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“And after?” she said. “When it’s done. When he’s gone. What then?”
I didn’t have an answer. I hadn’t thought about after. I’d only thought about the problem in front of me, the clean solvable problem, the way I always did.
“Then I’ll have done a good thing,” I said.
Dana squeezed my hand and let it go.
“You’re a good person,” she said. “I just hope this is for him and not for you.”
I didn’t understand what she meant.
Now, thinking back, I think she saw it before I did. She saw that I needed to be needed the way some people need to be loved. That I’d built a whole life out of showing up for other people so I’d never have to sit still long enough to notice how alone I was.
Larry saw it too.
He saw it better than anyone.
Two days later, we went to the courthouse.
Larry wore a clean blue button-down shirt. Someone at the shelter had given it to him, he said, though it hung loose on his shoulders because he’d lost so much weight. He’d washed his face and combed his hair and he looked, for one afternoon, like a regular man dressed up for something.
I wore my navy work dress. The nice one. I’m not sure why I bothered. Some part of me must have felt it mattered.
The courthouse waiting room was full of couples. A woman in a white jumpsuit was fixing her lipstick in a compact while her fiancé held her little bouquet like it might explode. A toddler was crawling under the plastic chairs, and his father kept diving after him and coming up empty-handed. Everyone looked nervous and happy, the way people look before they promise something big.
Larry and I sat in a row near the back.
He kept rubbing his palms against his pants. Back and forth. Back and forth.
“You’re shaking,” I said.
He looked down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else.
“I’m dying,” he said. “I’m allowed to shake.”
I accepted that. Of course I accepted that. What else would it be? The man was in liver failure. His hands were supposed to shake.
I didn’t think about it again for a long time.
When they called our names, we went into a small room with a wooden arch against one wall. A clerk read us the words. Larry answered when he was supposed to answer, his voice steady even though his hands weren’t.
When the clerk got to the part about rings, Larry patted his shirt pocket.
“Knew I forgot something.”
The clerk smiled. She’d clearly heard it before.
I laughed. A few of the people waiting glanced over.
Then the clerk had us sign. Larry asked twice where his signature went. Twice. A man who, it turned out, had spent twenty-eight years working in that exact building, asking a junior clerk where to sign his own marriage license.
I teased him.
“You’re acting like this is a real wedding.”
He went quiet for a second. Just a second. Then he smiled at me, and there was something underneath the smile I didn’t read at the time.
“First marriage,” he said. “Let me have my nerves.”
I laughed again.
Eleven minutes after we walked in, I was Larry’s wife.
Outside, on the courthouse steps, I bought us celebratory hot dogs from a cart because it felt like we should do something. Larry ate his slowly. He folded up his copy of the marriage certificate and tucked it into his shirt pocket, and he pressed his hand flat over it for a second, like he was making sure it was still there.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Never better,” he said.
And I believed him, because believing him was easier than asking what else might be true.
The three weeks we had after that went fast and slow at the same time, the way the last part of anything always does.
Larry moved into the state hospice facility. I’d arranged it, of course. I’d made the calls and filled out the forms and argued with an intake coordinator until she found him a bed. It was clean and quiet and smelled like disinfectant and something floral underneath, and Larry had a bed by a window that looked out at a parking lot.
“Room with a view,” he said the first day.
I visited every evening after work.
And every single visit started the same way.
I’d walk in carrying something. Better socks, because his old ones had holes. A phone charger, so he could reach me. A new blanket, because I decided the hospital one was too thin. A whole bag of toiletries once, enough for six months, which was a strange thing to buy a man who had three weeks.
I’d come through the door already talking, already unpacking, already looking for a nurse to flag down about something.
And Larry would say, from the bed: “Sit down, Sarah.”
And I’d say, “In a minute.”
There was always another minute of something to do. Another form at the front desk. Another nurse to ask about his pain medication. Another problem I could put my hands on. I’d fluff his pillow and organize his side table and refill his water cup and check the schedule and do everything except the one thing he actually asked me to do.
“You bought me socks again,” he said one evening, holding up the new pack.
“Your feet were cold.”
“My feet are always cold. I’m dying. That’s a feature, not a bug.” He set the socks down. “Sit down, Sarah.”
“I want to talk to that nurse about your—”
“Sarah.”