Hal came back about an hour and a quarter after he'd left. He took down the CLOSED sign and went back to work. Maybe that meant everything was fine. Maybe it just meant he had a lot to do. Nellie didn't think he would come across the street right away and tell her if the news was bad. He wasn't like that. And she couldn't go ask him right away, because she was busy herself. If I keep making mistakes like I'm doing, though, I'll lose so many customers, I'll never be this busy again, she thought.
At last, she had a moment when nobody was in the coffeehouse. She hung up her own CLOSED sign, waited for a break in the traffic, and crossed the street. The bell over Hal's door jingled. He looked up from a new heel he was putting on. Spitting a mouthful of brads into the palm of his hand, he said, "Hello, Nellie."
She couldn't tell anything from his face or voice. She had to ask it: "What did the doctor say? What did the X ray say?"
"I have something unusual." He laughed, as if proud of himself. "The doctor said he has only seen it a few times in all the years he has been practicing."
"What is it?" Nellie didn't scream at him. She never knew why or how she didn't, but she didn't. She waited, taut as a fiddle string.
"It is called carcinoma of the lungs." Hal pronounced the unfamiliar word with care. He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one.
When he offered the pack to Nellie, she shook her head. "Not now. What the devil does that mean, anyway?"
"Well, it is like a-a growth in there," he said.
"A growth? What kind of a growth? What can they do about it?" The questions flew quick and sharp, like machine-gun fire.
Hal sighed. "It is a cancer, Nellie. They can aim more X rays at it, the doctor said. That will slow it down for a while."
"Slow it down… for a while," Nellie echoed. Her husband nodded. She knew what that meant, knew what it had to mean, but grasped for a straw anyhow: "Can they stop it?"
"It is a cancer," he repeated. "We can hope for a miracle, but.. .." A shrug. "Who knows why cancers happen? Just bad luck, the doctor said." He blew a smoke ring at the ceiling, as he had for Clara and Armstrong. Then, stubbing out the cigarette, he said, "I am not afraid of death, darling. I am afraid of dying, a little, because I do not think it will be easy, but I am not afraid of death. Death will bring me peace. The only thing I am sorry for is that it will take me away from you and Clara. I do not think many men have the last years of their lives be the happiest one, but I have. I feel like the luckiest man in the world, even now."
"Oh, Hal." Nellie hardly noticed the tears running down her face. "What are we going to do without you? What can we do without you? I love you. It took me a long time to figure that out-longer than it should have, you being the finest man I ever knew-but I do, and who knows? Maybe there'll be a miracle with the X rays." She grabbed for that straw again.
Hal's smile was gentle. "Yes, maybe there will," he said, meaning, not a chance. He brushed her lips with his. "With you and Clara, I have already had two miracles." Nellie shivered. She wasn't, couldn't be, ready for this. But who ever could? Ready or not, it always came.
AmericanEmpire: TheCenterCannotHold
XV
"H ere you are, George," Sylvia Enos said, setting a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her son. When his fishing boat was in port, she liked to stuff him. She was convinced the cook on the Whitecap was trying to starve him. Logic told her that was silly, especially since he'd grown into a strapping man, almost six feet tall and broad as a bull through the shoulders. Logic, sometimes, had nothing to do with anything.
"Thanks, Ma." He slathered on salt and pepper and started to eat. With his mouth full, he went on, "You know what? When I went out to the Banks, I took along a copy of I Sank Roger Kimball. That's a good book-that's a really good book. You and that writer fellow did a… heck of a job." The brief pause there surely meant he was changing what he might have said on the deck of the Whitecap. Sylvia smiled. She'd raised him right. He didn't cuss in front of her-well, not much, anyhow.
"Thank you," she said now. "You ought to thank Ernie, too. He did the real work. And he's a brick, too-if it hadn't been for him, we'd've lost our money when the bank went under. He didn't have to come back and warn me about that, but he did."
She turned away so her son wouldn't see the look on her face. She didn't know what her expression was, exactly, but she did know it wasn't one she wanted George, Jr., seeing. She would have gone to bed with Ernie. She'd wanted to go to bed with him. And a whole fat lot of good that did me, she thought. Just my damned luck, the first time I really want a man since George got killed, to fix on one who couldn't do me any good-or himself, either, poor fellow.
George, Jr., got up and poured himself more coffee-and Sylvia, too, when she pushed her cup toward him. He added cream and sugar, sipped, and said, "There's a lot of stuff in there I never knew before."
"I'm not surprised," Sylvia answered. "That was nine years ago now. You were still a boy then."
"When you put me and Mary Jane on the train to Connecticut, did you really think you'd never see us again?"
"Yes, I thought that. It was the hardest thing about what I did," Sylvia said. "But no one was going to make that man pay for what he did to the Ericsson at the end of the war, and he deserved to."
"But you would have paid, too."
"I didn't even think about what would happen to me. When I found out he was running around loose, I didn't think about much of anything."
"That must have been… very strange," George, Jr., said. "A couple of fellows on the boat were in the Army during the war-they got conscripted before they could join the Navy, or else they weren't sailors yet: I don't know which. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Sometimes they tell stories. They talk about how they were going up against Confederate machine guns and they didn't think they'd come back alive. It must have been like that for you, too."
"Maybe." Sylvia wasn't so sure. If a man charged a machine gun, he had a chance of living-maybe not much of a chance, but a chance. Once she'd shot Roger Kimball, she was in the hands of the law, and she didn't think she had any chance of escape at all. She hadn't counted on having Confederate politics come to her rescue.
Her son said, "You have a book signing this morning?"
"That's right. Every time I sign one, that's fourteen and three-quarter cents in my pocket," Sylvia answered. She couldn't have figured that out herself from the murky language of the book contract she'd signed; Ernie had explained the way things worked.
"Call it fifteen cents." George, Jr.'s, face got a faraway look. He'd always been good in school. Sylvia wished he would have liked it more, would have got his high-school diploma instead of going to work on T Wharf. Years too late to worry about that, though. He went on, "If you sign twenty of them, then, that's three dollars. That's not a bad day's wage."
"I don't know if I'll sign that many of them," Sylvia said, "but they're buying the book-or I hope they are-from here to San Diego. We'll see what it does, that's all. The reviews have been pretty good." That was Ernie's doing, of course; the actual words on paper were his. But the story's mine, Sylvia reminded herself. He couldn't have written it if not for me. My name deserves to be on the cover, too.
"Might be just as well they took a while getting it into print," her son said. "With the Freedom Party coming up again in the CSA, people here are liable to be more interested in what happened to one of its bigwigs back then."
Sylvia blinked. That was true, and she hadn't thought of it herself. George, Jr., had a man's shrewdness. Well, fair enough-he was a man; he'd be old enough to vote in November. Has it really been more than twenty-one years since he was born? Sylvia didn't want to believe that, but couldn't very well help it.