Chapter 16: The Hospital
Gus woke to the smell of disinfectant and the sight of Sadie asleep in the chair beside his bed, her head tipped back, the turquoise stone clutched in her fist like a child with a security blanket. For a moment he was fifty-seven again, watching a nine-year-old sleep off a nightmare in the corner booth while the lunch rush clattered around her.
"You're staring," Sadie said without opening her eyes.
"You're drooling."
She sat up, wiping her mouth, and laughed. "How do you feel?"
"Like I got run over by my own grill." He shifted, winced. "What did the doctor say?"
"Angina. Rest. A week minimum, no grill, no stress." She ticked them off on her fingers. "I told him you were bad at all three."
"He's right to worry." Gus looked at the ceiling tiles. "Elena died in a bed like this. Different hospital. Same smell."
Sadie went quiet. "Tell me about her. The real stuff, not the café legend."
So he told her. Elena laughing at his burnt toast on their first date. Elena dancing in the kitchen to the oldies station. Elena, at the end, making him promise not to close the café, because "a town needs a place where the coffee's hot and nobody's in a hurry."
"Did you ever think about leaving?" Sadie asked. "After she died? Just... driving until the road ran out?"
"Every day for a year." Gus stared at the ceiling. "Then one morning I unlocked the café and Big Sal was already waiting on the bench outside, and Rosa had the coffee going, and I realized the place had become the thing that got me out of bed. Elena knew. That's why she made me promise."
"She was smart."
"Smarter than me. She did the books. I just cooked." He smiled faintly. "When the health inspector came, she'd put on lipstick and charm him while I hid the violations. Teamwork."
Sadie laughed, then wiped her eyes. "I wish I'd met her."
"You did, in a way. Everything I got right with you, I learned from her."
"She would have liked you," he said. "She always wanted a daughter. We tried. It didn't happen. Then you walked in with your bottle caps, and for a while I got to pretend."
Sadie's eyes filled. "Gus—"
"There's something I never told you." He stared at his hands, the knuckles swollen, the burn scars white. "After you'd been coming around a few months, I went to the county. Asked about fostering you. Filling out the papers, home study, all of it."
She froze. "What?"
"Ruth Ann Boyd turned me down flat. Single man, fifty-seven years old, one-bedroom apartment over a café with no separate bedroom for a child." His voice was flat, the way it got when something still hurt. "The home study lady measured my apartment with a tape measure. Wrote down 'insufficient square footage for placement.' Like you were furniture."
"What did you do?"
"I appealed. Got a lawyer from Florence to write a letter about my character. Mrs. Abernathy wrote one too, three pages, single-spaced. The county sent back a nicer no." He picked at the blanket. "I even looked at renting the house next door, the blue one. Couldn't afford it and the café both. So that was that."
"Gus." Tears were running down her face now. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"What good would it have done? You were nine. You needed somebody steady, not somebody rejected." He finally looked at her. "I want you to know I tried. I want you to know it wasn't because I didn't want you."
She stood up, came around the bed, and hugged him carefully around the wires. "You were the steadiest thing I had."
"Your foster mother—"
"Marcy did her best. But you were the one who looked at me like I was a person, not a case file." She pulled back, wiping her face. "You were the daughter I never got to keep," he had said, and now she answered it: "And you were the father I got anyway."
The night nurse knocked and pretended to check the IV. "Visiting hours ended two hours ago."
"She's family," Gus said.
The nurse looked at Sadie, at the stone in her fist, and nodded. "Family can stay." Gus grinned. "Told you," he whispered. "Best family there is." Sadie squeezed his hand.
After the nurse left, Gus held out his hand. Sadie placed the stone in his palm. He closed his fingers around it, then pressed it back into her hand and closed her fingers over it.
"Keep it," he said. "It's yours. It has been for twenty years."
"Gus, it was Elena's."
"Elena would want you to have it. She always said that stone was for whoever needed believing in most." He smiled, tired and real. "Right now, that's you. You've got a hearing to win and a boss to outsmart. Take all the believing you can get."
She slipped the stone into her pocket. "When you get out of here, I'm making you retire that grill."
"When I get out of here, you're eating my stew and liking it."
"Deal." She hesitated. "Gus, about the hearing. I filed a citizen comment. Four pages, as a resident, not as ADOT. Paula can't stop me from speaking as a citizen."
He studied her. "Could cost you the job."
"Could." She lifted her chin. "You taught me that some things are worth more than safe."
"Elena would have liked that too." He yawned, the medicine pulling him under. "Hey, Sadie?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For coming back."
She held his hand until his breathing went deep and even. "I said I would," she whispered.
He fell asleep holding her hand. She stayed until the sun came up, and for the first time since the draft document had landed on her desk, she wasn't afraid.
She had the truth now. All of it. And the truth, she was learning, was the strongest thing she owned.