**PART 2**
We were married on the eighteenth of June, in the little chapel on the first floor of Willowbrook, by a retired judge named Harold Mbeki who had been one of Eleanor’s students in 1981.
She arranged all of it herself. I want people to know that.
In May, before she’d let me file a single piece of paper, she called her own doctor, Dr. Ruth Feldman, who’d been her oncologist for three years. She asked Dr. Feldman to bring in a psychiatrist from the hospital in Dayton, a woman named Dr. Patricia Lowe, to do a full capacity evaluation.
“Why?” I asked her. “You’re the sharpest person I’ve ever met.”
“Because my children will say I’m not,” she said. “The minute they find out. They’ll say I’m confused. They’ll say I’m on too much morphine. They’ll say you tricked me.” She looked at me. “So I’m going to make it impossible for them to say it truthfully.”
Dr. Lowe spent three hours with Eleanor. She asked her about the date, the president, her medications, her finances, her children, me. She asked her to explain what marriage meant legally. She asked her to explain what would happen to her estate.
When she came out of the room, she sat down next to me in the hallway.
“Mr. Carter,” she said. “I’ve done about four hundred of these evaluations. That woman is more competent than I am. She corrected my grammar twice.” She paused. “She also asked me to write in my report that she proposed to you.”
“She didn’t,” I said. “I proposed to her. With a gummy ring.”
“She told me that too,” said Dr. Lowe. “She said, write down that he proposed, and I said yes, and that I’d have proposed to him myself if I’d had any idea he was that brave.”
The wedding was small. Dolores stood up as Eleanor’s witness. My clinical instructor, Ms. Abernathy, who’d written about my confidence, stood up as mine. Three nurses from the third floor came. Two residents from down the hall wheeled themselves in and sat in the back. Mr. Kowalski from room 308, who was ninety-four and deaf, kept saying “What? What did she say?” through the whole ceremony.
Eleanor sat in her wheelchair in a pale blue dress she’d had Dolores buy for her at Kohl’s. She wore the Haribo ring. It was starting to go a little cloudy by then.
When Judge Mbeki said, “You may kiss the bride,” Mr. Kowalski shouted, “WHAT?” and everybody laughed, including Eleanor, who laughed so hard she had to hold her side again.
It was the happiest day of my life. I’m not ashamed to say it. Whatever anybody thinks.
Her children found out three weeks later.
I don’t know how. Maybe somebody from the town told them. Maybe the county clerk. Harlan is a small place. Everybody knows everybody’s business by Thursday.
They came on a Saturday afternoon in July. Both of them. Philip and Gwen. No flowers this time. No lawyer. They walked onto the third floor like they were storming a building.
I was on shift. I was in the hallway with a medication cart when they came out of the elevator.
Philip saw me first. He walked straight up to me. He was a big man, a head taller than me, in a polo shirt and khakis.
“You,” he said. “You little parasite.”
“Mr. Whitlock…”
“Do you think we’re stupid? Do you think we don’t know what you’re doing?” He was close enough that I could smell his coffee. “She’s sixty-nine years old. She’s dying. She’s on morphine. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. And you crawl in here and marry her so you can get your hands on everything she’s got.”
“I don’t want anything she’s got.”
“Bull,” said Philip. Loudly. A resident in a wheelchair at the end of the hall turned to look.
Gwen stood behind him with her arms wrapped around herself. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me like I was something she’d stepped in.
Dolores came out of the nurses’ station.
“Mr. Whitlock,” she said. “Lower your voice, please. There are sick people on this floor.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. This is my mother.”
“It’s your mother’s floor,” said Dolores. “And your mother’s asking for you. Go in. Or go home. But stop yelling at my staff.”
They went in.
I stood in the hallway with my medication cart and listened through the door. I couldn’t help it.
I heard Philip shouting. I heard Gwen crying. I heard Philip say “morphine” and “confused” and “annulment” and “lawyer.” I heard Gwen say, “How could you embarrass us like this? Everyone in Harlan is talking.”
