"You can accept thanks gracefully or you can be stubborn about it. Those are your choices. " He smiled. She wiped her eyes again. "Come on," he said. "Let's go back in there before Zoe finishes narrating the entire movie. " They went back into the living room.
Robert was watching the TV, and Zoe was still narrating, and Nadia was still ignoring it with great patience, and the room was warm and full of people who had found each other across a broken fence and an unopened letter and a phone call at 8:15 on a Saturday morning. Robert glanced over at Marcus and Olivia as they came back into the room. He said nothing, but he looked at Marcus and gave him the smallest nodet one/tenth of an inch. Controlled as everything the old man did, and Marcus understood every single word of it. Zoe stopped her narration long enough to announce that this was the best part of the movie, and everyone needed to be quiet.
Robert told her he agreed. And for just that moment with the five of them in that room together, everything that had been broken about each of them rested. Not fixed, not resolved, not perfectly healed, just resting together, which is sometimes the most honest version of okay there is. The procedure was scheduled for a week from Thursday. Marcus already knew he'd be at Robert's door at 5:29 because that's what you do.
You show up. Marcus was at Robert's door at 5:29. He'd told himself 5:30. He'd set his alarm for 4:50, gotten up, made coffee, gotten the girls settled with instructions for Nadia that were more detailed than they needed to be because she was 9 years old and fully capable, and driven across the street, which took 11 seconds, and knocked on Robert's door at 5:29. Robert opened it immediately.
He was already dressed. Coat on. The good coat, not the yard coat, hat in his hand. He looked at Marcus. You're early, he said.
By one minute, Marcus said, "Early is early, but he was already stepping out the door. They drove to the hospital mostly in silence. " Marcus had the heat on low. The roads were empty at that hour. The city not yet awake and the quiet between them was the kind they'd gotten good at, not uncomfortable, not loaded, just two men sitting with what was real. At some point, Robert said, "I had a dream last night. " Marcus waited.
"Viviian," Robert said. That was his ex-wife, Olivia's mother. He'd mentioned her name exactly twice in two months of mornings. She was standing in the kitchen of the old house, the one we had when Olivia was small. She was just standing there, not angry, not sad.
He paused. She looked at me and said, "You finally figured it out, didn't you? " Marcus kept his eyes on the road. "What did you say back? " he said. "I said I was working on it," Robert said. "A long pause. " "She smiled," Robert said.
"And then I woke up. " Marcus said nothing for a moment. Then that sounds like a good dream. Yes, Robert said quietly. I suppose it does. They checked in at the front desk at 6:15, the cardiology unit.
A nurse named Angela took Robert's information with the practice efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times and still managed to treat each patient like the first. She gave Marcus a visitor badge and pointed him toward the waiting area without being asked, which meant she'd looked at the two of them and made a correct assessment without needing clarification. Olivia arrived at 6:40. She came through the doors fast, coat half buttoned like she'd been trying to get there earlier, and traffic had had a different opinion. She saw Marcus first, then looked past him to where Robert was being prepped.