He felt the same way as he listened to Ana rant about her father, the goddamn Program, the tree’s “lack of structural integrity,” and the quality of care her father had received since the ambulance had shown up at the farmhouse. The paramedics were fat and slow, the doctors full of shit—“Does that look like ‘resting comfortably’ to you, Droop? Would you be comfortable with a tube in your dick?”—and the hospital a Podunk outpost that couldn’t be trusted with anything more serious than ringworm.
In the course of her raving, Pete managed to piece together some basic facts. In addition to sustaining multiple fractures, Ben had swelling of the brain. He hadn’t blown his cover (thank God) because he’d slipped from unintelligible to unconscious as soon as they pumped him full of Dilaudid. So it could have been worse. Still, this was pretty bad. What the hell had gone wrong?
“So I have to ask,” said Pete after Ana trailed off in the middle of a complaint about the pushy nurses. “What was he doing up in a tree?”
“Living there.”
“Living there,” said Pete, thinking she would explain further, tell him It’s not what it sounds like, but she just nodded. He said, “How long?”
She chewed on her thumbnail. He resisted the urge to pull her hand away from her mouth. “Two weeks,” she said.
He felt something collapse in his stomach. How on earth. Pete went out to the farmhouse just last week, for Christ’s sake. How could he have—
Now that he thought about it, it had taken Ben a long time to answer the door. He’d claimed he was in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, but had he actually climbed down from the tree and slipped into the house through the storm cellar doors while Pete stood on the porch like a mook? Entirely possible. And entirely beside the point, because there was a more important question to ask.
“Ana,” he said. “Why didn’t you let me know?”
She gnawed on her thumbnail.
“I need to know,” he said. “Why didn’t you call me the instant your father went up in that tree?”
That line sounded ridiculous, straight out of a nursery rhyme, but neither of them smiled. Ana didn’t even look over, which irritated Pete. “I could have helped you,” he said. “Don’t you know that?”
She glanced at her father in the bed. “This is where the Program’s help has gotten us,” she said. “I didn’t think we could take any more of it.”
Pete shifted in his seat. That wasn’t fair, but now wasn’t the time to argue with this girl, not while her father lay unconscious in the bed. “He’ll get better,” he said lamely.
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He will.”
“How do you know?”
Pete opened his hands. He didn’t have an answer.
“You don’t know,” she said. Her voice trembled with anger. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about what it’s like for us here, and you don’t know if he’s ever going to get better. Do you? Admit it.”
She held his eyes, waiting for an answer, but what could he honestly tell her? The situation is fluid. That’s what the doctors had said about his own daughter, though her troubles hadn’t come from a fall. We’ll have to wait and see.
The truth is that nothing in the world is harder than waiting to see. Waiting is a blank page your mind fills with dark ink. Waiting gives you time to learn terrible things about yourself. Like how you might want an ending even more than you fear one.
Ana’s thumbnail was in her teeth again. He reached for her hand, pulled it gently from her mouth. Sometimes honesty was the worst gift. Sometimes a person needed to rest comfortably.
“Everything will be fine,” he said, though his words rang hollow, even to his own ears. He pressed on awkwardly. “I’m here now.”
Her eyes narrowed. She spoke clearly and slowly, as though he were a child. “Asshole,” she said. “No one wants you here.”
Chapter 3
RUN TO DELIGHT
BACK WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD, Ben—then Bennie—did not dream of being a father. When he thought about his future, he saw himself in the shade of a ragged palm, wearing frayed khakis and strumming a guitar. His uncle Rooster told him he was seeing Mexico.
Rooster had never traveled further than Atlantic City, but the fact that he was a transit agent at the Trailways terminal on West Fayette gave him a certain authority in matters of geography. And the fact that Rooster ran a small sports book out of his kiosk gave him authority in matters of numbers, so when he mentioned that a man could live like the Prince of Todos Santos on twenty pesos a day, Bennie took it as gospel.
Kate, his girlfriend, scoffed. She was still in high school. Cynicism came easily to her. “Pipe dreams.”
“Wait and see,” Bennie said.
Since graduating high school, Bennie had been a runner for Rooster, carrying paper bags between the bus terminal and points in Pigtown, Otterbein, and Ridgely’s Delight. He looked like he was delivering lunches, but the bags were bottom-heavy with cash instead of sandwiches, and bets were scrawled on the flaps. The job was allegedly paying his way through school—Bennie was chipping away at a business degree at City Community, a couple classes at a time—but that was mostly a ruse to keep his mother happy. If it were up to Bennie, he would drop out and run for Rooster full-time, earn his way to Mexico more quickly.
“If you drop out,” said Rooster when Benny aired this thought, “I will fire you.”
“You dropped out,” Bennie reminded him.
“Now look at me,” said Rooster. “Stuck in this fucking box, sucking bus fumes the rest of my miserable life.”
“And making a good living doing it,” said Bennie, eyeing Rooster’s watch, a Patek Philippe.
Rooster pulled his wrist away. “That’s a booby prize. This—” he gestured at his kiosk “—is not for you. And this—” he pushed a fresh tray of paper bags at Bennie “—is temporary.”
Rooster was only four years older than Bennie, but he didn’t let that keep him from dispensing advice. Rooster had been a self-appointed mentor since dropping out of school, when he began showing up at his nephew’s apartment around dinnertime nearly every night. He was always welcome, not only because he was family, but because he came with take-out: styrofoam clamshells of clam strips, steaming tins buckling under the weight of lasagna, soggy huts of moo goo gai pan. If Bennie’s mother ever wondered where Rooster got his money, she never mentioned it out loud. Occasionally she said, “What do I owe you?” in a distracted way, never expecting an answer, and never getting one.
While the boys sat at the dinette table, she ate standing up, leaning her elbows on the counter. Bennie knew why she did this—her back ached from cleaning houses, and she was dizzy from breathing ammonia all day—but still, he wished she would sit with them. Hunched over her plate on the countertop, she looked like a dog wolfing down kibble.
After dinner, she would always say, Time to do the dishes,