CHAPTER 20

Liz Stone met me in the hospital cafeteria. Seeing her was like taking the cure at Baden-Baden or getting a blood transfusion or something. I was so grateful she came, and then absurdly happy when she wanted to have the same thing I was having—my usual lunch of coffee and a vanilla Dixie cup.

“I didn’t expect you to be doing this,” Liz said. “I thought it’d be Susan.”

“Doing what?” I said. “Oh. At the hospital every day.”

“I’m just surprised you’re this devoted to him considering how shitty he was to you,” Liz said. She was direct. We had that in common.

“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” I said.

Liz laughed. She expected me to be defensive. “So why then?”

“Stockholm syndrome, I guess,” I said. “I don’t know. I mean, you know! I don’t have to explain myself to you of all people.”

“It seems like Susan’s never around for the bad stuff,” Liz said.

“He loves that about her,” I said. “No darkness between them.”

“Yeah, but I still thought she’d be here, not you.”

“She has kids, I don’t. That’s the reality. Anyway, I forgave him and c’mon, you forgave him, too. Eventually. And you didn’t have to! You didn’t have to speak to him ever again after the camping trip, or hang out at my house, and you did.”

“True,” Liz said. She took a mouthful of ice cream and sucked on the wooden spoon before stabbing it back into the cup. “Whenever I’d come over, he’d pull me aside and ask me about something I was doing, like those speaker cabinets I built, remember those? And he wanted to know the details, how many nails I used. He showed me his tomato plants, and he’d put his arm around me, not in a lecherous way, not usually, it was more conspiratorial. He’d tell me some insight he had, like some key to happiness he just thought up, and he’d make it seem like I was the only one he was telling this stuff to. Like everyone else was stupid. Just him and me, we were the only ones in on the secret.”

“He does that, doesn’t he?” I said. I asked Liz not to come up to the room with me, though. He wasn’t in the mood to see anyone. Talking hurt his head. Besides, Liz giving all her time to me was good for everyone. It was amazing what seeing a friend for a couple of hours could do when you were in some kind of nightmare.