He was in a chair by a window.
Seventy-one years old, thinner, shaved by somebody else, wearing a cardigan I did not recognize.
I stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then he looked up.
“Well,” my father said.
“There he is.”
“Dad.”
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’ve been up since six.”
That was a good day.
I did not know yet that you cannot order them.
We talked for forty minutes about a boat he sold in 1998.
At the end he said, “Is your mother coming?” and I said she was at the store, because the nurse had told me that morning: do not correct him about the d*ad, it is cruel and it does not stick.
When I stood up to go, he caught my wrist.
“Son.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Did you get the key?”
For a second the whole room went silent.
“I got the key.”
He nodded, satisfied, and let go, and then he asked me who I worked for now, and the good day was over.
But he asked.
Fourteen months in that room and at some level beneath the damage, my father was still waiting to hear about the key.
The pressure came the next week.
