Free Can't Hurry Love by Molly O'Keefe Page B

white walls of Mark’s room had to stay white, his pajamas blue. The TV in the corner showed John Wayne movies and John Wayne movies only. Caitlyn was the only nurse who could feed him.
    Mark was a broken barometer, so sensitive to change that any difference sent him spinning.
    Eli pushed through the front doors, nodding to Clark, the night guard, before heading down the dim hallway toward the screaming in the farthest bedroom. He nudged the door open and stepped into the bright artificial light from the ceiling fixtures over the bed. The two new aides—Jim and Eddie, both former high school linebackers—were holding the nearly skeletal frame of the old man against the white sheets of his bed.
    “Where’s my wife?” The man bowed off the bed as if possessed. “What the hell did you assholes do with her?”
    “Christ, man, you’re gonna break something,” Eddie said. “Why the hell aren’t we giving him a sedative?”
    “Because it makes him sick.” Eli’s voice brought the big men around, their faces folded into all kinds of respect. They probably thought he was footing the bill for this place.
    He flipped off the bright overhead lights and reached down to turn on the lamp on the bedside table. The gold light pooled across the table and bed, and almost instantly, the old man calmed down.
    The bright lights freaked Mark out—Eli didn’t know how many times he’d had to tell the staff that.
    “Sorry, Mr. Turnbull,” Eddie said. “We just didn’t want him to hurt himself.”
    “Fuck you!” the old man said.
    Eli smiled, but the old man didn’t see and wouldn’t care. Eli waved away the two aides. “I got it from here.”
    “Mr. Turnbull—” Eddie and Jim shared a look. “He’s pretty violent—”
    “I’ll be fine.” Eli stepped up to the bed, felt the metal of it against his legs. The light from the lamp sliced him in half, illuminating his hands and legs while shadows covered his face and chest. It looked like he was disappearing, one inch at a time.
    “Who the fuck are you?” the old man asked, his runny blue eyes searching the shadows until Eli leaned forward into the pool of light.
    There was no sign of recognition. Nothing but distrust. Eli wasn’t even aware of hoping it would be different until it wasn’t.
    Your son .
    “A friend,” he said instead, because Mark Turnbull had no memories of a son.
    “Where’s my wife?”
    “She left.” Twenty-seven years ago. But his father’s memory had folded up like an envelope, hiding the lastthirty-five years as if they’d never happened. As if Eli had never happened.
    “Stupid bitch.”
    Eli hooked his boot around the chair behind him and pulled it forward so he could collapse backwards into it. “Stupid bitch” was usually the beginning of a song Eli knew by heart. But Mark wasn’t fighting anymore; he lay still and trembling against the white sheets, his blue pajamas skewed around his stomach, his ribs poking through like the ruins of a shipwreck.
    Eli, risking his father’s wrath but unable to resist, reached forward and pushed the white hair off the old man’s face. Tired, he didn’t protest, and Eli took a moment to fix his damp collar.
    His father’s skin felt like paper: too fragile a bag to hold all the hate and anger and confusion that filled it.
    “Why did she leave?” Mark’s runny eyes got runnier. Anger and grief were the only stops left on Mark’s emotional train.
    Eli’s body sagged with weariness.
    He’d already had this endless conversation tonight and he didn’t have the heart to hash it out all over again. His father was stuck in the lowest moment of his life, the days when Amy had left them.
    Eli wondered if he’d share that fate—would he grow old and senile and live in this moment forever?
    “I lost my job at the ranch. And the land,” he said, needing to say the words even though he knew there would be no reaction from his dad. “I fucked up. She’ll never sell it to me now.”
    He would have