information desk in the emergency room, and she gets Callie’s exam room number. “Only two family members can go back at a time,” the nurse says.
“It’s just the two of us,” Sydney says without telling her I’m the cab driver.
We walk up the hall to Callie’s room. Sydney opens the door, and we step inside. Callie is in a hospital bed, looking very small. Her eyes are closed, and she doesn’t stir at the sound of the door.
“Grammy?” Sydney says, shaking her.
Callie doesn’t wake.
“Maybe she’s on medication,” I say.
Sydney goes back to the door. “I want to talk to the doctor.”
I stand at the door as Sydney goes up the hall to the nurses’ desk. “Who is Callie Beecher’s doctor? I need to see him.”
“He’s on the floor,” I hear the nurse say. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Sydney comes back to the exam room. “She looks like she’s dying,” she whispers.
Her phone rings before I can answer, and she pulls it out of her purse. “Oh no. It’s my boss.” She swipes it on. “Mr. Southerby, I’m so sorry I had to ask for a continuance, but I’ve had a family emergency. My grandmother vanished, and then I found out she was taken by ambulance to Missouri Baptist. I’m here now, waiting to talk to the—”
The boss cuts her off, yelling so loudly I can hear it from across the room. It’s almost enough to wake Callie, but she still doesn’t stir.
“I know, sir,” Sydney sputters. “No, I do want this job. I know they wanted it over by Christmas, but I’m the only one my grandmother has . . . I will, sir . . . No, I have every intention—”
The doctor steps into the room, and Sydney swings toward him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Southerby, but I have to go.” She hangs up on him, though he’s still talking. I want to cheer.
“What’s wrong with her?” she asks the man in scrubs.
He’s carrying a laptop, which he sets on the table and opens. “I’m glad to finally meet you. We’ve been playing telephone tag.”
“Did she hurt herself when she fell?”
“No,” he says. “Yesterday we had her come back in because our test results were worrisome. We did an MRI and PET scan. Today we did X-rays, and there are no fractures. We understand she fell onto grass, so there don’t seem to be any injuries from the fall. We think her condition precipitated her fainting.”
“What condition?” Sydney asks. “A UTI would cause unconsciousness?”
“Her condition, and her collapse, are caused by late-stage cancer,” he says.
I catch my breath. Sydney reaches for the footboard of Callie’s bed to steady herself. “Late stage . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“Wait.” She shakes her head, as if trying to clear it. “Are you sure you don’t have her mixed up with someone else?”
“Callie Beecher. Trust me, this is not a woman you easily forget. You didn’t know?”
I stand rigid, staring at him, feeling as if I don’t belong here. But I can’t make myself walk out.
“No! Why didn’t anyone tell me?” Sydney asks.
“I tried to call multiple times,” the doctor says.
“I tried to call you back last night. I was in court all day.”
“I can’t leave a message like this on voice mail,” he says. “Your grandmother has liver cancer that has metastasized all over her body. She has masses in her lungs, her pancreas, her stomach, and her brain.”
Sydney starts to cry again, and I step toward her but don’t touch her.
“No!” she says. “I thought the antibiotics were helping her. I thought—”
“She does have secondary pneumonia. We started IV antibiotics today. But as I said, she is in late-stage cancer.”
Sydney clutches her forehead. “So . . . we’ll do chemo, right? Radiation? We’ll fight this.”
The doctor glances at me, as if to tell me to help Sydney with this, but I just stand there, like I do.
“She’s beyond chemo. While she was still clear-headed, she opted to forgo it. It wouldn’t have offered her much more time.”
I take off my cap and ask, “How long does she have left?”
“We don’t like to put a time on these things.”
“Ballpark,” I insist.
“A year?” Sydney asks. When she sees the sympathy on the doctor’s face, she says, “Months? Weeks?”
“At this point, after this episode,” he says softly, “I think weeks would be optimistic.”
“Days?” The word cracks in her throat, and she seems to lose her legs and begins to fall. I grab her then and help her to steady herself.
She rallies her strength and looks at her grandmother. “Days,” she whispers. “She has days left, and I couldn’t even take the time to take her to the doctor or answer his call.”
She pulls away and bends over the bed, touches her grandmother’s face, strokes the wrinkled skin. “Grammy,” she whispers, and tears assault her again.
I look awkwardly at the doctor. “Is she . . . is she going to recover . . . from this episode? Or is this it?”
“She may recover some strength and be able to go home. The next few hours will tell us. We’ll do our best to get her home for Christmas if we can. I know it’s important to her. She’s told me more than once.”
I wonder if she tried to fix him up with Sydney.
“We’re going to set her up on hospice care, but since it’s so close to Christmas, we may not be able to get it started until the day after Christmas.”
“Hospice?” Sydney says as though that word rips her to shreds.
“We want to keep her comfortable.”
I can’t stand here anymore. I tell Sydney I’ll be in the waiting room, but she doesn’t seem to hear me. I go out there, get a Coke out of the machine, and look around for the least germy seat. There’s a kid sitting close to the vending machines who’s covered head to toe in a rash, so I head the other way and sit by the woman with a swollen ankle.
