Page 29

Another pause. I could hear the faint tick of the clock in his study, the antique one, the one he winds himself on Sundays and won’t let anyone else touch. I knew exactly where he was sitting: a leather chair, a glass of water by his elbow, a folder open on his knee that he wasn’t reading.

“I have a few matters,” he said. “First. The board has moved the quarterly meeting to the twelfth. You are not required to attend. I am informing you as a courtesy.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Second. Your sister has a boyfriend.”

I blinked. “Jenny has a what? “

“His name is Tyler. He plays the ukulele.”

“That’s— honestly, Dad, that’s kind of sweet.”

“I do not care for him.”

“You’ve met him?”

“I have had him looked into.”

I leaned my forehead on the cold plaster wall of the Blue Line’s hallway and started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Dad, in his study, at seventy-one years of age, with a private investigator’s report on a twenty-year-old boy with a ukulele.

“You can’t investigate her boyfriends,” I wheezed.

“I can. And I have. He has an unpaid parking ticket in Nova Scotia.”

“That’s a crime?”

“It is a character flaw.”

“Dad. Come on.”

“Your mother says I am being ridiculous,” he said, after a moment, with the faintest dry edge that in another man I’d have called humor. “She may be right. I am telling you because you are her brother, and you have a way of speaking to people that I have never managed. If he is a decent boy, you will see it.”

“Okay.”

“If he is not, you will also see it.”

“Okay.”

I heard him take a breath, and hold it.

“Alexander,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Are you eating?”

I opened my mouth. Something happened in my throat. I don’t know what it was. It was a very small thing, a question, four words, and I stood in the hallway of a bar with my face against the wall and my eyes suddenly hot.

“Yeah, Dad,” I said. “I’m eating.”

“Good. Are you sleeping?”

“Not really.”

“You will play better if you do.”

“I know.”