Page 55 of Sublimate
“More than your fiancée?” I asked.
“There.” He pointed. “That’s the hospital entrance.”
I dropped him off and then parked, because he was obviously in a hurry to see his dad. Then I followed the signs and sat in the waiting room of the cardiac care unit with some other worriedpeople. He was gone for a while and I made myself comfortable and tried to do more of the assignment I’d been working on earlier, in my bedroom. It seemed just as impossible and I got pretty much nowhere with it.
He came out after I had put that crapola away and I tried to read his expression, but all I could get was “shuttered.” “Are you ready?” he asked. “They close the unit to visitors for an hour and then reopen, but my dad said not to come back tonight.”
“Is he tired?”
“No, he’s sitting up and doing work, and I think I’m getting in his way. He let me know that some people have jobs and can’t just waste hours by chatting.”
“People who just had a heart attack can do that,” I pointed out, but Nolan only shrugged.
“Do you want to go eat?”
Yeah, pretty much always, but I also asked questions about his father’s care, his prognosis, and his medicine. “When does he get to leave?”
“Tomorrow. He says that this was nothing and the doctor did use the word ‘mild’ when we discussed it. It’s still a goddamn heart attack, though. He also said that I shouldn’t have come, but then he remembered that I don’t have anything better to do.”
“You have better things to do than sit in a hospital room so someone can be mean to you!” I retorted. I wished it had been me instead. My feelings never got hurt but his clearly were.
“This is my own fault,” he told me. “First of all, I shouldn’t have driven downstate—I shouldn’t have made you drive me. I shouldn’t have expected my father to want me here. He believes that my life is meaningless because I have nothing to fill it. And you were right.”
“Really, I was? About what?”
“I need to do something. I used to spend my days drinking, figuring out how to drink more, and flying off to drink somewhere else. That was so time-consuming.” He did the bitter smile, which I hated. “Baking multiple loaves of bread and going on multiple runs isn’t enough.”
“Can we still run together, though?”
“Absolutely. This place looks good,” he said, pointing. We turned into the parking lot of a restaurant.
His mother didn’t make it to the hospital for the night visiting period either, but now I was thinking that his dad deserved to lie there alone. She was still at work when we got to their house after dinner. The housekeeper let us in and showed us to our room. It was a very nice one, but just as all-white as the rest of this house. “Was this yours when you lived here?” I asked, looking around.
“No, I used to be at the end of the hall from my parents. My bedroom is now my mom’s upstairs home office, in case she wakes up but doesn’t want to have to go downstairs to work. They sleep in separate bedrooms,” he explained. “This is a new guest area that was formerly my mom’s secondary downstairs home office. It’s smaller and less convenient thanher primary downstairs home office. She let me know that she was sacrificing it for our use.”
“Holy bells, how many offices does one person need? Or is it just showing off?”
“I would say that it’s both. She enjoys telling people that she has three separate work areas here because she’s so busy. Two, now.” He looked at the bed. “I was thinking about what you said about our relationship.”
“What did you think?”
“At rehab, they warned us to take at least a year before we started seeing someone. But this wouldn’t be romantic.”
“Exactly,” I said, nodding. “It would be just what we have now, except we’d call it something more formal.”
“And you’d stop worrying about money and what you owe me.”
“And you could trust that I’ll be around if you need me. You can stop saying ‘I don’t care.’”
“I do care,” Nolan told me. “I didn’t want you to go anywhere. Obviously, I have no idea of how to form bonds with people.”
“You form great bonds,” I said. “You made me like you a lot and want to be friends. I even liked you that first night, when you said your name was Nnnn-ooo-lll-aaa-nnn.”
“Why did I say it like that?” he wondered.
“I called you ‘bud’ and you were trying to help me out. I thought you were polite and I was so glad that you weren’t a revenant.”
“You have low standards.”
