No one speaks in the chapel. They slump in the chairs, stare at the crucifix on the wall or down at their slippers, or play with something in the pockets of their robes, or readjust a walking stick if one lies across their lap. Most of the residents are in pajamas and Rodney wonders if they’ve been here all night. It’s nearly four a.m., he notices, looking at a clock on the wall.
He closes his eyes after a while but catches himself before he nods off. He doesn’t want to fall asleep in this room, with these people, and for a while his nerves keep him awake. The residents look at Rodney then nod to each other. They know who he is. One of the old men along the wall rests his chin on his hands, clasped over the end of his cane, and stares hard at Rodney, at the sun-baked surface of Rodney’s face, at his hands crooked and shaky from holding the vibrating controls of heavy machinery for what feels like many years. They eye Rodney, like they’re here for the sole purpose of sitting in judgment of him, this son of a woman who’s passed. All the while, the woman at the front weeps, quiet yet persistent. None of the others move to comfort her. It’s this that makes Rodney think they’re here just to see him, to see what he looks like, to bear witness to his being here. If any of them would offer condolences to the crying woman he’d feel different about it, or if they shed tears themselves or lay hands on the pine casket. Sitting in the chapel, having these old folks watch him, it makes him feel like he too is dying, or that he should be.
Another of the women leans over eventually and says something into the crying woman’s ear. It doesn’t make a difference, she still weeps. The nurse tells Rodney that the crying woman was his mother’s friend. “Very devoted,” she says. “Her only friend in the world.”
Over the next two hours the residents nod off, wake up a few minutes later, then go to their rooms in clusters of two or three. Even the nurse in the pink smock leaves, her shift over, so that by sunrise it’s only the old lady at the front and Rodney stiff in his chair at the back. The old lady has quit weeping and sits farther away from the casket, blotting her face with a tissue.
An administrator comes into the room soon after the shift change and sits next to Rodney. “You’re the son?” she asks, resting her hand on the seat next to his. “I want to let you know that the pastor has called and she’ll be here in an hour or so. That’s when the service will begin and there’s no stopping it then. Nurse Haskell told me about last night. If you want to have a final glimpse of your mother, now’s the time.”
All Rodney says is, “No.” He’s silent until the administrator excuses herself.
It isn’t until then that the old woman at the front rises and walks to Rodney. She moves haltingly, rests her droopy weight on an aluminum walker. A paling redhead, her thin hair hangs loose over her ears, a few strands still in curls.
“I tend not to need this,” she says, indicating the walker, “but it’s a long night to be here for these vigils.”
“You’re my mother’s friend.” Rodney’s voice cracks, this the first real thing he’s said in hours. “The nurse told me you were.”
The old woman closes her eyes and smiles when Rodney says this, her red face creasing, becoming even redder.
“Come with me, Rodney,” the woman says. A twinge of a brogue sneaks out when she says his name. “Follow me.”
She takes Rodney to her room so he can wash his face in the sink of her bathroom. She gives him a towel and a fresh bar of soap, then closes the door behind him. Rodney lingers a long time in the bathroom, running cold water over his hands, examining the chair in her shower as he stands at the sink. When he’s finished she’s leaned against the doorframe without her walker. She’s crying again and waiting to embrace him. Her body engulfs his skinny limbs. He kind of lifts under her arms as he hugs her because he’s taller and stronger. It’s strange to him how he lingers to comfort her. Rodney feels a surge of contentment rush through his body, holding this old woman.
“There,” she says. She touches his face, still damp with lather at his sideburns. “Now you look presentable.”
They sit together at the front of the chapel as the pastor performs the rites then Rodney allows the old woman to stand at his elbow during the burial at a cemetery outside of town. They are the only two at the plot, besides the pastor and the gravedigger, to witness the patter of soil falling on his mother’s wooden box, bits of white root showing in the dirt. When the pastor takes them back to the home the old woman asks Rodney if he would like to come to her room and rest a while. “If you have nowhere else to be,” she says, “you’re welcome to stay.”
“I took the train,” Rodney explains. He remembers that his return doesn’t leave until nearly three a.m. His plans are vague, at this point of the day, as to how he will pass the more than fourteen hours before the train takes him back to Omaha. It occurs to him that he might not be welcome here, if he tries catching a nap in the park, if he wanders too close to an elementary school playground. He doesn’t know what the cops are like in Hastings, if they will judge him at first sight like the old folks at the vigil had, or if they will leave him alone like the police at home often do. Being here without anything to do could mean trouble for a man like him.
When the old woman asks again if he’ll stay with her for the rest of the day, when she says that there’s coffee in her room, Rodney feels lucky to have found her.
He wakes up later after napping in a chair beside the old woman’s bed. She gives him the TV remote and tells him to watch what he wants. A Cubs’ matinee is on. He doesn’t care much for the Cubs, but bad baseball is better than none.
Rodney gets comfortable in the room after a while, talking to the old woman between pitches. It makes him feel like a nice person. Even though he never came to visit his mother, he’s not a bad man. He didn’t deserve the looks those old folks gave him, how the pastor locked his car the instant Rodney closed the door after himself. Rodney was used to these things, whether he deserved them or not. And his never coming to visit, that’s just the way he was with his mother. If she ever felt differently about their arrangement she never said anything to him.
She was middle-aged when Rodney was born, his mother, accustomed to privacy and calmness. She didn’t like doing for other people what they could do for themselves. There was no waiting on hand and foot to serve the men in her house, so Rodney knew the value of keeping quiet and taking care of his own business. But it wouldn’t be fair to say that things were bad with his mother, like the cold stares at the vigil implied. It had been five years since he’d seen her, but Rodney loved his mother, that’s safe to say, as much as he’s loved anything.
The old woman understands this, Rodney thinks, because she loved his mother too.
After there’s the singing for the seventh-inning stretch, the old woman opens a drawer and pulls out a store-bought cake under a plastic dome. She takes the cake, German chocolate, with both hands and gives it to Rodney, then shuffles back to the drawer for a spatula, a paper plate, a plastic fork, all of which looks like it’s been lifted from the cafeteria.
“Please stay off the bed,” the old woman says, “while you’re eating.”
“They let you run out for cake?” Rodney asks.
“They’ll take us to the store if we ask. There’s a shuttle van.”
“I guess that’s right.” Rodney remembers seeing those vans around the city before, old folks in the back. He stands from the bed with the plastic dome and moves to the chair.
Rodney cuts himself a piece of cake as the old woman tells about herself, how her kids, the ones who are still alive, are wicked like their father was. “They wish I was dead. I don’t mind knowing that. I turn a hundred this winter.” She nods her head to confirm it. “It isn’t like I planned on living this long.”