Page 49 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

“I heard you had a rough night,” I prompted, hoping he’d fill me in on what happened.

He shooed away the comment like a fly circling his dinner. “Ahh.”

Okay, maybe not.

I crossed to his bed to try and help him settle in when Ida Blanchart breezed into the room with a wide smile on her face. I remembered her from my mom’s many hospital stays. I had no idea she was still nursing.

Buddy barked, “You here to bust me out or just jab me with something? I swear half you nurses can’t find a vein to save your life, or mine, in this case.”

Ida took his statement in stride, not personal at all, and went about doing what she needed to do, which included taking his vitals and administering his medication.

Once Ida left, there was a steady stream of visitors in and out all afternoon. Now that Buddy wasn’t in the ICU, visitation had been opened to non-family members. It turned into an episode of This is Your Life. It was a parade of characters from my childhood—ladies in pastel windbreakers who used to pinch my cheeks at potluck suppers, men who worked for Buddy back when we still ran cattle, health workers who cared for my mom. No one showed up empty-handed. They had everything from pies wrapped in picnic towels, casseroles in disposable tins, to cards with a cartoon horse on the front. All of them had the same sequence of comments when they saw me: first, how long it had been since they’d seen me; next, that I was the spitting image of Rosie and/or Rosebud, my mother and grandmother. Some even saying it was like seeing a ghost. Last, they would all say that they were glad I’d come to my senses and finally moved home where I belonged, or some version of that statement.

Buddy never missed the opportunity to correct people, letting them know this was only a visit and that if it were up to him, I’d be on the first flight back to the East Coast. My living arrangements weren’t the only thing that got a reaction out of him. Every time my appearance was mentioned, I felt Buddy stiffen in his bed beside me. Sometimes he’d give a grunt, sometimes he’d stop talking altogether, and sometimes he’d change the subject so abruptly that the visitor would blink in confusion. I was proof that it was tough for him to see my grandma and mom in me and validated the reason I’d stayed away so long.

The parade of visitors slowed down around dinner time, and the floor quieted except for the beeping monitors and the shift-change gossip of the nurses in the hallway. I sat at the foot of Buddy’s bed, picking at the edge of a Jell-O cup, and thought about the phone calls I’d been ignoring all day. Besides Janine and Peter, I’d also ignored calls from the head of acquisitions, most likely wanting to know what I planned on doing with my clients—all of whom had asked for updates, all wanted to know when I’d be back. I ignored the calls because I couldn’t answer them. My entire future was on hold, out of my hands, pinned in limbo by the white-banded wrist of the man in the hospital bed.

Buddy caught me looking at his IV. “Stop staring like I’ve already kicked it,” he gruffly commanded.

“What do you expect,” I shot back, “when you keep trying to pull out your own tubes?”

He’d attempted to check himself out of the hospital three times so far and pulled out his I.V. each time. I wasn’t sure how long they’d be able to keep him in this place.

He made a face at me. “Hospitals are for people who don’t have better things to do. I’ve got three thousand acres of fence to ride and crops to look after.”

The sick pit of worry in my stomach grew as the world outside the hospital room walls began to close in on me. The farm. The land. The legacy. The longer Buddy’s recovery took, the more impossible it seemed that he’d ever go back to running things the way he always had.

“You know you’re not invincible, right?” I stated, flipping through yesterday’s local newspaper someone had left behind, scanning the obits as if they might have featured his name.

Buddy snorted. “Says who?”

I ignored him and kept going. “I mean it. The doctor says you need to be off your feet for weeks, maybe months. You can’t run a farm from a hospital bed.”

“I’ve seen men run empires from worse places than this,” he sneered.

“Empires have staff, Buddy. You don’t even have a foreman anymore. Word is, you fired the last two.”

Apparently, Buddy had become quite curmudgeonly since Randy, his foreman of forty-plus years, retired to Arizona. Rumor has it he was impossible to please and lost his temper at the drop of a hat. It reminded me a lot of his demeanor immediately after my mom passed. He never raised his voice at me, he barely spoke to me, but I heard him with his workers, Randy, Jasper, Kevin, Freddy, and the others. He’d been short with them. They put up with it because they loved him.

He tried to sit up and failed, settling for a slow-motion glare. “I didn’t fire them. They quit. Millennial work ethic is shit.”

I wasn’t going to bite even though he was clearly baiting me. His hands looked small against the white sheet, which felt like a trick of the light because nothing about Buddy Lockhart was ever small. “You need help.”

He softened just a fraction, or maybe the morphine was starting to win. “Don’t worry your pretty little head,” he said, but it didn’t have the old bite.

“It’s already too late for that,” I muttered.

He pretended not to hear me and closed his eyes, but I could tell by the way his fingers flexed that the conversation wasn’t over. Not for him, and definitely not for me.

I had hoped for a quiet evening, but more visitors arrived after dinner, just as predictable as the sunrise. First it was Mrs. Lindahl from down the road, who brought a sack of homegrown pears and told me three times in five minutes that I looked just like my mother did at my age. She lingered in the doorway, eyes darting between Buddy and me like she was watching a television drama, and when she finally left, I caught the faint scent of her rose perfume. That was followed by two men from the feed store with matching ball caps and matching stories about how Buddy once ran a calf auction while running a hundred-and-two fever. They shook my hand, patted Buddy’s arm, and marveled at how “the old dog still has all his teeth.”

The cycle repeated every thirty minutes, like someone in town had set up a sign-up sheet for hospital visits. I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually had. The theme was always the same: they’d start by telling Buddy how tough he was, most would make a joke about him needing to get his strength up so he could be ready for the annual bachelor auction which happened at the summer festival in ten days’ time, that always got a laugh out of him, and then, almost as an afterthought, they’d turn to me and say, “You’re her spitting image, you know that?”

After the third or tenth round of this, Buddy started to look worn out. His color dulled, and his voice lost some of its snap. Once the room was finally empty, he let out a sigh so deep it rattled the ice cubes in his remaining cup of ginger ale. I thought he might finally let the walls down, but instead, he turned on the TV and pretended to care about a golf tournament.

That left me with my phone, which I’d kept on silent but checked compulsively, scrolling through increasingly terse emails from my office in Manhattan and a half dozen missed calls from Peter. I let them pile up because every time I pictured Peter’s voice on the other end of the line, I felt like I was being gently smothered with a hotel pillow.

I’d already ended things over text, a call, and voicemail. The guy was just not giving up. I could be wrong, but I was starting to suspect I was the only person who had ever broken up with him before and it was just not computing.