The Fourteenth

Episode 2 of 3 of Thursdays in Chair Four by Claire Mosley

He’d been coming for six years.

I got that out of him in pieces over the next month, on Thursdays, in the tea colored room with the boating magazines. He was thirty four. He’d been diagnosed at twenty seven, which he described as the single most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to a person, and when I asked what he did before, he said that he had been a middle school science teacher and that he still was, technically, on Mondays.

“Technically on Mondays.”

“They’ve been very good about it,” he said. “I do one day and I do it badly and the kids are extremely tolerant of me, which is a terrible thing to say about thirteen year olds but there it is. I have a stool now. I teach sitting down. They think it’s a whole bit.”

He’d worked out a system. He came in at nine and finished at half past twelve and he said the trick was to treat it like a commute, that everybody does three and a half hours of nothing every week, it’s just that most people do it in a car and call it Tuesday.

I said that was an insane thing to say about a machine cleaning your blood.

He said he’d had six years to get the line right and I was welcome to workshop it with him.

That was the thing about Ben. He would not let you be sad in front of him. He’d take whatever you brought in and hand it back lighter, so smoothly you wouldn’t notice until you were driving home, and then you would sit in your own driveway and realize you had spent four hours in a dialysis center laughing.

I brought him coffee from the place on Arbor after that, because the machine coffee was an insult. He said I didn’t have to. I kept doing it. He kept drinking it.

Around that time I started arriving at eight. Not eight fifteen. Eight, which meant leaving my house in the dark and sitting in a parking lot for eleven minutes, and I told myself it was about the traffic on Arbor and I have never once believed that.

He had a sister in Cleveland he talked about constantly and a mother he did not talk about at all. He had been engaged before the diagnosis and he mentioned it exactly one time, in March, in a sentence that went past so fast I almost missed it, and when I tried to go back to it he asked me whether I thought the boating magazine people knew they had a captive audience.

My father got worse in April. I don’t want to write about that part except to say that there was a week when I sat in that waiting room and did not talk to anybody, and Ben did not make one single joke. He moved from chair four to the chair next to mine and sat there and read his paperback with the cover bent back, close enough that our arms were almost touching, and at nine o’clock he got up and went in without a word.

That was the kindest thing anybody did for me that year and he never once mentioned it afterward.

In May my father was moved up the list.

I came in that Thursday nearly running, and I was three sentences into telling him before I noticed his face.

“That’s good,” he said. “Grace. That’s really good.”

“What.”

“Nothing. It’s good news, tell me the rest.”

“What, Ben.”

He put the book down on his knees.

“My sister’s a match,” he said.

I said something like oh my God, or that’s amazing, some noise a person makes.

“They’ve been running her for about five months. Tissue typing, cross match, the psych evaluation, all of it. She made me promise not to say anything to anybody until it was actually scheduled, because she said if it fell through she didn’t want to be the person it fell through on.” He was smiling and he was looking at the floor. “It’s scheduled.”

“When?”

“The fourteenth.”

The coffee machine cleared its throat in the corner.

“That’s three weeks.”

“That’s three weeks,” he agreed.

And then, because he could not help it, because he had spent six years never once letting anybody sit in it with him, he said:

“So I’m not going to be here after the fourteenth.”

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