“Nance.”
That’s all he said.
I held up the envelope.
“What is this?”
He set the roller down very carefully in the tray.
“That’s a letter I wrote your boy in September.”
“Asking what?”
“Asking his permission.”
“To do what, Gene?”
He looked at the floor.
He looked at the ramp through the door.
“To ask you something at Christmas.”
I had to sit down.
There was a chair right there, pulled out, at exactly the height a woman with bad knees would need.
Of course there was.
Here is what I didn’t know about Gene Mercer.
I knew he’d been an electrician.
I didn’t know he’d been Mercer Electric.
Sixty-two trucks. A hundred and ten employees. Every hospital wing in three counties, including the one I’d worked in for thirty-four years.
He’d wired the ER I spent my life in.
He’d never once mentioned it.
“Margaret and I bought this house in 1981,” he said. “I ran the company out of that shed for nine years.”
