“You must miss him.”
The vendor on the corner slammed the metal lid that housed the hot dogs unnecessarily hard. Charles stared across the street at a budding dogwood tree. Farther down that block was the Italian restaurant his father sometimes visited for lunch. Once, when Charles had walked down this block to a lunch place on Walnut, he’d glanced into the Italian restaurant’s front window and seen James alone at the bar, with his tie flung over his shoulder and a glass of amber liquid in his hand. There was a ball game on TV, and the waiter was leaning on the bar, watching. Charles’s dad had looked so comfortable being alone, a posture Charles had never mastered himself. Charles had panicked, crossing furtively to the other side of the street so his father wouldn’t see him. He had no idea what James would have done if he’d noticed Charles walking by. Ignore him? Grow furious that Charles was walking down his block, invading his space? One thing was certain, his father certainly wouldn’t have invited Charles into the bar—despite his mother’s Pollyannaish suggestion the day before his interview, Charles and his father never met for lunch. What would they have talked about?
Caroline shifted onto her left leg, waiting for Charles’s answer. Did he miss his father? He didn’t really know. “I—I should be going,” he said, turning blindly toward the street.
“Of course,” Caroline said, her voice dripping with foolhardy sympathy. Maybe she thought he was too overcome with grief to properly respond. Charles still said nothing, focusing instead on the shiny spots of mica in the sidewalk, the xylophone part of a Rolling Stones song he’d heard on his iPod that morning thrumming absurdly in his head. Finally, Caroline patted his arm and told him to hang in there. Charles watched her push through the revolving door, cross the lobby, accept a badge from security, and disappear around the corner toward the elevator bank.
Charles leaned against the cold slate of his building, wishing he could nap beneath one of the big stone benches. The burbling fountain smelled pungently of chlorine. There was a sharp pain at his right temple, maybe the beginning of a migraine. The cleaning ladies were still standing on the corner, chatting. Was one of them her? The security guard who’d called the ambulance for Charles’s father had met the family in the ER lobby later that same night. “A cleaning lady found him,” the guard had said. “She called down to the front desk, and I called 911.” About a week later, after Charles’s dad had died, Charles tracked down the agency that employed the building’s cleaning staff and asked for the woman’s name. The agency was evasive, saying that the woman had quit and they didn’t have a forwarding number.
Maybe she was in this country illegally. Maybe she felt guilty and embarrassed that she had come upon such a thing—an executive limp and lifeless on a bathroom floor, soaked in his own urine. But the woman was out there, certainly, and she had information Charles wanted. If only he could see her and ask her about his father’s final moments of consciousness. Had he said anything? Regrets, maybe? A sudden confession of love?
The hand on his watch slid to the three. Charles peeled his body from the wall, straightened his shirt, and prepared to go back to work. The sun came out for a moment, turning the marble fountain base in front of his building amber. An exact match, Charles realized, to his dad’s headstone.
Chapter Three
Normally Sylvie looked forward to the biweekly Tuesday board meetings at Swithin. She loved sitting in the library, drinking tea, plotting, and gossiping, with the Philadelphia classical station on quietly in the background. It was less a board meeting and more a nice cozy get-together with people she’d known for years. But she dreaded this one, staying in the shower until the last possible moment. She found herself wishing the weather would abruptly turn biblically catastrophic, raining down frogs or locusts or bumblebees, forcing the Department of Transportation to close the roads. She longed for a sudden high fever, nothing dangerous, just a passing flu. She even took her temperature as she sat at the kitchen table drinking her coffee.