The eggs are cooking too fast. I turn down the heat. Scrape them around the pan with a spatula that’s missing half its rubber edge.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Again.
It’s been buzzing all week. Texts from Chloe that I’ve been answering with increasing brevity.
Chloe
How’s your dad?
Brody
Better. Thanks.
Chloe
How are you holding up?
Brody
Fine. Busy with the team.
Chloe
See you Saturday?
Brody
Yeah.
One-word answers. The conversational equivalent of a brick wall. Because if I write more than that, I’ll say something I can’t take back.
LikePlease come over.
Or worse.I need you.
My defensive game has gone back to being garbage too. So all around, things are just…great.
The toast pops up. Burnt on one side, pale on the other. Naturally. I scrape the black parts into the sink. Plate everything. Pour coffee that’s been sitting in the pot for forty minutes and is now thick enough to be a biohazard.
“That smells good,” my dad says from the doorway.
I turn.
He’s dressed—barely. Gray sweatpants with a hole in the knee. Ratty Minnesota Blue Ox T-shirt that should have been thrown out years ago. Arm still in the sling, hanging at an awkward angle. Hair uncombed. Face unshaven. Looking like he aged five years in the past week.
Looking like me, probably.
He lowers himself carefully into a chair at the small Formica kitchen table.
The same table where my mother sat before she got too sick to come downstairs, when she’d wrap herself in blankets and sip ginger tea and try to pretend she wasn’t dying.
The same table where my father and I have sat a thousand times, not talking, just existing in the same space because that’s what you do when you don’t know what else to do.
I set the plate in front of him.
“Thanks,” he says quietly.
