After work that night I went out to my car and put a few things into a plastic bag. I then went back inside. I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor and headed for the ICU where Jack was being stashed. Visiting hours were soon coming to a close and Nina and her mother had already gone for the night. I was unquestioned as I walked past the nurse's station. The surgical scrubs I wore saw to that.
I entered his room and stood in the doorway for a moment. Jack Blackmore was dressed in a standard hospital gown. IV's were installed in his arm and connected to a pump. Wires snaked from beneath the sheets and his gown and fed to a monitor on the wall above his head. He was sitting in the bed, which he'd adjusted to a chair position, watching a baseball game on the television. He looked over at me as I entered, his eyes taking a moment to realize that I was not just another hospital worker coming in to take his blood pressure or to get him to piss in a jar.
"Bill." He nodded when he recognized me. "How are you?"
"I'm fine." I told him, coming in and closing the door behind me. "How are YOU?"
"Hanging in here." He said as I took a seat. "I never did get a chance to thank you for talking me into going the other night." He lowered his voice a little. "The doc tells me I might've died if I hadn't of come in."
"I was glad to help." I assured him.
"As much as I hate to admit it." He said. "I owe you one."
"Maybe I'll collect someday." I said. "But in the meantime, I brought you something you might like."
"What's that?" He asked.
I reached into my bag and withdrew two dripping, icy cold bottles of beer. Beer that my Dad had bought for me that morning and which had sat in an ice chest in my car all day. It was his favorite brand. His eyes lit up as he saw them.
"I can't drink that." He told me, his voice far from virtuous.
"Sure you can." I said. "You're probably sick of Jell-O and powdered eggs about now. You're probably even sicker of powdered orange juice. Have a brew. You're going in for bypass surgery tomorrow. What can it hurt? Hell, they ought to be feeding you bacon and eggs and greasy tacos tonight. The cholesterol can't hurt you now."
He licked his lips for a moment and then said. "You have a gift for putting things into perspective young man. Give me the beer."
"Better pour it into your cup." I instructed. "If the nurse comes in and sees it, she'll kill me."
He gave me a shrewd look. "We wouldn't want that now, would we?" He asked.
We poured the beer into the little plastic cups that are only found in hospitals and stashed the bottles away.
"To good health." I offered, holding up my cup.
He nodded. "To good health."
We clinked them together, well, not really, plastic doesn't clink, but you get the idea. We drank. The beer was like nectar on my parched throat. It probably tasted even better to Jack Blackmore, who had just faced death in a much different way than he had in World War II.
"Mary tells me that you had a talk with her." He said after the first drink.
I looked at him for a moment and then nodded. "We did." I said.
"Uh huh." He grunted. "She also tells me she invited you into our house."
I swallowed nervously, wondering if Mr. Blackmore was about to veto this decision. If he was about to tell me that he would see me in hell before he saw me in his house. "She did." I said.
"Well," He said, sipping out of his beer again. "I guess I'll have to agree with her then."
It took me a moment for what he said to filter through, so much was I expecting the "see you in hell" speech.
"You agree with her?" I finally asked.
"Young man." He told me. "You alone have caused more turmoil in my household than anything since Bob Simpson himself. I've fought with my wife, my daughter, sometimes both at the same time over the subject of you. That last thing I ever thought I'd do was invite you into my house. But I'm forced to admit that much of the turmoil and arguing that you've caused was because of the preconceived notions that Mary and I had about you. Notions that, like Mary pointed out, are apparently wrong."
"I'm not inviting you over because you saved my life, although I'm grateful for that. I'm inviting you over because I think I was wrong about you. You're not Bob Simpson. You're an offshoot of him, but you're not him. And I think that maybe you're starting to get out of that stage. My daughter adores you Bill, absolutely adores you. But I also realize that maybe you feel the same way about her. That maybe you were telling me the complete and honest truth that day I came over to your house. If that is so, I apologize for not believing you and ask that you understand why I didn't."
"I do." I said. "I probably would've reacted the same in your shoes."
"I suppose you would have." He said. "I'm not sure I like you yet. I'm still holding judgement on that matter, but I'm going to give you a chance. Just like any father gives any suitor their daughter brings home."
"Thank you." I said.
"You asked me the other day if I wanted to live to see grandkids."
"Yes." I said.
"I do." He nodded. "And I assume that you intend to provide those grandkids?"
I swallowed nervously again. "Yes." I finally said. "I do."
He nodded slowly, taking a long drink from his beer. "Be sure you treat my daughter right Bill." He said. "She's the only one I got. I intend to live long enough to kick your ass if you ever hurt her. Do you understand?"
"I do." I told him. "And you're gonna have to live a long time to see that Mr. Blackmore."
We stared at each other for a moment. Finally his expression softened. "Who do you like?" He asked, jerking his head towards the television.
"Like?" I asked.
"In baseball?" He clarified, as if I was an idiot. "You're from Spokane so I assume you like the Mariners."
"Well to tell you the truth Mr. Blackmore…"
"Jack." He said. "Call me Jack."
"Jack." I said, the name sounding strange on my lips. "To tell you the truth I'm not much of a baseball fan at all. In fact I don't really follow sports at all."
"You don't watch sports?" He asked, looking at me as if I was some sort of communist radical.
I shook my head. "No."
"If you're going to be my son-in-law Bill, we're going to have to change that."
The next day Jack Blackmore went under the knife for a triple bypass operation. They cut open his leg and removed arteries from it. They then split open his chest, stopped his heart and installed those arteries in his heart, bypassing the occluded vessels. They restarted his heart and sewed him back up. The procedure took nearly five hours to complete from anesthesia to recovery room. Nina and Mary spent the day there, hanging around in the surgery waiting room, reading old magazines, drinking coffee, and worrying.
I spent the day in school and at work, doing some worrying of my own. At the front of my mind was the fact that I'd most likely pushed fate off of it's path once more. Mr. Blackmore, Jack, was supposed to be dead in all likelihood. But now he wasn't. Was fate going to work swiftly to reclaim him? Was he going to die on the operating table, a victim of reaction to anesthesia, improper procedure, or some other malady? Was he going to die of a post-op infection? A thousand things could go wrong, any of which a vengeful fate could seize upon in order to take the wayward Jack Blackmore out of the picture.
Since he was in the hospital where I worked I stopped up to see how things were going at every opportunity. I popped by upon arrival to find Nina and Mary still in the waiting room, waiting anxiously. I hugged Nina and told her it would be all right. She wiped a few tears away as she heard this. The words felt almost like a lie on my lips. By my second break he was out of surgery but not allowed any visitors yet. I offered more words of encouragement before heading back to my station. By my last break they'd both been in to see him. Their moods were better and they were more relaxed. He'd come out of surgery just fine, they told me, though he was in considerable pain.