It wasn’t that.
It was forty-six years of practice.
Then one afternoon, Alden reached for my hand.
“Marry me, Willa,” he whispered.
My heart started pounding.
“Alden… you’re seriously ill. We barely know each other.”
“I don’t want the state handling my final hours,” he said, touching my fingers. “My last wish is to leave this world as a husband, not as a nameless file.”
I knew how strange the request was.
I said yes anyway, and I’ve been asked why perhaps forty times since, and the honest answer is not noble.
I said yes because of a nurse I never met.
Because somebody had done a last thing for my mother and I couldn’t repay her, and here was a man asking me to do a last thing for him, and it was the closest I was ever going to get to squaring an account that can’t be squared.
Still, two days later, a hospital chaplain married us.
I wore a yellow sweater.
We didn’t have a wedding ring, so Alden slipped a soda can pull tab onto my finger instead.
He had one in his pocket.
I thought that was chance.
He put one on his own finger too, and he looked at both our hands for a long moment, and he said something I didn’t understand and didn’t ask about, because he was tired and the chaplain was still in the room.
He said: “One thousand one hundred and forty.”
For the next seven days, I never left his side.
I want to describe the seven days, because they were a marriage and I’ve stopped letting anyone tell me otherwise.
We talked for four of them.
He was lucid until Thursday, and in those four days I learned more about Alden Voss than I know about people I’ve had in my life for a decade — not because he told me about himself, which he barely did, but because of how he was with the staff.
He knew all of their names.
Every nurse, both night techs, the woman who brought the trays, and the man who mopped at eleven — Efraín, who had a daughter starting community college and about whom Alden asked, every single night, by name, in Spanish, badly.
On the third night I said, “How do you know everyone?”
And he said, “I’ve been in a lot of hospitals,” and changed the subject, and I thought he meant as a patient.
