Miss Combs opened the spiral notebook she had been holding shut with both thumbs, and she stood up by the coat rack in the church fellowship hall in Charleston, and she said that in eleven years of hospice work she had never read a familys words out loud, but that my wife had asked her to, so she would.
She said my wife had made her write it down, word for word, two nights before she died, when she could still talk a little.
The last thing my wife said was not a worry about our son at all, it was the truest thing anyone said in that room, and she had made sure it would be read to the one man who needed to hear it.
Miss Combs read it slowly. Tell Everett I was never worried about him. Tell him I heard every page. Tell him that a man who comes every night for eleven months and reads to his mama when she cannot see is not under a truck, he is the best thing I ever built. And tell Thurman, when he says something at my lunch, because he will, that I was awake the one time he came, and I saw where the flowers were from, and that it is all right, because my boy brought me something better every single night, and it was himself.
The fellowship hall was so quiet you could hear the coffee maker. Thurman set his plate of ham biscuits down on the table and did not pick it back up.
I am Everetts daddy, and I buried his mama that morning. My son is thirty-eight and fixes coal trucks out on Route 119, and for eleven months he drove to the hospital every night after work and read to his mother, the paper, her magazines, the Psalms, whatever she wanted, when the cancer took her eyes before it took the rest of her. My brother-in-law Thurman, a lawyer with his name on a building downtown, visited once and brought gas-station flowers. So when Thurman stood up at the funeral lunch with a plate of biscuits and said, your mama always worried about you, thirty-eight and still under a truck, my paralegals make more than you, nobody laughed, but nobody stopped him either. My daughter said, Daddy, let it go. I could not. But Everett could. He poured more sweet tea and said, pass the pickles, Uncle Thurman.
Then I saw my son look over at the hospice nurse by the coat rack, and I saw her thumbs tighten on that notebook, and I understood that my wife had planned this from her bed, the way she planned everything, because she knew her brother and she knew her son.
Miss Combs closed the notebook and said one more thing, on her own. She said that in hospice you learn who people really are by who shows up at two in the morning, and that in eleven months she had learned Everetts coffee order, his truck, and the sound of his boots in the hall, and that she had never once learned Thurmans face.
Thurman did not say anything else. He left before the pie, and that was the right thing for him to do, and I will give him that much.
Everett got up and went and thanked Miss Combs and hugged her, and then he came and sat down next to me and we ate ham biscuits without talking, because there was nothing left to say that his mother had not already said better.
Somebodys gotta turn the bolts, Thurman said. Somebody also has to read the Psalms to a dying woman every night for eleven months, and it was not the man with his name on a building. My wife knew it. She wrote it down. And she made sure, from her hospital bed, that the last word at her own funeral would be hers, and that it would be about her boy.