I try to get interested in a Dr. Phil episode on the TV in the upper corner of the room. It isn’t turned up, so I try to follow the conversation on the closed captioning, but it’s several seconds behind the voices. Soon I’m just staring at the screen, not reading lips or transcription. Just thinking about Callie lying on the ground, then being loaded into an ambulance.
I should have talked to the doctor yesterday. I should have tried to reach Sydney. I go into the men’s room and bend over the sink. I turn the water on, splash it onto my face.
When I go back to the waiting room, Dr. Phil is off and a soap opera is on. I don’t know why I’m sitting here. I should be working the airport crowd. What is wrong with me?
The doors to the ER open. Sydney stands barefoot, looking around the waiting room. She looks spent, and her blouse’s shirttail is outside her skirt now. She’s carrying a bag.
I stand up. “Sydney?”
She turns and looks relieved as she comes toward me. “Hey. I figured you were still here.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she woke up. She even knew me. They’re moving her to another floor. They told me it would be a half hour or so.”
“Want a drink? Something to eat?”
“Yeah. I missed lunch.”
I realize I did, too. “We could go eat high hospital cuisine. Or something out of the vending machine.”
“The cafeteria, I guess.”
We head to the cafeteria, neither of us speaking as we get our food. We both wind up making salads at the salad bar, and we reach for the same salad dressing. “You first,” I say.
She puts some on hers, then finds a table. When I’m finished prepping mine, I take the seat beside her. We both eat quietly for a moment.
When she looks at me, she says, “I wanted to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For doing what I should have done.”
“What’s that?”
“Taking her to the doctor. I should have—”
I touch her hand, stopping her. “Don’t.”
“But she kept calling you, and you kept coming. You didn’t have to. You could have refused. And you were kind to her. You cared.”
I’m getting uncomfortable now. She’s starting to think more of me than I deserve. “Look, you don’t have the market cornered on this. I’ve had my share of regrets about what I didn’t do for someone in my life . . .” My voice trails off, and I don’t have the stomach to finish.
“She has cancer,” Sydney says. “How could I not know that? How could I not be there for her?”
“I think you have been.”
“Not when she needed me most. I’m sorry. You’re a nice guy, but really? The cab driver is the one who’s taking better care of my grandmother than I am?”
“Come on. I drove her around. I even charged her for it. Don’t give me too much credit on the whole caretaking thing.”
Her eyes glisten as she locks her gaze on mine. “It was more than that and you know it.” She takes another bite, then says, “My mother died when I was young. I adored Grammy. She was my biggest fan. But when Mom died, Grammy tried to get custody of me. My father won the court battle, but he was so angry that he decided to never let her see me again. He could be vindictive and unforgiving sometimes, which is probably why Grammy thought he wouldn’t be a good single parent. But I had memories of her.”
“So when did she come back into your life?”
“A few years ago. When I was getting close to graduating from college and had gotten into law school, I thought that my mother would have been so proud. And then I wondered if Grammy was still living, and I went looking for her.”
“She must have been thrilled.”
“She was. She had prayed for me all those years. She had never given up on seeing me again. But I haven’t held up my end. I’ve tried, but I wasn’t used to someone focusing on me the way she did. Until she got sick, I didn’t spend that much time with her. Then she started needing help . . .”
“And apparently you were there then.”
“I go by every morning and every night, trying to make sure she’s okay and taken care of.”
“Sydney, that’s a lot. That’s so much more than . . . a lot of people do.”
“Not enough. She had cancer, and I didn’t even know.”
I can’t dry her tears, but I decide to do my best to make her smile again. “I’ll never forget that morning I took her to the doctor the first time. A nurse walked by, and Callie asked someone if her own thighs were that big.”
Sydney almost chokes on her food as she laughs. “Sounds like her.”
“Another time she commented, very loudly, on the likelihood that a woman passing by was going to lose her marriage, since her husband was better looking than she was.”
“She does talk loud, doesn’t she?” She’s giggling now. “She hasn’t had much of a filter for a while.”
“Did you know she’s been making me drive her around to see men?”
“Men?”
“It’s true. At first I thought she was hitting on them, but she was visiting them for you. She’s invited each of them to spend Christmas with the two of you. She even invited me.”
Her smile fades like air going out of a balloon. “Do you think that’s because she knows she won’t be here next Christmas?”
“I’m sure of it.”
She sighs. “She thinks I can’t make it on my own.”
“I’m sure she just doesn’t want you to be alone.” I grab her tray and stack it on mine. “I’ll take this, then I’ll get out of here. If you feel like it, text me to let me know how she’s doing.”
“Okay, I will.” I start walking away, and she says, “Finn.”
I stop and turn back.
“If she gets out in time for Christmas, you should come.”
I swallow hard and nod. “I’ll think about it.”
“Okay. Thanks for helping me look for her.”
“No problem.”
I watch her walk from the room. She’s still barefoot, and she looks nothing like a lawyer, except for the skirt. I hope she doesn’t pick up some kind of foot fungus.
As I wait for LuAnn to have someone bring my cab, I look up toward the upper windows and whisper a prayer that Callie will make it home for Christmas.