“This baby is all I have left of Thomas,” Crystal said through tears, one hand pressed against her belly.
The church cried with her. People reached for tissues. A few heads bowed as if they were praying for her and that unborn child.
I did not cry.
I knew exactly where my son had been four months earlier.
My name is Dorothy. I am seventy-one years old. Harold and I raised Thomas in the house we bought in 1969, and I buried both of them within five years of each other. Harold went first. Then Thomas, on March 12th. I still have trouble saying that date without feeling as though I am talking about somebody else’s child.
Thomas got sick in 2019. He fought through it, and for a while we let ourselves believe that was the end of it. My boy was a fighter. But the treatment took things from him, things he had hoped to keep private.
He married Crystal in 2022. She was pretty, loud, and always seemed to be looking past me when we spoke. I tried not to take that personally. A mother can find fault with almost any woman her son marries if she is not careful, and I did not want to be that kind of mother-in-law.
Still, I noticed things. Crystal was impatient when Thomas was tired. She checked her phone when he talked.
Rick, Thomas’s business partner, was around often enough that I knew his face better than I wanted to. Crystal always had an explanation. Rick was helping with business. Rick had offered a ride. Rick was just being kind.
Last October, Thomas’s sickness came back. It came back fast.
From November 3rd until December 15th, he was on the fourth floor at St. Luke’s. I know those dates as well as I know my own birthday because I sat beside him every night. I slept in a vinyl chair, if you can call it sleep. I walked the same hallway, spoke to the same nurses, and paid for parking every morning.
I kept the stubs in a shoebox on my dresser. Forty-three of them, one for each night.
Harold used to tease me for writing everything down. I had a green notebook for appointments, bills, repairs, birthdays, anything that needed remembering.
“You’d write down what I had for breakfast if I let you,” he would say.
“I would if it mattered,” I always told him.
At St. Luke’s, it all mattered.
Crystal came four times during those weeks. I did not have to guess. I wrote those visits down too. She would sit beside Thomas for twenty minutes or so, look at her phone, say she had something to handle, then leave. Rick was usually waiting downstairs or outside. More than once, I saw him through the glass doors as she got into his car.
