Brandon looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded.
"Mom?" he called. "We've got company."
Denise emerged from the bedroom with a speed that belied her illness, patting her hair, a faint flush on her cheeks. She was wearing her good cardigan and a pair of earrings Brandon had not seen in years. She stopped short at the sight of the old man in her hallway and put one hand to her chest.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, goodness."
"Mrs. Pryce." Walter inclined his head. "Forgive the intrusion. I'm Walter Hayes. I believe you've heard of me."
"I've heard of you for two weeks. My son hasn't stopped talking about you." She stepped forward, and to Brandon's amazement, took the old man's hand in both of hers. "I wanted to meet you. I wanted to say I'm sorry. What he did—"
"Please," said Walter. "He has said it enough. And he has done a great deal more than say it."
"I'd like to say it too."
"Then I'll accept it on his behalf." He smiled. "And I'll say this. You have raised a young man who knocked on a stranger's door and asked to be made to work. That's not a failure of upbringing. It's the opposite."
Denise's eyes filled. She did not wipe them. She simply held his hand for another moment and nodded, and Brandon, standing at the sink, had to turn his face away.
The clinic on Fairmont Avenue was a low tan building with a faded awning and a waiting room that smelled of bleach and weak coffee. A nurse named Patrice greeted Denise by name and ushered them through a set of double doors into a long, dim room where a dozen recliners stood in rows, each with its own humming machine. Patients dozed under blankets, their forearms tethered to red tubes. A television in the corner played a quiet game show.
Denise settled into her usual chair, the one by the window, and Patrice began the familiar routine of needles and tape. Brandon pulled over a plastic stool. Walter, after a moment's hesitation, took the other one, on the far side of the bed.
For the first hour, nobody said much. The machine hummed. Denise's eyes were closed, but she was not asleep, and every few minutes she smiled faintly, as if at a private joke.
"Margaret hated the waiting," Walter said eventually, in a voice so low it was barely audible over the machine. "Not the pain. The waiting. She said it was like being a package nobody wanted to open."
Denise opened her eyes. "I know that feeling."
"She'd draw. On a pad she kept in her purse. Little sketches of the nurses' hands, the IV pole, the flowers on the windowsill. She'd say, If I'm going to lie here, I may as well look." He folded his hands. "I used to hold the pad. I never learned to draw. I just held it."
"That's a great deal," said Denise softly.
"Is it?"
"Sometimes the holding is the whole thing." She turned her head on the pillow. "My Brandon sits here every Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday. He doesn't say much. He just sits. I used to think he was bored. Then one day I realized he was keeping watch."
Brandon looked at the floor, his ears hot.
"It's an honorable thing," Walter said. "Keeping watch. It's what we do when we can't do anything else."
The game show ended, and another began. A tiny, ancient woman three chairs down began humming along to the theme song, off-key and wholly content. Somewhere a machine beeped, and Patrice glided over to silence it.
"I'm told the Meridian is quite a car," Denise said after a time, in a lighter voice.
"I'd like to think it is."
"Brandon says it has your engine in it."
"It does. And Margaret's line." Walter hesitated. "I've been thinking of saying something about her at the gala. I don't know what. I've never been any good with speeches."
"Say what's true," said Denise.
"That's the difficulty. I don't always know what that is."
"Then say what she'd have wanted you to say."
Walter looked at her, and something in his face opened, slowly, like a window in spring. For a moment he seemed to be somewhere very far away, in a hospital room in another year, holding a drawing pad.
"She'd have wanted me to say that the car belongs to everyone," he said. "That anybody should be able to walk up and put a hand on it."
"Then say that."
"Yes," said Walter. "I think I will."
On the stool beside him, Brandon felt an odd weightlessness, as if a stone he had carried a very long way had finally been set on the ground. He did not speak. He did not need to. He only sat between the two people he now cared for most in the world, in the humming, fluorescent quiet, and kept watch.