Bags of belongings thud down the chute and glide smoothly by. I’m watching them, drowsily mesmerised, when up she walks – Lexi, my ex, who kindly offered me a ride and a room – and I see straight away that something is wrong. It’s the way she clears her throat before saying hi; it’s her hug, warm but perfunctory, though it’s a year since I’ve been here.
I flip a wayward curl from her face, tell her she looks like a squirrel. But instead of responding in her usual way, with a sly smile or an eye roll, Lexi takes my hands in hers, clears her throat again, says, ‘I have news,’ by which time I’m flashing through a mental list of mutual friends. Who’s split up? Or is someone sick? Has there been a terrible accident?
‘It’s your dad,’ she says. ‘He’s doing fine but he’s at Northwest. He had emergency surgery the night before last. A quadruple bypass.’ She looks at me like it’s my turn to speak.
‘His heart,’ Lexi says, dropping my hands to form an X across her chest, as if I need a lesson in where a heart resides. ‘He had a major heart attack. But he’s doing fine.’
I chew my lower lip to keep my thoughts from flying out. You tell me how your father is, I tell you how my father is – that’s how this is meant to go. And I know he’s fine, we talked last week. Whereas you haven’t talked to him in ten, twenty years, and even then only once or twice.
‘He’s controlling,’ you said back in the day, with a shiver of disgust. All because he piled your plate with honeydew, yet now you have the gall to greet me with ‘He’s doing fine’?
His heart, did she say?
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