I tilted my head. “This is uncharacteristically bossy of you, Richard.”
“Don’t call me Richard. Dad will do.”
“What’s the rush, exactly? The doctor said it wasn’t urgent.”
“You need to get it taken care of.”
As I looked closer at my dad, he seemed atypically rumpled. Tie askew. Wrinkles in his Oxford cloth. He always traveled in a business suit. Formal guy. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Singapore?”
“I came home early from my conference.”
“For this?” I asked. It had to be for something else.
“This couldn’t wait,” he said. That sounded like a yes.
Was this all it took to get his attention? “Wow. I should have gotten a cavernoma years ago.”
“You’ve always had it. It’s congenital.”
“I was joking.”
But he was in no mood to joke. He actually looked … worried.
Huh. Worried about his daughter. Was this a first?
“It’s fine,” I said next. “I’ll handle it.”
But he shook his head. “It’s done. I’ve already scheduled you for Wednesday.”
At that, I just frowned. “This Wednesday?”
He nodded, like, Affirmative.
I tried to think if my dad had ever scheduled anything for me—even an orthodontist appointment. “Why would you schedule my surgery?”
He looked at me, like, Duh. “I’ve got some connections.”
“No kidding.”
“Otherwise, it was a three-week wait.”
“Fine with me.”
“But you need to get it done—”
“Right now,” I finished for him. “Yeah. You said.”
His latte sat untouched.
I stirred my own, then watched the bubbles circle around in the cup. Then I said, “Look, I’ll be honest. This seems like a whole lot of interest all of a sudden for a guy who has literally not asked me one question about myself in the last decade.”
“I understand.”
“So what’s going on?”
He nodded, like he’d been waiting for this question. “Your mom,” he said then, looking down at the distressed wood tabletop.
My mom. He absolutely never brought up the topic of my mom.
He had my attention now. But then he paused so long I finally had to ask: “My mom. Okay. What about her?”
“Your mom,” he said again. “She…”
Another pause. I tapped the table in his line of vision. “She what?”
He looked up and met my eyes. “She died of a cavernoma.”
I sat back.
Heck of an adrenaline jolt there.
“I thought she died of a stroke,” I said.
“She did. A stroke from a burst cavernoma.”
“That seems like something I should have known sooner.”
“Maybe if you’d gone to medical school you’d have learned all about it.”
“Are you giving me shit about medical school right now?”
He pursed his lips together at the curse word—which seemed like the least of our problems. Next he tilted his head forward like he was forcing himself to take a calming moment. Then he said, “I’m telling you, you can’t wait. You have to do this right now.”
“I can’t do it right now. I don’t have time.”
He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “That’s exactly what your mother said.”
Oof.
Then, before I’d absorbed that, he added, “And she might even have been wearing that very same robe when she said it.”
I looked down and took a breath. Time to stop arguing. “So you’re saying … she had this same exact thing?”
“Yes. It’s inherited.”
“And she knew she had it?”
“Yes.”
“And she was advised to have it fixed?”
“Yes.”
“But she didn’t? And then she died?”
He nodded. “Precisely.”
“Why didn’t she have it fixed?”
My dad looked away. “I don’t think we need to get into that.”
“What else could there possibly be to get into?”
“I don’t want to dredge up the past.”
I lifted my hands, like, What the hell? “Too late. It’s dredged.”
“The point is—just get it done.”
To be honest, I wasn’t going to fight him. My dad might be a complicated, difficult, overly formal, pathologically reserved, not-particularly-fond-of-me person … but he wasn’t stupid. He was, as Lucinda could verify, a “very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon.” He knew his shit. He understood—if nothing else—the workings of the human body.