And then I heard Eleanor.
She didn’t shout. She never shouted. She spoke in her classroom voice. The one that made rooms of thirty teenagers go completely silent.
“Sit down,” she said. “Both of you.”
The room went quiet.
“I’m going to say this once,” Eleanor said. “I married Owen Carter because I love him. Because he reads to me. Because he talks to me. Because in fourteen months in this building, he is the only person who has ever asked me what I think. You came here twice. Both times with paperwork.”
“Mother…”
“I’m not finished, Philip.” A pause. “My will has not changed. It’s with Leonard Price. It was written two years ago and it says exactly what it said then. Owen isn’t in it. He never will be. I told him that the day he proposed, and he said that was fine. He meant it. He’s the only person in my life who’s never wanted anything from me.”
Silence.
“Then why marry him?” Gwen said finally, in a small voice.
There was a long pause.
“Because I wanted to be married to someone who loved me,” Eleanor said. “Just once. Before I died. I wanted to know what that felt like.” Another pause. “Your father was a kind man. But he never once asked me what I thought. Owen asks me every single day.”
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Then the door opened and Philip came out. He walked past me without a word. Gwen came out a minute later. She stopped in the hallway and looked at me.
For a second, I thought she was going to say something. Something real.
Then she looked away and followed her brother to the elevator.
Willowbrook moved me off the third floor the following Monday.
The director, a tired woman named Ms. Haskins, called me into her office. She was apologetic. She said she didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. She’d read Dr. Lowe’s report. She’d talked to Dolores. But Philip Whitlock had called the corporate office and threatened to sue the facility for allowing “an employee to exploit a vulnerable resident,” and the corporate office said there was a conflict of interest, and they had to protect themselves.
“You can visit her,” Ms. Haskins said. “As her husband. Anytime. Visiting hours don’t apply to spouses. But you can’t be her aide anymore.”
So I worked the first floor during my shifts, and every night after, I took the elevator up to 312, and I read to my wife.
It was a strange summer. Hot and short. She got weaker every week. By August she couldn’t sit up without help. By the end of August she slept most of the day. We finished Middlemarch on the twenty-ninth. The last line. I read it twice, because she asked me to.
“That’s the truest thing ever written,” she said, with her eyes closed. “About people who live quiet lives and do good things nobody notices. Most people are like that. Most of the good in the world is done by people nobody will ever write a book about.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Like you.”
“I’m nobody special, Eleanor.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she said. “That’s exactly what makes you special. You don’t know it.”
We started on Persuasion again after that. The one she’d thrown at the wall. She said she wanted to end with something where the people got a second chance.
We didn’t finish it.
She died on September fourteenth, at four twenty in the morning.
I was there. I’d been sleeping in the chair by the window for six nights. Dolores had put a blanket over me. I woke up at four because Eleanor’s breathing had changed. I know what that change sounds like. I’ve heard it a dozen times on placement. I got up and sat on the edge of her bed and took her hand. The one with the ring on it.
She opened her eyes once. Just for a second. She looked at me.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
Then she closed her eyes again, and about fifteen minutes later, she was gone.
I sat there holding her hand until the sun came up over the parking lot. Then I went and got Dolores.
Her children had a lawyer at Willowbrook before the funeral home did.
I’m not exaggerating. The funeral home came at eight. Philip’s lawyer called the facility at seven forty-five, asking for copies of Eleanor’s medical records and every document related to “the alleged marriage.”
The funeral was held three days later. Gwen leaned close to me by the coffee urn and said what she said. Philip stood at the front of the church and gave a eulogy about what a devoted mother she had been. Nobody mentioned the fourteen months. Nobody mentioned the two visits. Nobody mentioned the paperwork.
I stood at the back and held a paper cup I didn’t drink from.
A week after the funeral, Leonard Price called.
