The meeting ran another forty minutes. I made decisions about a fundraiser, a comms calendar, and a foundation event that was now going to be moved because my mother couldn't be expected to host an event in this season, this year.
Mark wrote everything down. He didn't look at me when he wrote. Mark was good at his job.
The meeting ended, and I stayed in my chair.
The room emptied. Two of the board members thanked me on their way out. One of them asked after my father, and I gave him the answer I now give everyone — he is comfortable, my mother is with him — and he nodded and went out.
Then I was alone.
I stared at the line on the agenda where Mark had read Bonnie's case.
Pride. That was the lazy answer. Sabrina was proud and pragmatic. She didn’t want to use me. That was the noble answer. She would die on the hill of not having been a woman who worked an angle for a daughter she hadn't known she would meet me through.
Maybe she hadn't told me because she hadn't trusted me to handle it.
I put both hands on the table.
I stood up, and came out of the conference room. Mark walked me to the elevator. He said something about the next quarter that I nodded at without hearing. The elevator went down. The lobby was quiet.
My car was in the executive row.
I had my keys in my hand when the phone rang, and I looked at the screen.
Mom.
I answered. "Mom."
"Oh, Beau."
The two words landed at the back of my neck and stayed there.
She was breathing on the phone. There were words in it, but the words weren't arriving in order. Fragments. "Not breathing. Seizure. They tried. Cade. Theo. Your dad. My boy, my boy, my boy." The thirdmy boywas the version she had used when I was small, the same one she had brought to the hospital that first night in the cardigan and the cup of tea.
I leaned both hands on the hood of the car.
The metal under my palms was cold.
My father was the hand on the back of my head when my hamster died. He was the man teaching me to tie a tie in his own bathroom mirror, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled and the smell of his aftershave in the steam.
He was the one at the rail at Sebring with his hand on Theo's shoulder, yelling something at the track that the engines ate before any of us could hear it. The man at the door of my dorm in the middle of the night with a sandwich in a wax-paper bag because he had decided, on his own initiative, that I wasn't eating enough.
I knew he wasgone.
Mom was still on the phone. “Beau, baby, can you come? Beau, please come.”
I said yes, that I was on my way, and that I would be there.
I ended the call, stood with my forehead on the roof of the car, and drove.
I didn't remember unlocking the car or turning the key. The garage came up around me, then fell behind me, and the avenue slid under the car while I drove the route to the hospital with my hands on the wheel. But the rest of me elsewhere.
I tried to remember the last time I'd seen him.
The last visit. Mom had been in the chair. Theo had been on the couch by the window with his phone. Suzanne hadn't been there. Cade had been there for the first hour and had left for a meeting, and I'd stayed for what — half an hour after that? An hour?
I tried to call up the last thing I'd said to him.
I'll see you tomorrow, Dad.That came up first. I'd said it most days.
