Fortunately, earlier I had been taken off the IV drip as well as off the catheter. After Malcolm put down the safety railing, he climbed into bed with me, no less clumsy than ever. He put his head upon my chest, as if he were smaller than me, younger than me.
One of the many wonders of this world is that, if we allow it to happen, anyone newly met can all but overnight become a central figure in our lives, hardly less essential to us than air and water. Although we’ve made it a world of hatred and envy and violence, the preponderance of evidence proves to me that it is a world created to inspire friendship and love and kindness.
He said, “Don’t hate yourself, Jonah. You’re not your father and you never could be. You’ve got to be yourself, you and me still the way we’ve always been with each other. You’re all I have now, Jonah. Just you. Just you.”
His pledge never to cry lasted only until then.
86
So many people came to visit me at the hospital, but the one I most expected—Miss Pearl—never appeared. She had said that she’d given me more help than she ever should, what happened next would be up to all the people who lived along her streets, and my part of what happened next was up to me. I still hoped to see her again.
Until we were on our way home in Grandpa’s twenty-one-year-old Cadillac, I hadn’t given a thought to the cost of the medical care. I knew we had an inexpensive form of insurance, and suddenly I realized that the care I’d been given must have been the best.
Riding beside me in the backseat, Mom said, “The hospital refuses to bill us, sweetie. And all the doctors, too. We don’t want charity. We made our case to be allowed to pay over time, but none of them will take a dime. I don’t know, it is a Catholic hospital, and maybe all those years your grandma worked for the monsignor is why.”
I said, “There sure are good people in the world, aren’t there?”
“There sure are,” she agreed.
From behind the wheel, Grandpa Teddy said, “And I’m proud to be a chauffeur today for two of the best of the good. What say we stop at Baskin-Robbins and relieve them of three hand-packed quarts of ice cream for dessert, each of us with the right to pick one flavor?”
Mom said, “You don’t have to ask me twice.”
“You didn’t have to ask me the first time,” I declared.
“Just so you know, there are still rules in this family, and we’re not cool with gluttony. We’re not eating it all tonight.”
When we arrived home, I discovered that the front porch steps had been replaced with a long, sturdy ramp. The first-floor doorways, exterior and interior, had been cut wider and reframed to accommodate a wheelchair, and new doors had been hung throughout. The wheelchair stood in the living room, and Grandpa put me down in it, warning that speed limits indoors would be strictly enforced. All the area carpets in the lower four rooms had been rolled up and put away, completely baring the hardwood floors—linoleum in the kitchen—and furniture had been rearranged, so that I could move about freely. The dining-room furniture had been put in storage, and my bedroom furniture had been brought downstairs in its place.
The most impressive change proved to be a ground-floor bathroom where my grandfather’s little study had once been. A low pedestal sink allowed me to roll right up to it. Sturdy railings framed the toilet, so that I could maneuver myself out of the wheelchair onto the throne and back again, with little danger of falling. The bathtub also had safety grips.
Amazed, I said, “How could you do all this in only eleven days? And holy-moley, what did it cost?”
“Same answer to both,” Grandpa said. “A lot of good tradesmen go to our church or they live in the neighborhood. This was all volunteer labor. We didn’t even ask, they came to us. Plus I’m a wizard with a paintbrush, even if I do say so myself. We paid only for materials, and we could handle that easy enough.”
I could see that the kindness of our neighbors moved him.