“That’s a twenty-pound chair.”
“It’s a ten-pound chair,” Lenora said. “Don’t confuse the patient.”
I laughed, and then I was crying, and she put down the chair and held me, small and strong, with her hand moving slowly between my shoulder blades.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said into my hair.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see it.”
“You saw it,” she said. “You just saw it a little late. That’s all right. Dispatchers always arrive after the call.”
That night, I put Wyatt to bed.
Real bed.
Rocket-ship sheets and a lamp shaped like a moon.
He pulled the covers up to his chin, then looked at the doorway, where the old yellow night-light glowed in the hall.
For six weeks, that glow had lit a boy lying on a carpet.
Now it lit nothing but a stretch of empty beige, and my mother’s door, open a few inches, with the sound of a radio playing low.
“Mom?”
“Yes, baby?”
“Can Grandma say goodnight?”
Lenora appeared in the doorway in her blue robe, with her glasses pushed up in her silver hair.
She crossed the room and kissed his forehead.
“Goodnight, my brave boy,” she said.
Then she leaned close, and whispered, as she had a hundred times before:
“Peach cobbler.”
Wyatt smiled with his eyes already closed.
“Message received,” he murmured.
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