The dumplings sat half cooked in the pot, pale and unfinished in the cloudy broth, and for one strange second I thought, Samuel would be furious about that. Not angry-angry. Never that. But he would have looked into the pot, sighed with theatrical disappointment, and said, “Dot, patience is the whole point. You can’t quit on dumplings halfway through.”
Forty-one years of marriage and that was the lesson of his that lived in my body more reliably than prayer: patience. Stir slow. Wait. Let things become what they are on their own time. Don’t rush the broth. Don’t force the rise. Don’t pull bread from the oven before it’s ready just because you’re tired of waiting.
I had spent most of my life believing patience was a virtue.
That Tuesday evening, I began to understand it could also be a weapon.
My name is Dorothy May Hastings. I am sixty-eight years old. I was a registered nurse at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta for thirty-four years. I delivered babies, held the hands of men who knew they were dying, cleaned wounds that would have made most grown adults faint dead away, and I never once in those thirty-four years called in sick unless I was physically incapable of standing upright.
