They met at Rocky’s, a diner across the street from the hospital that had been around since the fifties. John’s father had been a regular there as a young resident and later as a flourishing internist, when he had both the time and money to have taken lunch somewhere more refined. There were still waitresses working there who had waited on him.
When John and Mike were young, Larry Husted would bring his sons to Rocky’s when he was on call and needed to stay close to the hospital. “On call” became words John resented, because it meant his father—and the family—was forever tethered to his job. Long after his stature at the hospital would have allowed him to scale back, Larry still took rounds in the emergency room he helped build and made himself available for consultation at all hours.
As an adult, John wondered if his father always declared himself available whether the hospital actually needed him or not. He knew his father loved his job, but as Larry’s marriage stretched on and his sons grew more troublesome, maybe work provided him an escape.
Families weren’t always easy, John knew.
Almost nothing ever changed at Rocky’s. A shadow of a decal for Squirt, the lemony soda that still made John’s mouth pucker just thinking about it, scarred the front door. The gumball machine just inside still raised money for the Lion’s Club. After all this time, John wondered what kind of empire they must’ve amassed, a penny at a time. It took quarters now.
The counter where John and Mike spent hours when their father ran across the street to consult on some quick emergency remained. Their mother had been involved with community work on the weekends, so when the hospital intruded on Larry’s day off, the diner’s owner had been happy to watch the boys. The waitresses doted on them—every kid in school knew Mike and John got free sundaes at Rocky’s any time they wanted. Mike was still young then, years away from the misbehavior that would tear him and his father apart.
“Johnny Husted!” A zaftig, sixtyish waitress had sneaked up on him. “Where you been keeping yourself?”
“Hey, Sheila. Ah, you know. Sticking close to home, trying to get some work done.”
“And your mother?”
“You’ll see her next week. We have a lunch date.”
“Good for you!” she smiled as she led him to a table. “I hear Mike is back home.”
John flinched. Her discretion was admirable, but he was sure small-town gossip had all the dirt on big brother Mike.
“He is.”
“Tell him to get his fanny in here,” she said. “I still remember when there was nothing a free sundae couldn’t fix for that boy.”
John smiled as she handed him a menu. “I’m waiting for someone. Walt Bolger, actually.”
“How is he?” she asked with a heartsick concern.
“I don’t know,” John said warily. “I actually haven’t seen him practically since I was a kid. Is something wrong?”
“Cancer. Or that’s what everyone says. The old poop is as close-mouthed as he’s ever been,” she said with a fond gruffness that went back decades. “We’d hear this and that from his wife, but she died years ago.”
She took back the second menu. “Well, I can go ahead and get his order in. Walt Bolger hasn’t changed his lunch order in forty years.”
She winked in that motherly way that has been bred out of our younger waitresses, and John was left with his reveries. Out the front window, beyond the strip mall that had grown in well past his father’s day, he could see “new” Holt Memorial, which remained a monument to his father’s vision and determination. It still towered over the town but no longer appeared like the sleek, modern facility that opened to much local fanfare in 1983.
It would always shine by comparison, though, so long as the old hospital remained grafted to its replacement. Coming out of the seventies, Holt City—an hour southwest of Milwaukee—was a dying town, and the doctors and the hospital’s board argued that only a world-class hospital could keep Holt City from falling to dust like so many small Midwestern cities. With the vast tract of land already paid for, they built the new hospital directly adjoining the existing building. They intended to tear down the old hospital just as soon as they found the money for the demolition.
On the day they broke through the wall between the old hospital and new, there was a ceremony where dignitaries and prime movers got to take a symbolic swing at the edifice with a sledgehammer. John’s father, never a big man, staggered beneath the hammer’s weight, but as he drove it home his pride was clear.
Chunks of that concrete, encased in Lucite, were still on Larry’s desk the day the stroke brought him down two years later.
But it was all the new facility could do to keep up with the cutting-edge medical technology required to keep it competitive. The old hospital hung on to rot, affixed to the working building like a tumor.
* * *
Memories of Dr. Bolger returned to John when the old doctor finally arrived and sat down across from him. Dr. Bolger had been an imperious name associated with Larry’s career and a dour specter pecking at a cocktail at the dinner parties John’s parents hosted when he was a kid. John stole looks at the old man while he picked at his lunch. He did look frail, perhaps from disease, but definitely older than John figured he was. Dr. Bolger had been younger than his father, but John guessed he was into his seventies. Seeing him so weathered, knowing that he and John’s father were a team back when they were young and vital, made John wonder what Larry would look like had he earned such a long life.
“How’s your mother?” The old man asked after muted small talk.
“Oh, you know,” John said. “Not great. I’ve had her in with Dr. Kelly over the past year. He’s pretty sure it’s Alzheimer’s.”
“I’ve spoken to him,” Dr. Bolger said. “He’s very good, and he won’t sugarcoat anything for you. This is an awful disease and there’s not much he can do for her. You just need to keep her world very quiet and be patient with her as her thinking gets more tangled.”
He looked John in the eye. “Dr. Kelly tells me you’re doing a great job with her. I’m not surprised.”
John smiled gratefully.
But then an awkward silence fell over their lunch that stretched into an air of avoidance. Having dispensed with all the fond and sad talk about the past, it appeared that the old man was avoiding the real reason for this meeting.
After Sheila cleared their plates and topped off their coffee, Dr. Bolger cleared his throat.
“John, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your father. About how he … died,” he said. “There are things you need to know.”
Going into their lunch, John wondered if this was why his father’s old friend reached out to him after so long. His father died when he was thirteen and that whole period was so emotionally wrenching that there were great holes in his understanding of what happened. With his time on earth dwindling, John figured the old man wanted to tell him what he could about his father and the way he died, just to make sure he knew.
“You know, your father was a great doctor,” Dr. Bolger continued. “We both were, and we knew it. Everything was changing in medicine, and we saw all the advancements that were on the way. We’d lose a patient and it would haunt us to know that if they had just hung on, if they had just gotten sick a few years later, we maybe could’ve saved them.”
John was confused by where this was leading, but he felt the old doctor drawing close to the matter at hand. He looked past John through the front window, toward the hospital.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.