The Boating Magazines
Episode 3 of 3 of Thursdays in Chair Four by Claire Mosley
He was wrong about one thing, which was that he thought I’d understood him.
I spent those three weeks thinking that what he had told me was good news with a sad edge, and I said all the correct things. I asked about his sister, whose name was Priya and who had two kids and a husband who was apparently being a saint about it. I asked what the recovery was. On the second Thursday I brought him a paperback I thought he’d like, and he said it was the worst book he had ever been given and then read the whole thing in one session and argued with me about the ending in the parking lot.
It was the third Thursday, the last one, when I got it.
We were in that parking lot again. He’d finished at half past twelve and I still had an hour of my father to wait out, and he was standing by his car and not getting into it.
“So I’ll see you,” I said. “After. When you’re up and around.”
“Grace.”
“I’ll bring you a worse book. I’ll find one.”
“Grace.”
I stopped.
“There’s no reason for you to see me after,” he said. He said it gently, which made it worse. “You come here on Thursdays. I’m the guy from Thursdays. That’s the whole thing, that’s all it’s ever been, and in three weeks there won’t be any Thursdays.”
“That’s not.”
“I’ve done this before.” He wasn’t smiling now. “Not this. But I’ve had people be kind to me in this building, and then I’ve watched them realize that they were only ever kind to me in this building. There was a woman in 2021. She was lovely. She brought me soup.” He shifted his keys to the other hand. “And I would rather, honestly, I would rather just shake your hand in a parking lot and remember it as a good thing than find out in August that you were being decent to a sick man on a Thursday.”
I want to say I said something enormous. I didn’t. I stood in a parking lot in May and my ears were ringing.
“Is that what you want,” I said.
“It’s not remotely what I want.”
“Then why are you saying it?”
“Because I’m going to be unconscious on a table in three weeks,” he said, “and I have spent six years being extremely careful about what I let myself want, and I am not good at stopping once I start.”
A car alarm went off two rows over. Nobody came for it. It ran through its whole cycle and quit on its own.
I walked around to his side of the car.
“I’ve been coming to this building for four months,” I said, “and I hate it. I hate the coffee and I hate the chairs and the second one from the window wobbles. There are four boating magazines in that rack and I have read all of them twice, including the one from 2019, including the letters page.” I was not crying, which surprised me. “And I get up at six on Thursdays and I am never once dreading it. Not one week. I want you to think very carefully about why that might be.”
He looked at me.
“Oh,” he said.
The surgery was on a Tuesday, not the fourteenth. They moved it up two days and he texted me from a bed at five in the morning with an enormous number of exclamation marks, which was not like him at all, and which I have never deleted.
My father got his call in August, at four in the afternoon, and he took it standing in his kitchen and said thank you very much to the coordinator in the voice he used to use on parents. Then he sat down on the floor. It was a Thursday, which we all agreed afterward was showing off.
I still go to Riverbend twice a year, because Pat with the cart is owed something, and because Ben teaches five days a week now and likes to come and be obnoxious in the doorway where the nurses can see him. He has a scar he is unreasonably proud of. Priya sends him a card every year on the anniversary that says congratulations on my kidney.
He was right that there are no more Thursdays.
He was wrong about the rest of it.