Fat Charlie muttered.
“What was that?”
“I said, I’m pretty sure I can’t make them do anything,” said Fat Charlie. He was consoling himself that things could not possibly get any worse, when his father took a plastic carrier bag from the drummer and began producing cans of brown ale and handing them out to his band, to the nursing staff, to the patients. Then he lit a cheroot.
“Excuse me,” said the woman with the clipboard, when she saw the smoke, and she launched herself across the room at Fat Charlie’s father like a Scud missile with its watch on upside down.
Fat Charlie took that moment to slip away. It seemed the wisest course of action.
He sat at home that night, waiting for the phone to ring or for a knock on the door, in much the same spirit that a man kneeling at the guillotine might wait for the blade to kiss his neck; still, the doorbell did not ring.
He barely slept, and slunk in to the hospital the following afternoon prepared for the worst.
His mother, in her bed, looked happier and more comfortable than she had looked in months. “He’s gone back,” she told Fat Charlie, when he came in. “He couldn’t stay. I have to say, Charlie, I do wish you hadn’t just gone like that. We wound up having a party here. We had a fine old time.”
Fat Charlie could think of nothing worse than having to attend a party in a cancer ward, thrown by his father with a jazz band. He didn’t say anything.
“He’s not a bad man,” said Fat Charlie’s mother, with a twinkle in her eye. Then she frowned. “Well, that’s not exactly true. He’s certainly not a good man. But he did me a power of good last night,” and she smiled, a real smile and, for just a moment, looked young again.
The woman with the clipboard was standing in the doorway, and she crooked her finger at him. Fat Charlie beetled down the ward toward her, apologizing before she was even properly within earshot. Her look, he realized, as he got closer to her, was no longer that of a basilisk with stomach cramps. Now she looked positively kittenish. “Your father,” she said.