Chair Four
Episode 1 of 3 of Thursdays in Chair Four by Claire Mosley
“You’re in my seat.”
I looked up. There was a whole row of empty chairs on both sides of me.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “Please don’t move. I’ve been working up to that one for three weeks and it came out badly.”
My father has dialysis on Thursdays. Three hours and forty minutes, plus the setup and the taking down, which means I get to the Riverbend Kidney Center at eight fifteen in the morning and I leave a little after one, every single week.
I had been coming since February. By April I knew things about that waiting room the staff didn’t know. I knew the magazine rack held four issues of a boating magazine and nothing else, and that one of them was from 2019. I knew the second chair from the window had a wobble because somebody had tightened it wrong. I knew the coffee machine made a noise like a man clearing his throat, and that if you pressed the button twice you got hot water and disappointment.
I knew that at ten fifteen a woman named Pat came through with a cart, and that if you said yes to the cookies she was pleased with you all morning.
And I knew that the man in chair four was there every week, same as me, and that he read paperbacks with the covers bent all the way back so the spines were ruined, and that was the sum total of what I knew about him.
“Grace,” I said.
“Ben.”
“Who are you here for?”
He had a way of taking a second before he answered things. I would learn that about him. At the time I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“Long story,” he said. “Who are you here for?”
“My dad.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s stubborn.”
“That’s the correct answer,” Ben said. “That’s the answer they want.”
We talked for maybe forty minutes that first week. He was easy to talk to in a way that made me suspicious, because I am not easy to talk to and I distrust people who make it look simple.
He asked about my father and he asked good questions, specific ones. Which access. Whether the fistula had been a fight. How my father was doing with the fluid limits, which is the part nobody outside it knows to ask about, because everybody assumes the machine is the hard part and it is not, the hard part is being thirsty for four years.
“How do you know all that,” I said.
“I read a lot.”
“You read crime novels with the covers bent back.”
“I contain multitudes,” he said.
My father would not have talked to him. My father does not talk to anybody at Riverbend, on principle, because in his view acknowledging the other patients is the first step toward becoming one of them, which is a position I have stopped arguing with. He goes in, he does his four hours, he comes out, and on the drive home he tells me about the stock market as though nothing happened that morning.
He is seventy one. He was a high school principal for twenty six years and he has never in his life let anybody see him be afraid of a thing, and I have come to understand that the dialysis is not the hardest part of this for him either. The hardest part is that his daughter has to drive him.
So I sat in that waiting room every Thursday with a person who would not let me help him, and then I went in and collected another one.
At nine o’clock a nurse came to the doorway with a clipboard.
“Grace Okonkwo?”
“That’s not me. That’s my father. He’s already in.”
“Not looking for Okonkwo,” the nurse said, and looked past me. “Ben. We’re ready for you.”
Ben put his thumb in his paperback and closed it. He stood up. He was wearing a short sleeved shirt, and I saw it then, on his left forearm, the thing I had been looking at every Thursday for two months without once looking at it.
The raised line under the skin where they put the access in.
“Long story,” he said again, and went through the door.