“Well!” Her cheerful tone sounds forced, although I can’t tell if that’s from the bombshell Ran just dropped or her husband’s health emergency. “I guess you and I have some catching up to do while you’re down here. I’m sure your father will appreciate seeing you. Should I get Stephanie to pick you up from the airport?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll rent a car,” Ran says. “Let me let you go so I can throw some stuff in a bag and make this flight.”
“OK, honey. Safe flight. Bye, Errol!”
“Bye, Mrs. Knight. See you soon.” Ran picks up the phone and turns off the speaker, but her voice is loud enough that I can still hear her.
“Are you sure that’s the same Errol? Because he never said that many words to me the entire time he was living in our house.”
I snicker as Ran rolls his eyes.
32
AARYN
Ipull into my parents’ driveway next to a baby blue land-boat of a sedan. I chuckle a little and turn to Errol. “Bet you a million bucks my aunt Stephanie is in the kitchen, hermetically sealing something in plastic wrap that was probably already wrapped up just fine in the fridge.”
He smirks and we get out of the car. The heat and humidity is like walking into a damp blanket. I use the front door keycode to let us in. “Hello? Anybody here? Aunt Stephanie?”
There’s a shriek and a crash. A moment later, my mother’s older sister sweeps into the living room, enveloping me in a hug and a cloud of perfume-scented cigarette smoke. “What a surprise, Aaryn!” She’s the only one who regularly uses my given name. “I haven’t seen you in years. Allyson told you about Roger, I assume.”
I nod. “We booked the first flight we could.”
“You’ve always been a good son.” She sort of pats my cheek.
“Everything OK in the kitchen?”
“It’s fine, dear. You just startled me. I was putting away some leftovers.” I chew the inside of my cheek to keep from snickeringas Stephanie turns, seeming to notice Errol for the first time. “Oh! Who’s this?”
“Aunt Stephanie, this is Errol. I don’t remember if you ever met him. He lived with us for a while my senior year of high school. Errol, this is my Aunt Stephanie. ”
“Oh!” she says again as she studies him. “Did you used to have brown hair?”
I groan inwardly, but Errol rises to the occasion —and then some. “I sure did. Happens to the best of us, they tell me.”
He gestures towards his hair before tipping a nod in the direction of Stephanie’s improbable, unapologetically ruby-red coiffeur. “One of these days, maybe I’ll get lucky enough that you’ll tell meyoursecret for dodging that bullet,” he says with a smile so close to flirtatious that I blink at him in shock.
And holy shit, it works. The notnotsuspicious squint vanishes from around her eyes, and she preens. “Oh, I don’t know! A girl has to havesomesecrets, doesn’t she?”
I grin. “I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing in the kitchen. We’re just going to leave our bags here and drive over to the hospital. Do you want to come with us?”
Stephanie gives a wave of her hand. “I spent all morning there. I’m sure Allyson is sick of me. I left once they decided to admit Roger. They were going to get him into a room, but they sent him off for a battery of tests first. I told your mother I’d come back here and tidy up so she wouldn’t have to come back to a sinkful of dishes.”
I wait until we’re back in the driveway before I turn to Errol. “Weren’t you just full of surprises in there!” I elbow him lightly in the ribs. “Where’d you learn that trick? You’re like the divorcee-aunt whisperer.”
Errol snorts out a laugh. “Bartending. Believe it or not, AJ is a master craftsman when it comes to that shit.”
“Really? AJ? The big biker dude who owns the place?”
“Uh-huh.” Errol nods. I’m about to say something hopefully funny in response when the heaviness —the awfulness —of the moment’s reality crashes down on me. I stare at the lush green of my parents’ yard with the hummingbird feeder hanging from their orange tree. It’s surrounded by the tiny birds that always freaked me out just a bit because they look like oversized, iridescent bugs. My dad just loves those critters.
“You OK?” Errol asks, and I realize I just zoned out on him.
I give my head a shake. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”
The hospital is a sprawling, multi-building campus rising up from the flat landscape. After I find a spot for the car in the gigantic parking garage, Errol and I follow arrows until we reach a registration desk.
It’s only when the brusque security guard asks to see my ID that I start to worry maybe they won’t let Errol in because he’s not family.
