Читать книгу The Hunt - Andrew Welsh-Huggins - Страница 16

7

“WHY ARE YOU HERE?” MY FATHER SAID, turning his head toward me.

“To see you.”

“Make fun of me, more like it.” His voice scratchy with fatigue. “Before I die.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“You want me to.”

“No, I don’t.”

Behind me, I heard my mother sigh.

“You think this is my fault,” he said. “Because I don’t exercise. That’s what you said.”

Focus, Andy, focus!

I’m trying!

Not hard enough!

“It’s not your fault,” I said, though I knew I didn’t believe it. I glanced at my mom, silently accusing her. She stared back, her face a stone.

“Like you’re so high and mighty,” my dad said. “My son the security guard. Like you eat vegetables all day long. Like you run marathons.”

“Bud,” my mother said. “Leave off.”

I took a breath and pushed my chair back. We were crowded into his room on the cardiac step-down unit. A tube snaked from his nose down along his side. He had an IV in his left arm. He looked pale and pasty, salt-and-pepper stubble turning the corner into a beard. He’d been stabilized, catheterized, brought back from the dead with the help of stents and angioplasty and some other things I didn’t understand. But his blockage was too severe for him to go home before the surgery. Shelley had driven back to Cleveland to gather some things and make arrangements for a longer stay. My mom was driving back to Homer that night, declining an offer to stay with me.

“How are you feeling?” I said.

“How do you think? Like shit on toast.”

“Hopalong’s favorite snack.”

“Who’s that?”

“My dog. It was a joke.”

A grunt. “What kind of dog?”

“Golden lab.”

“Bitch?”

“Male.”

He grunted again, gave the slightest nod.

“He’s a good dog,” I said. “Gets the job done. You’d like—”

“When Bernie died, I thought about telling you. Calling you up. Asked your mother for your number. Then I thought, what the hell. Why? What would you care?”

“Bernie?”

“Yeah.”

“That was, like, fifteen years ago.”

“I still miss him. That a problem?”

“No. I’m sorry Bernie died. He was a good dog too. And I’m not a security guard.”

“What are you?”

“I’m an investigator.”

“Of what?”

“People’s problems. I help fix things.”

“You help people?” He laughed, stopping just short of it turning into a cough.

“What I said.”

“Never helped us.”

“That’s not true.”

“All we did for you. Down the toilet.” His voice gravel, and low. Though not like when he drank and smoked. “We struggled while you messed everything up. Help people. That’s a good one.”

“So the fact you couldn’t hold down a job is suddenly my fault?”

My mother’s sharp intake of breath was audible. “Andy,” she said. But it was too late. My father squeezed his hands into fists and rolled his head to the side and shut his eyes. He looked so much like my grandfather in the days before his death that I had to turn away. I met my mother’s face, white and drawn. She was shaking with fury.

“I didn’t tell Shelley to call you,” she said.

“I know you didn’t,” I said, and turned and walked out of the room.