“I know,” I say, dropping my head back.
“Maybe you ought to have stayed.Got a room nearby, in case she needs you.”
In spite of myself, I lift my head up to cut him a sharp look, but only because he’s floated the idea I was too chickenshit to do myself.“I’m not going to fucking stalk her, Dad. She said she didn’t want me around.”
“Tough thing, that.”
Holy shit, I am not in the mood for this. I am not in the mood for my dad’s weird, monkish approach to advice, where he says hardly anything at all and I’m supposed to sort out the answers in the silence.“I don’t think I’m right for her, anyway,” I say.“She’s pretty settled in here, with her life, and I’m headed home in a few days. Long distance wouldn’t have worked. It was a temporary thing. We don’t—we don’t really fit.”
He snorts, half laugh, half scorn.“Don’t be an idiot, Ben. I was married to someone I didn’t fit with, and what you’ve got with Kit, it’s not that. Maybe you’re not going to be able to work it out with her, but don’t say some damn fool thing about you not fitting with her. You know you did.”
I do know I did. But right now, I want to go on lying to myself about it. I want to pretend I’m going to get on a plane on Sunday night, fly back to my life in Houston, sleep in my king-size bed with its two pillows and extra-hard mattress and not think about Kit at all. I want to pretend that it’ll be easy, at some point, to just check-in, make sure she’s okay, and then go on with my life as if I’d never fallen in love with her.
As if I’d never thought at all about living a whole different life, for her.
“So you’re going to leave, then,” he says. I look over at him, at where he’s still got his eyes down on the clock. Despite the words, he’s not said this with any judgment, and that’s how he’s always been. He’d been the same when I’d announced I’d go to Texas, when I’d told him I’d be staying there once I’d taken the job with Beaumont. I always wondered whether he thought I should have stayed, taken over the yard, been closer to him. But he’s done fine without me. He’s had a whole life without me, with Sharon and his work. He loves me, but he doesn’t need me here.
“We ought to turn in,” I say. I rise to go over to Dad’s chair, still shadowing him a little as he pushes himself up, even though now he uses all the stability training he’s got from the trainer.
When he puts his good arm around my shoulders as we walk, I know he’s trying to take care of me now.
Chapter 19
Kit
For the next three days, my life is stale coffee, shitty hospital food, and long, loaded silences with Alex and Candace, punctuated with the occasional interruption of a doctor or nurse. Alex and I have checked into the hotel nearest the hospital, separate rooms, and Alex didn’t even bother arguing with me about paying. At night, one of the three of us stays in Dad’s room, the others scattering to our respective corners. I sleep better upright, in the chair next to my father’s bed, than I do for the two nights I’m in the hotel room—there, it’s too quiet. I’m too alone. After the first day, the immediate danger to Dad had passed, and that left room for everything else—for thoughts of my job, of Dr. Singh. For thoughts of Ben.
If I’m lucky, Ben will never know what it cost me to send him away. To not collapse into him, inhale his familiar scent, press my whole self against his warmth and cry until I couldn’t anymore. But the truth was, while I was terrified about my dad, I’d still been in a sort of numb, unprocessed shock about it. The real thing that had been keeping me on the verge of tears was what had happened with my job, with what Ben had done.
Candace is what I pictured, back when Dad first told me he was moving in with someone, except maybe her hair is even more enormous, teased up in the front in such a way that I want to take photographs and study it for scientific purposes. But over the last two days we’ve spent together in my dad’s cramped hospital room, I’ve learned a few things about Candace.
They’re not the normal things—where she works or whether she’s got kids of her own, or how long she and my dad have been together. The mood in the room has been too tense, too somber to strike up those kinds of conversations. But they’re important things, I think. Candace takes notes when the doctors and nurses come in, because, she tells me and Alex, it’s easy to forget when there’s so much information coming at us. When she leaves for an hour to take a shower, she comes back with an afghan that she’d made for Dad as a gift. It’s his favorite, she says, and even though it is completely hideous, she is obviously correct, because my father, who hardly opens his eyes, still manages to clutch that afghan between his hands like a child. She also brings in a small radio, tunes it to a station that plays“golden oldies,” and lets it play softly from the table next to Dad’s bed. And she watches him—not with the furrowed, tense, vaguely angry attentiveness that Alex seems to radiate—but with a patient, focused concern, her hands often clasped in her lap.
It’s these things that make me think I should make an effort to know her in a more complete way. I haven’t even spoken to Dad about her, other than that first phone conversation we’d had weeks ago, but I have the sense from watching her these last couple of days that she’s not temporary. By Saturday afternoon, the worst has passed—the doctor tells us that Dad’s stroke was minor, and during the few hours a day he was awake, he’d been passing benchmark tests, though he’s got lingering aphasia—language difficulties—that may or may not clear up. We’ve heard long, frightening lectures about my dad’s risk if he keeps smoking. A counselor has come by and spoken to us about managing his withdrawals. But it’s all less pressured than those first few hours, and so while Alex is out picking up lunch, I decide to try for conversation with Candace that’s not about my father’s immediate care needs.
“So. You met my dad at church.”
Candace looks up from the Sudoku puzzle she’s been doing. She’s got a book of these and has done them periodically throughout our time here, and up to now, I’ve preferred that to her trying to make conversation.“Is that what he told you?”
Oh, fucking great. I should have known better. The craps table is my dad’s church. I don’t say anything in response.
“Well, I suppose we did meet at church. Our meetings are in the basement at St. Christopher’s.”
“Your—what meetings?”
“Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. You didn’t know?”
“I know my dad’s an alcoholic.Among other things. But I didn’t know he went to meetings.”
“We met there, well, I suppose about eight months ago now…”
“Eightmonths?”
“Aha,” Candace says.“Well. Your father attends meetings. And he’s sober, or at least he has been for the last five months—he had a few stumbles early on. But I don’t know that he’s necessarily accepted many things about the work. Such as making amends to the people he’s hurt.”
“Right.”
“And I know he’s hurt you, Ekaterina.” The way she says my name—it’s too harsh, starting with aneeesound.
