She’d carried her guilt over Winston Perry for three years and never once set it down, a debt that never cleared.She’d been so certain that the minute a single other person found out what she’d done, they would walk out the door.
But Hank had merely put the kettle back on.
She didn’t feel forgiven.She wasn’t sure she believed a word of what he’d said about doors and keys and the rooms men trapped themselves inside.The guilt sat exactly where it always did in her chest, heavy and familiar, and she suspected it always would.
But she’d shared her guilt with someone, and the world had stubbornly declined to end.
When the tea was ready, he set a fresh mug down in front of her.She wrapped both hands around it and let her mind go quiet, just for the length of one cup, in a house she’d dug back down to its honest bones.For the first time since Winston died, she set the whole weight of him down on the table in front of her.
And the table held.
14
The Shoemacher place sat west of Cobbler Cove, a sprawling horse facility with four-board oak fences in need of paint around empty pastures, and the conspicuous absence of a main barn to house the racehorses they were depicted in the iron arch over the front entrance from the road.
Hank drove up to the southern plantation-style mansion with his medical bag on the seat beside him and the windows down because he needed to bank all the fresh air he could get before walking into a house where Lucas Shoemacher chain smoked cigars and was slowly dying alone.
Lucas was in end-stage congestive heart failure and refused to change his lifestyle one iota.Which meant there was no fixing his prognosis.There was only managing the long slide down, which Hank did with a house call every couple of weeks.He increased the medications that could still be increased and was honest with Lucas about his decline.
The mansion felt empty and echoing inside, a place built for a big family and crowds of visitors that had stopped coming.Columned porches stretched across the front and back of the house.He knew there were eight bedrooms upstairs, a guest bedroom and one for each of the children who no longer came home to visit.
The day nurse let Hank in, gave him her report in the low voice medical people kept for hallways, and disappeared to take a break from Lucas.He didn’t blame her.Lucas was a terrible patient, cranky, uncooperative, and defiant.
The old man was set up in what had been the casual family room in the back of the house.An oxygen concentrator chugged in the corner like a small, tired locomotive.Lucas sat propped up in a hospital bed facing the wall of big windows.The view ran clear down the valley passed his empty pastures, uncut hayfields, and far off in the distance, the gray smudge of the town he’d run for the past dozen years.
Hank took a critical look at him.He’d lost more weight.His skin was the color of an old nickel, and his ankles, when Hank pressed a thumb into them, held the dent the way bread dough did.Lucas sat up and leaned forward so Hank could listen to his lungs.
“Well,” Lucas rasped while Hank moved the stethoscope across his back.“Give it to me straight, Doc.Am I gonna live?”
It was the same joke every visit.Hank listened to the wet crackle at the base of both lungs and didn’t laugh.
He came around the bed to the high bar stool a nurse must’ve brought in from the billiard room and sat down.He’d given this particular news often enough across his career to know there was no good way to deliver it.There were only honest ways and cowardly ones.
“No,” he said.“You’re not.”
The oxygen machine huffed in the silence.
“I figured you’d be upping the diuretic pills again,” Lucas said eventually.
“I will.They’ll buy you comfort, but they won’t buy you time.”Hank kept his voice level, the same voice he used to talk down a panicked horse or kid.“Your heart’s done, Lucas.It’s pumping a fraction of what your body needs.The nurse says your kidneys are slowing down, too.There’s no surgery or pill or machine left that will change the math.We’re talking weeks.Maybe less, if your kidneys quit before your heart.”
Lucas turned his face to the window and looked down the long green run of the valley for a while.He was eighty-one years old, and looked every single day of it.
“Fix it,” he said.The bluster had gone out of the words.What was left was smaller and terribly sincere.“You’re a doctor.You fixed the Henderson boy’s arm and Earl Tatum’s hip and half this valley besides.There’s got to be a way to fix my heart ...or at least make it run better for a while.”
“I’m not God, Lucas.”
Saying those words did something strange to Hank.They vibrated through him like a gong, resonating oddly deep inside him.
“I can’t fix a heart that’s used up its years.Nobody can.As for the other kind of heart trouble you’ve got ...”He held the old man’s gaze.“...that kind was never mine to fix in the first place.That kind, a man has to fix himself.While he’s still above ground to do it.”
Lucas’s gaze slid away from his.Which told Hank what he already suspected.He was right about the other kind of heart trouble.
He took out the blood pressure cuff and worked through the rest of the exam because routine was a mercy and they both knew it.Only when his bag was packed again did he say the rest of what he’d driven up here to say.
“There’s a rumor been floating around town.It runs along the lines of whatever mess the state finds in the town’s books will turn out to be Bonnie Watson’s doing.”
He watched the old man’s face while he said it, the way he watched a patient’s face when he pressed on a spot he suspected was the real problem.
