Page 26 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

There was still another hour before I had to be at the ranch, so Minnie and I went back inside and started a fresh pot of coffee with the canister I’d found behind the microwave. While it brewed, I finished resetting the bathroom door, wiped down the counters, reorganized the pill bottles, and went back over the list of everything we’d fixed, making notes on what still needed repairs.

When it was time to go, I gathered up Minnie, locked up, and walked out to my truck. I got in, and Minnie curled up on my lap and went to sleep. It had been a big day for her. I sat there for a long time with my head against the headrest, eyes closed. I thought about Sadie, about the way she’d smiled at me this morning—the real smile, the one that cracked open my heart. I thought about what it would be like to see her every day, to be someone she could count on again.

For years, I wondered if I’d built up what we shared, what my feelings for her were. Now I knew the truth, I hadn’t. If anything, my mind had deluded my feelings in an attempt to protect me. She was the only girl I’d ever loved, and I was more certain than ever the only girl I ever would love.

9

OF COURSE SHE HAS GREAT NAIL BEDS

Sadie

The elevator doors groaned open like they had somewhere better to be, and I stepped out carrying a gift shop bouquet and approximately thirty years of unresolved daddy issues.

I forced my shoulders back, squared up, and stepped out into the bland, medicinal corridor of the hospital’s third floor. Every surface—walls, floors, even the benches—seemed designed for easy cleaning and maximum psychological discomfort. Not a splash of color except for the out-of-season paper heart taped to the nurses’ station glass. I made my way past them, ignoring the cloying scent of antiseptic and the distant, cyclical wail of someone else’s heartbreak.

He doesn’t want to see you. The thought ambushed me somewhere between radiology and the vending machine alcove, the same alcove where a younger, healthier version of Buddy had once pressed a crumpled dollar into my eight-year-old hand and whispered, “Go on, get the good stuff.” Back when he’d been invincible. Back when I’d believed he was indestructible.

Buddy’s room was near the end of the hallway, the exact one Mom lay in bed fighting whatever landed her in ICU over Christmas break when I was eight. I’ll never forget, that year Buddy snuck in a Christmas tree from our lot, despite not getting clearance from the hospital. No one dared stop him from bringing his baby girl a little holiday cheer.

I didn’t blame the staff for not confronting my grandpa, he was large in stature and presence. His stride had always been brisk, the sort of purposeful, sprawling gait that made you believe he could conquer anything, scale a tall building, or maybe tear it down, if the mood struck. He was my hero, a literal tree-felling, deer-dragging, get-up-before-sunrise-to-fix-the-water-pump kind of man. I’d grown up believing his hands could mend anything, even the things that weren’t meant to be fixed, and that his voice—booming and full of banter—could drown out any sorrow.

Today, my shoes made no sound on the waxed linoleum as I neared his door. The silence was oppressive, a vacuum that threatened to collapse my lungs. I paused outside his room, bracing myself. I tried to conjure the memory of his laugh, irrepressible and contagious, but what came was the image of him I’d walked in on yesterday: hooked to machines, face drained of color, eyes lost in some distant, unspeakable ache. I pressed my palm to the cold metal of the door frame and tried to slow my breathing, but it wasn’t enough.

Inside, the room was dim. Shades drawn against the sunny glare, so the only light came from the heart monitor’s green sinewaves and the little flat-screen TV, muted, showing a rerun of some old game show. Buddy was asleep, mouth open, his chest rising and falling in shallow increments. The expanse of his shoulders was still there, but he looked shrunken inside the hospital gown, the blue fabric barely restraining a latticework of IV lines and adhesive sensors. The man who’d once lifted me one-armed onto the hood of his pickup, who’d made a sport out of arm-wrestling drunken loggers at Cupid’s Arrow, now looked breakable as a sparrow’s leg.

I wanted to retreat, to leave before I had to see him open his eyes and measure the distance between the man I remembered and what was left of him. But I owed him more than that…I mean, I owed him everything. So I slid into the upholstered chair in the corner, the one that converted into a cot for overnight visitors, and tried to become as unobtrusive as possible. I set my tote on the floor and pulled out the three black ledgers he’d asked for. They were heavy with decades of notes, receipts, and what he claimed were “the secret blueprints to the Shepard family empire.” The familiar sight of his slanted handwriting—always in blue ink, always all caps—made my chest pinch with nostalgia and something like dread.

He stirred, a small noise escaping him, and I froze. Then, as if summoned by the smell of paper and bad hospital coffee, he cracked one eyelid and glared at me. “You’re still here?” he croaked. Even drained of volume, the words carried the same old stubbornness. “Told ya, I’m fine. Get on back to the city.”

I tried to smile, but my lips wobbled. “You asked me to bring you your books, remember?” I set them on the rolling table, careful not to disturb the tray of untouched Jell-O and the melting cup of ice chips.

“Yeah, well, you dropped them off. No reason to hang around,” Buddy insisted, waving a hand in a feeble arc, as if shooing a misbehaving animal. “Go on back home.”

I looked at him, really looked, and saw the tremor in his fingers, the way he kept glancing at the monitors as if checking his own stats. The impulse to obey him—to play the good, self-sufficient granddaughter and vanish as instructed—clashed with the fact that he was not, in fact, fine. He was dying, or if not dying, then certainly breaking apart in slow, inexorable increments.

“Buddy, I think⁠—”

The knock was a polite warning, but the nurse stepped in, cutting me off, a small, forceful woman with the militant efficiency of someone who’s administered more sponge baths and morphine drips than she could count. Her neon-green scrubs announced her presence even before the scent of latex and baby powder did. She scanned the room, clocked me and the three binders, then zeroed in on Buddy’s chart at the end of his bed.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Shepard,” she said in a voice trained to soothe or command, depending on the patient’s stubbornness.

Buddy blinked, squinting at her like she’d interrupted a private conversation with his subconscious. “Afternoon, Nurse Mary,” he grunted.

She didn’t correct him, although her name tag clearly read ‘Jackie,’ and instead launched into the ritual: temperature, blood pressure, pulse ox. Buddy offered up his arm with a theatrical sigh, then seized the opportunity to complain about the finger clamp being “invented by sadists.” She grinned, the kind of retail smile that was all upturned lips and no teeth, and threatened, “You keep eating the pudding instead of the protein, and maybe I’ll have to try the rectal thermometer next time.”

He barked a laugh that collapsed into a cough, and at the same time, I felt my own face flush. Jackie scribbled something in the chart, then turned to me.

“Have you had a chance to go over his dietary options?” She gestured to the sticky binder of laminated hospital menus, which I could tell had never been opened. “He’s not a fan of the chicken, but the meatloaf is decent,” she added with a wink.

She handed Buddy a cup of pills and a teetering paper cup of water. “I better not come back here and find these under the pillow,” she warned, voice flat.

“Ahh,” he grunted dismissively.

Nurse Jackie started to leave but stopped. “You’re Rosie’s girl, right? Rosie Shepard.”

Rosie was my mom. She was named after her mom, Rose. I was given the middle name.

“I am, yeah.”