I said, “Carol, I don’t care if he was crying.”
She grabbed my wrist with a grip I didn’t know she still had and said, “You do care. You have to care. He’s ours.”
I got her into the truck. She didn’t want to go, and I told her she was going, and for the first time in 41 years I didn’t let her win an argument.
So now you know what I said to that nurse.
I said, “My son did this. My son, Daniel Hollister, 38 years old, has a drug problem, and he beat his mother in our kitchen about three hours ago.” I said all of it in one breath because I knew if I stopped I wouldn’t finish.
And she looked at my vest. She looked at the patches. She looked at my hands, which are scarred up from forty years of engines, and she made a decision about what kind of people we were. I watched it happen behind her eyes.
Falls. Stairs. Honey.
She laughed.
I’ve thought a lot about that laugh since then. I don’t think she’s an evil woman. I think she was tired and she’d seen a hundred old couples come through those doors with stories that didn’t add up, and she decided we were another one. Old biker, wife with a black eye. She’d done the math and she’d done it wrong.
But here’s what that math was going to cost. If she wrote “fall” on that chart, there was no police report. No photographs. No record. And Danny would come home in three days, sobbing, swearing it would never happen again, and Carol would let him in.
