Harry beamed. “Yup. My pleasure! So. Shoot. Why are we here? Is there something going on with Mom that I don’t know about?”
“You know what I know, Harry, which isn’t a great deal. We’re watching and waiting.”
“Yeah, like you and I do that so well.” Harry pushed away his empty plate, sat back, thumped his feet on the floor, sat forward. “You’d expect more from medical science in the twenty-first century,” he said.
“You would indeed.”
“Could we take Mom to England?”
“I have a call in to Saint John. His brother is on staff at Papworth, the leading heart hospital in England.” Felix sipped his Perrier. “But I think we have to accept that a transplant is in her future.”
Harry traced circles through the crumbs of his giant cookie.
“In the meantime, we need to create a plan.”
“For what?” Harry’s voice turned cautious. His face distorted through a series of tics.
“Your future.”
“Could you make that sound a little less scary?”
“College.”
Harry jerked his chair closer to the table, then pushed it back. “Can we talk about this when we get home?”
“No, Harry. Spring break is less than six weeks away, and I need to make plane reservations. We’re going to do a weeklong college tour in the Northeast.”
“What does Mom say?”
Felix wrestled the edges of a headache.
“You haven’t told her, have you?” Harry said.
“No. Harry, she’s too brittle to get dragged in. You and I need to figure this out on our own. Then we can involve her, and it will give her something uplifting to think about.”
“My leaving home is uplifting?”
“Yes. College is a marvelous time in your life. You’ll be independent without the responsibility of being a wage earner.” In a year and a half, Harry would leave home. That gave Felix a year and a half to prepare him. And a year and a half to prove—or fail to prove—that he could be a good father.
Harry scratched the side of his head, rose out of his chair, plonked back down. He picked up his white linen napkin, twisted it as if he were squeezing out a wet rag, and dumped it on the table. “Can we put this off till the summer, when we have a better sense of the whole transplant thing?”
“No. Whatever happens with Mom, you have important decisions to make that will shape your future. The path you take now will set you up for the rest of your life.”
“But I feel like the world’s upside down and there is no future.”
“That’s rubbish. The future—your future—is out there waiting. You need to start looking at colleges, and you need to start making decisions.”
“There isn’t room in my head for all this.”
“Make room.”
Harry stood up. Felix leaned forward and dropped his voice. “Sit. Down.”
“I’d like to go look at the art now, Dad. I have a lot of homework.”
How could a good parent argue that one in public? The guy on his laptop—was he listening? Was the group in the corner waiting to judge? Will that man be a good father and let his son do his homework? Jazz played softly in the background. Trumpets with mutes. He’d played the trumpet at Eton. And had failed to make first trumpet in the school band.
Felix signaled the waitress. “Check, please?”
Harry got up and left. Clearly, they weren’t going to the gift shop to buy Valentine’s Day gifts.
Harry stopped in the middle of the huge, empty atrium, huffing out his breath. Was Dad trying to go behind Mom’s back? Because if so, there was only one place this was heading: Harvard. And if Dad knew anything about him, anything, he would know that Harry would be miserable in a pressure-cooker bastion of whatever-ish-ness.
His thoughts scrambled. He actually wanted to growl. Grrr.