What Happened to Sophie Wilder Read Online Free PDF Page B

have known, that no real relationship existed between them.
    â€œMr. Crane,” Sophie said, reaching out a hand to him.
    He only nodded, and she dropped her hand back to her side. Neither spoke again until they were in the elevator.
    â€œThank you,” he said. “I couldn’t stay any longer.”
    His voice suggested little in the way of gratitude. But she didn’t want gratitude. Better that he understand her arrival as an act of duty. This was how she wanted to
understand it herself. She wanted to believe that she was behaving against her own will, if only so she could say as much to Tom. Yet letting the man spend one night in the hospital would not have weighed so heavily on her. She had come for herself. She had come to meet Tom’s father.
    â€œYou can leave me here,” he told her out on the street.
    â€œI’m taking you home.”
    â€œYou don’t need to do that.”
    â€œI signed a form in there,” she said, as though the form had anything to do with it. “I’m going to take you home and get your prescriptions filled. If you don’t like it, I can bring you back upstairs.”
    She struggled to strike the right tone. She felt more sympathy than she’d expected she would, more than she wanted to feel, and overbearing authority from her would only make his situation more pathetic. But she didn’t mean to budge, and she needed him to know it.
    â€œI live on Fourth and C,” he said. “The pharmacist is right up the block.”
    She helped him into a cab, and they rode in silence. There was everything still to say.
    He untucked his shirt, reaching under it to bother at something in his gut. Some kind of surgical scar, she guessed. She thought, So this is the man . Tom hadn’t wanted her to know Crane, would have been happy enough if she’d never learned that he existed, and it was difficult to shake the idea that an act of kindness toward one was a betrayal of the other. Or that Tom would think of it that way, which amounted to much the same thing. But everything she had seen thus far that day confirmed the secret image of Tom’s father she’d kept these years, the image of a sad man who had made mistakes he didn’t know how to redress, a man against whom hearts had
been hardened. Such a man was owed kindness from those in the position to offer it.
    They had his name on file at the drugstore, and the pharmacist told Sophie that the prescriptions would be ready in an hour and a half. They walked another block, and she followed him up the stairs to a three-room railroad apartment, the sort that many of her college friends had occupied in their first years out of school. There were papers everywhere, loose pages and newspaper clippings, some of them very old, by the looks of it. Most were collected into manila folders, as if to suggest organization, a gesture that only made the mess seem more desperate.
    â€œWhy don’t you lie down,” she told him, “and I’ll pick up your drugs in a bit.”
    He nodded silently, still working through his shirt at whatever bothered him underneath. Then he disappeared into the bedroom, leaving her alone amid his ruins.
    She had at least an hour, which she might have spent outside, in a diner or a café. Instead she created some space for herself on the couch by pushing one of the folders to the floor. For a moment, as she looked over the papers and general disarray, she thought: This could be me . This could be my life . She felt unaccountably exhausted.
    When she stood she felt queasy, unstable on her feet. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water and found the sink overfull with dirty dishes, the cupboard empty. She washed and filled one glass. But before taking a sip she started cleaning the others.
    Her own father, an investment advisor prey to wild shifts in mood, had never seemed happier than in the act of physical labor, raking leaves or chopping wood in their