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"With a card," I say. "Thank you for your service. No name."

"He'll think it's a death threat."

"Perhaps he’ll be cautious for a few weeks. Then he'll say fuck it and drink it. Then he'll feel odd about having drunk it." I sign where Feldman points. "His temper got me a wife. Somebody in this world should thank him and it certainly won't be his father."

Feldman packs his briefcase very carefully and stands.

"Congratulations on the engagement, Mr. Novak."

"Thank you. She doesn't know about the hospital."

"I gathered that without being told," he says, and goes off to bill me for the afternoon of his life.

* * *

Nicko is sitting up, furious and holding a whiteboard. The man does look battered. There are bruises everywhere and I’m surprised he can even hold that board.

He writes: GRAPES WTF?

"Chew slowly," I tell him, same words as on the card.

He writes something else, and my mother takes the pen off him before he can turn it round.

She's been here since Thursday night. There's a rosary on the blanket, three coffees on the windowsill, and a nurse in the corridor who now flinches at the sound of breathing in this room. My mother has decided that Nicko's recovery is a project she personally manages, and God help anyone from the anaesthetist to the janitor.

"Sit," she says to me. "Eat something. You've gone thin."

"You think I've gone thin in two days."

"You've gone thin since Thursday." She hands me a pastry out of a paper bag, then keeps hold of my wrist for a moment longer than she needs to. "So there will be a wedding, Laszlo."

"Yes."

"Such an important decision, made between duck and dessert. In the presence of a man bleeding all over the grass."

"You raised me to make the best out of every situation."

"She didn't eat." She lets go of my wrist and starts moving the coffees on the windowsill into a line, which is where I get that quirk from, whatever she likes to call it when it's mine. "Dolores put a plate down for her. The girl never looked at it. She had her eyes on her brother, on you, on the fountain, and she said yes with her hands shaking. When she left, you sat back on your chair and continued to cut into your duck."

"It was a very good duck."

She sighs. "Laszlo."

"Would you like to help with the flowers?"

She turns and stares at me until it gets unnerving. My mother is very beautiful, and I look like her. She's always at these family things yet never really there with her mind. I've spent my whole life trying not to turn into her. She also isn't stupid, and nothing in this family gets past her twice.

"You stood up," she says. “When she came in.”

Not her, too.

"A woman was shouting. I wanted to see why."

"There is always shouting. You have never once stood up for anyone, for anything." She folds her arms. "So tell me why my son, who has never hurried toward anything in his life, is suddenly in a hurry to marry a stranger. I was starting to think you preferred men."

In the bed beside her, Nicko writes something on his whiteboard and turns it so she can read it and I can't. She laughs. I start pacing before the two of them can gang up on me any further.

I shake my head. Gay? I'm sure she suspects I fuck Leah—she's seen her once or twice on my arm. In fact, I do it every Tuesday evening, on the clock.I know how to use my dick on a woman.