The Hospital Lobby Had One Good Chair Left

The only good chair in the lobby was green, with one wooden arm worn smooth. I knew it was the good one because it was the only chair people remembered to put back after I mopped.

At eleven on a Tuesday, a man in a mustard cardigan sat in it with a white bakery box balanced across his thighs. He had a folded green apron tucked under the string. Every time the elevator opened, he sat forward a little.

“You want me to do this side last?” I asked.

He lifted his shoes. “I can keep them up for a minute.”

“Sir, I have a whole lobby.”

He looked down at his feet as if he’d forgotten there were two of them, then lowered them. His name was Walter. He’d come straight from closing his bakery because his sister had been taken upstairs that afternoon. The box held the cinnamon roll she’d asked him to save. He was waiting to hear whether she felt up to seeing him.

A woman in a denim jacket got off the elevator. I’d passed her twice since supper, once by the drinking fountain and once in the stairwell with a phone pressed to her ear. Now she sat on the metal bench, tucked her phone under her thigh, and leaned back against the wall. Her head met the glass with a small, hard sound.

Walter got up. He put the bakery box on the low table and rested one hand on the smooth arm of the green chair.

“Try this one,” he said.

The woman opened one eye. “You were in it.”

“I know all about it, then.”

She held out her hand like she meant to refuse a flyer, but after a moment she came over and lowered herself into the chair. There was a long breath between sitting down and taking her jacket off. She left the jacket on.

Walter tried the metal bench. He folded his apron into a square and put it between his back and the wall. It was a little thing, maybe an inch thick when he was done. I watched him shift twice before settling.

I was about to tell him there were more chairs upstairs when he tipped his head toward the woman. She had her eyes shut, but her hand was still curled around the phone.

“If she falls asleep,” he told me, “please wake me before anybody asks her to move.”

I asked why anybody would do that.

“Happened to me last time I was here,” he said. “Somebody needed to wax the floor.”

I looked at the mop in my hand. He looked at it, too.

“I wasn’t going to wax it.”

“I figured.”

I moved my bucket out of the light by the chair. At the desk I asked Renee, the night receptionist, if we had a second upholstered chair. “Malik, if we had another one, do you think I’d be sitting on this?” She wheeled back from the desk and showed me her vinyl stool. There was one good chair in the consultation room, she said, but they needed it in there.

“What do we have that nobody needs?”

Renee thought about it. “An ugly footstool.”

She disappeared down a short hall and came back carrying a square brown footstool with a dip in the middle. We put it against the wall in front of the metal bench. Walter set his heels on it, then asked if he could move it two inches to the left. I moved it two inches to the left.

A man who’d been charging his phone unplugged it so Walter could put the bakery box on the little shelf by the outlet. Renee brought out the clean fleece she kept under the desk for cold shifts. She handed it to Walter folded, without telling him what to do with it. He set it on his lap and left his hands there.

The woman woke when her phone lit up. She looked at the screen, tapped out a reply, and stood. For a second I thought she was leaving. Instead she walked over to the bench and waited till Walter opened his eyes.

“You can have it back,” she said.

“Oh, I’m all set now.”

“I know,” she said. “Try it anyway.”

Walter got up slowly and sat in the green chair. The woman took the bench and put her feet on the ugly footstool. She looked at me, lifted one heel, and pointed a little to the left. I moved it two inches again.

At ten past midnight, the desk phone rang. Walter’s sister was awake and wanted him to come up. Renee told him he could take the box. He picked it up by the bottom to keep it level, then left the folded fleece on the green seat.

Before I clocked out, I found the fleece draped across the arm. Someone had moved the footstool beside the chair, with the dip facing out where a pair of heels would go.

I mopped around both.