“Yes.” He turned, courteous as always, to introduce us. “Margaret and Josephine. My son-in-law, John.”
“Meg.” I held out my hand. “I hope your...”Mother? Father? Child?“I hope everything turns out.”
She hugged me, too. “Thank you, darling. Your father has been such a comfort. A real angel of the Lord.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
Wistfully, I watched as he walked with them to the elevator. There were more hugs, more murmurs, one of my father’s rare smiles. Hot pressure burned behind my eyes. I didn’t need him to be a saint or an angel. I just wanted him to act like a dad. What was missing in us, or in him, that made him go away? That made him available to everybody but us.
He resumed his post staring out the window at the dreary parking lot.
John put his arm around me. I rubbed my cheek against his sleeve, absorbing his solid warmth. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I’ll buy you a candy bar.”
I nodded against his arm. “We’ll be right back,” I told Jo.
The hospital gift shop smelled like a fake, cold Christmas, like peppermint gum and pine cleaner. Small, chilled bouquets jostled for refrigerator space next to bottled drinks and waxy-looking fruit.
“What do you think?” I asked John, holding up a bud vase: four white rosebuds tied with red ribbon.
“I think you should wait until her surgery’s over before you buy her flowers.” He looked at my face. “Or we could get them now and they’ll be waiting for her when she’s admitted to a room.”
I held on to them like hope. “I want her to see them when she opens her eyes.”
“Sure. You want to get anything else? A book? Magazines?”
I shook my head. “Sometimes flowers are enough,” I said. Trying to tell him that I loved him. Thinking of the red roses on our kitchen island, waiting for me when I got home.
His warm, brown eyes met mine. “I can do better.”
My chest ached. He was trying so hard. I never wanted him to think our life together wasn’t enough for me.
Maybe I was afraid to hear it wasn’t enough for him.
“You don’t need to do better,” I assured him. “You don’t need to do anything.”
He frowned. “Meg...” His phone buzzed with another text. He fished it from his pocket and glanced at the screen. “We should get back.”
“What is it?” I asked, instantly anxious. “Is it Jo? Mom...”
“No word yet.” He paid for the flowers and a candy bar before taking my arm and steering me out of the gift shop.
“Who was the text from?” I asked.
“Trey.”
I forced a smile. “He must be swamped with people buying new cars for Christmas.”
We reached the waiting room. My father had returned to his book. Jo was prowling the narrow aisle between the chairs.
“He wasn’t texting from work,” John said.
“Then what...?”
A man strode down the corridor from the opposite direction, raindrops shining in his hair and darkening the shoulders of his jacket—a young man with bright black eyes and a wide smile.
“Trey!” Jo stumbled over a chair and launched across the room.
He opened his arms, lifting her half off her feet. A moment’s sunshine lightened my heart. Jo could protest all she wanted that she and Trey weren’t meant to be together for always. But he was here now, when she needed him. That had to count for something.
