Free The Evening Hour by A. Carter Sickels Page B

poker, scared me to death. Larry and Rebecca have been coming over here almost every day, it’s too much.”
    â€œI’ve been busy,” Cole said defensively. “Working all the time.”
    â€œOh, honey. Listen, over there he’ll get the care he needs.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “I’ll visit him every day. It’ll be nice.”
    Cole looked out the window at the thick fog lifting across the back field. “You want me to take him in?”
    â€œHe’s sleeping now. We’ll bring him in later.” Before she hung up, she added, “The only reason I feel okay about this is ’cause you’ll be there.”
    As usual they were short-staffed. Cole, with his head still screaming, spent the first hour changing diapers and sheets. The old miner John Hill, suffocating with black lung, couldn’t get out of bed, and Cole maneuvered around him, carefully turning him as he rolled on the new sheet. As soon as Cole finished, John let loose, peeing all over the sheet he’d just put down. “Fucking hell,” Cole said.
    He stepped outside for a smoke, joining Ellen. “It’s going to be weird,” he admitted. “Working in the same place where my granddad will be.”
    â€œDon’t you pretty much just take care of him anyway?”
    â€œI guess so,” he said, feeling a sharp pang of guilt.
    Ellen patted his arm, said everything would be okay. He liked Ellen. He could talk to her about nursing school, and she did not seem surprised that a guy like him would consider it. He used to entertain the thought of asking her out, but she was engaged. To a cop, of all people. He looked at her hand on his arm and Charlotte flashed in his head. Why hadn’t he done anything, instead of just standing there, watching her put her arms around someone else?
    Cole walked by the room that his grandfather would be moving into, still pulsing with the most recent death. Stripped bed, bare walls. He tried to imagine his grandfather among these people, Larry Potts twiddling his thumbs and Hazel Lewis trying to take off her shirt. The truth was, he’d probably fit right in.
    Mabel Johnson was sitting in a rocker with a ball of blood-red yarn on her lap, looking dressed for church: blue belted dress, strand of plastic pearls, stockings the color of sand. She barely hit five foot, but wasn’t frail; she looked like she could walk for miles. Mabel was ninety-five years old and had the memory of an elephant. She was the only black resident in the home, and a few of the patients refused to room with her.
    He handed her a can of apple juice with a bendable straw poked through the top, and set down a bowl of tapioca pudding.
    â€œYou got anything else?”
    â€œJust for you.” He dropped several chalky peppermints into her wrinkled hand. She popped one in her mouth and for a second it sat, a bright pink medallion on her fleshy tongue, then her lips smacked and it was gone. “Mmm,” she said. “I like those candies.” One time Mabel had walked in on Cole as he was searching her dresser, the closest he’d ever come to getting busted. He pretended that he’d lost something, a ring, he muttered, and she narrowed her eyes: I never knew you to wear no ring. After that he had avoided her, until one day she put her hands on his: I don’t hold grudges . To this day he wasn’t sure what she knew.
    He asked what she was knitting.
    â€œA scarf.”
    â€œWho for?”
    â€œOne of the grandchildrens, I ’spect.” She motioned for him to lean forward and her icy fingers grazed his neck. “Or maybe I’ll give it to you. I can see this color kindly favors you.”
    Cole said he’d be proud to wear such a scarf. Mabel’s children had fled the coalfields long ago and rarely visited, but she didn’t complain: “I reckon they’re busy.” Now she looked at him, and