Page 91 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“IUNDERSTANDYOURfrustration, ma’am, but we’ve been asked to limit Mr. Crawford’s visitors to only his son for the time being.”

The horse-faced nurse behind the desk engrosses herself in paperwork to avoid eye contact, as if I will disappear if she ignores me long enough. I set down the bouquet of pink and white stargazer lilies I brought for Gil. I went to three different florists before I finally found them, then shelled out fifty dollars for a dozen limp flowers and a cheap vase for them to wither in. “These are his favorite flowers,” I say.

“I’m really sorry.”

“I’m never going to see him again. I brought him flowers.”

She simpers and tilts her head, looking just past me. “And that’s very thoughtful of you, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. I don’t make the rules, unfortunately. That’s what I like to call above my pay grade.”

“How much money will make you look the other way?”

This gets her attention. She draws a hand to her chest and gasps like I’ve suggested we infiltrate the Louvre and steal theMona Lisa. “I’m insulted you would even—”

“Everything okay here?” Penny joins the nurse behind the desk, standing close behind her, hands cupped over the nurse’s broad shoulders. The gesture is too intimate to be platonic. The horse-faced nurse unclenches at her touch, and when Penny’s hands push aside the fabric of her scrub top to massage her bare shoulder, she doesn’t recoil. This woman has probably met Josiah, shaken his hand, eaten dinner at his table, held Penny’s hand and kissed her cheek in front of him.

Penny smiles at the bouquet. “Beautiful, flowers, Providence. Stargazer lilies?”

The horse-faced nurse rolls her shoulders until they pop. “I’m trying to explain,politely, that Gil Crawford can’t have visitors other than his son.”

“Did something happen?”

“I’m going off the notes in his chart.”

“I’m leaving town soon,” I say to Penny as she reads the computer screen through squinted eyes. “I’m probably never coming back, so I wanted to say goodbye.”

Penny strokes a petal with her thumb, then brings it to her nose and breathes in the scent left behind. “It’s probably a precaution from the concussion,” she says “You know how Dr. Bart is. Gil’s doing great.”

It probably has nothing to do with the concussion and everything to do with me telling Connor to drop dead. If he was willing to cover up my mother’s death to protect his father, he wouldn’t bat an eye to blackball me from the nursing home. “Connor mentioned the concussion,” I say. “It sounded pretty minor.”

“They happen a lot here,” the nurse says.

“Slips and falls every day of the week,” Penny adds, turning to her colleague. “I don’t see the harm. He’s been lonely the last couple days, anyhow.”

She shrugs again. “You’re the one who’ll get yelled at.”

Her smile still plastered on, Penny hands me the bouquet and leads me down the hall. She leans close to me like a high schooler with a titillating piece of gossip to share. “Not like they can fire me. We’re four nurses short as it is.”

We avoid a wet-floor sign and the janitor mopping up a yellow puddle. The door to every room is open, allowing the competing cacophonies of their television channels to spill into the hallway—radical right-wing news channels, gunfire from old western movies, has-been celebrities shilling reverse mortgages. There is no bingo in the common room today. The French doors are fastened shut by a bungee cord around the handles, a handwritten sign taped to the door asking residents to join them for a gin rummy tournament at seven.

“Has Connor been back to visit since his fall?”

Penny’s cheerleader ponytail whips the back of my neck when she shakes her head. “He’s busy. He comes as much as he can.”

“If Gil was my dad, I’d be here every day.”

“You wouldn’t,” she says. “This place sucks the life out of you. You go in and the person you love can’t even remember your name. It’s painful. I don’t blame people who can’t handle it more than once or twice a year.”

Chastened, I hold the flowers tighter against my chest.

Penny announces our arrival in a singsong voice. “Mr. Crawford, look who came to see you!” She ushers me through the doorframe in a dramatic sweeping motion, as if she’s welcoming me onstage for a game show. The gesture strikes me first as childish, but when I see the tenderness in her face, I realize this is the bright spot in her day of feeding people who cannot feed themselves and cleaning people who cannot clean themselves.

Gil is too engrossed in setting up his chessboard to greet us. He wears a gauzy bandage above his temple, the top edge of which has unpeeled from his skin and flopped over like a dog’s ear. I start to bring him the flowers, but Penny gestures to the dresser. I make as much noise as possible, clearing my throat and shuffling my feet, but Gil never looks up, and the stargazer lilies are thus sentenced to a short, sunless life.

“Maybe your friend could join you for a game of chess, hmm?”

My name is on the tip of his tongue. I will him to say it and I will him to never speak it again, to find peace in its clumsy syllables and to turn to stone as soon as they pass his lips. He sputters, stuck on the first syllable.Prov—Prov—and every word he could make pours through my mind. Providence. Provide. Provoke. Proverbs.Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit.

And then it comes, “Providence,” just as splintered as the man before me. My lungs ache like a giant fist is squeezing out all their air, my ribs caving in on my heart.

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