PART 3: Two Hundred Mornings
Nadine took the notebook in both hands.
The first page had a date scrawled at the top. Last February. Below it, in a teenager’s messy handwriting: Found her. Northbound Coffee, Union St. Silver Corolla. 6:43.
After that, every line looked the same. A date. And beside it, two words. Hot chocolate. Latte.
Page after page. Month after month.
Some days had tiny notes squeezed into the margins. She looked tired today. She was laughing on the phone. Snowstorm, she still went to work. She’s working doubles again.
Nadine turned the pages slower and slower, until she stopped turning them at all.
"He talked about you," the old man said. "The nurse who stayed. He found out where you worked last year. He figured out what time you got coffee."
"Why didn’t he just come say hello?" Nadine asked.
The old man smiled sadly.
"He said you’d done something for him without asking for anything back. So that’s how he wanted to pay you back. Without you knowing."
Nadine laid the notebook gently on the blanket. Then she sat beside Jonah’s bed and held his hand.
"Hi, Jonah," she whispered. "It’s me. You can stop paying now. I know."
His fingers stayed still. The monitor kept up its steady, indifferent beeping.
The grandfather’s name was Walt. Over awful cafeteria coffee that evening, he told us the rest.
After Maureen died, Jonah moved in with him on his farm outside Hermon. Jonah’s father had walked out before he was born. Walt was seventy-four, a widower, and had no idea how to raise a teenager.
"He didn’t talk for months," Walt said. "Did his chores. Did his schoolwork. Hardly ate. I thought I’d lost him too."
Then one evening, Jonah brought up the nurse. The one who sat with him until morning. The one who bought him a hot chocolate and didn’t say a word, just let him cry.
"He said it was the only thing that night that didn’t feel like the end of the world," Walt said.
The next summer, Jonah got a job bagging groceries. He saved every penny. He bought the Honda from a neighbor for six hundred dollars. And the very first place he drove it, Walt said, was to find her.
"He gets up at five-thirty every day so he can be in that line before school," Walt said, shaking his head. "I told him he was crazy. He said, ‘Grandpa, she sat up all night for me. I can get up early.’"
Nadine said nothing. She just stared into her cup.
On Monday night, the night of the ice storm, Jonah had been driving home from his shift. A logging truck swung too wide around the curve on Route 2. Jonah swerved. The Honda’s tires were bad. They always had been.
"The doctors say there’s swelling on his brain," Walt said quietly. "They don’t know when he’ll wake up. Or if."
Nadine sat by Jonah’s bed the next day too.
She came every day after her shift.
I came every afternoon after mine.
Sometimes we talked to him. Nadine told him about her patients, her two cats, her daughter at college in Boston. I told him which regulars had come through, how the guy in the red pickup had asked about him, how Kurt had muttered that mornings felt wrong without the green Honda.
Walt hardly ever left. He slept in the chair in his cap and flannel, one hand resting on the blanket near Jonah’s foot.
On the fourth day, the doctors removed the breathing tube. On the sixth, his fingers twitched when Nadine spoke. On the seventh, nothing. On the eighth, nothing.
On the eighth night, I overheard Walt in the hallway asking a doctor, in a voice so small it broke my heart, what would happen if Jonah never woke up.
On the ninth day, I was standing by the window when Nadine gasped.
I spun around.
Jonah’s eyes were open.
The first person he saw was Nadine.
He looked confused for a long time, his gaze drifting slowly over her face, her scrubs, her tired bun.
Walt shot up so fast his chair toppled over.
Then Jonah’s cracked lips began to move.
