by Anne Tyler
When I am working out at the church, I wear my cardigan to ward off chills, and I button it all the way up. In winter I add brown fur-lined galoshes, though I know it’s not what people would expect. “Remember I’m an ordinary woman,” I tell them, “but I’ll do my best. Will you come forward?” They come. An old man reaches out to me. There is a pain between his ribs, he says. A sharp, dry pain dividing him down the middle. No doctor understands what he means. I am the last hope he has. I lay my hand upon his bony chest. “Here? Here?” I pray, and the old man ducks his head and prays, too. “Now,” I say, “how do you feel?”
He straightens up. He tilts his ear toward that faraway sound that all of them listen for. “It’s still hurting,” he says.
“Still?”
“Only maybe not quite so bad.”
“Ah.”
“Is this what I came all this way for?”
I placed my hands on his shoulders. “That’s the way it is,” I tell him. “Sometimes these things are gradual. Change is not always sudden. I am doing the best I can. Do you understand?”
He says he does. “Yes, yes,” he says. But he holds rigid under my hand, as if waiting for a touch of flame or an icy stab or an electric shock. He looks at me steadily with his soft blue eyes, in the hope that there will be more to it than this.
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