Chapter 4 - What He Said in the HallwayThey admitted me an hour later. A neurosurgeon named Dr. Castellano came down around midnight, reviewed the scans with an expression I couldn't read, and told us that surgery would likely be necessary, that the location was delicate but accessible, and that the coming days would involve more tests to determine exactly what we were dealing with.
My father didn't say much through any of it. He sat in the corner of the room, arms no longer crossed, hands resting loosely in his lap like he'd forgotten what to do with them.
Later, when my mother went to get coffee, I heard him in the hallway outside my door, talking to her in a voice he clearly thought I couldn't hear.
"I kept telling her to walk it off," he said. "Three weeks. She told me it hurt and I told her everybody has headaches."
"You didn't know," my mother said.
"I told the doctor we were leaving. I had my hand on her jacket, Marlene. If that woman hadn't stopped me—"
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He didn't finish the sentence. I heard him exhale, long and shaking, and I understood, for the first time in my life, that my father was not made of the certainty he always performed. He was just a man who was frightened of hospitals, frightened of bills, frightened of anything he couldn't fix with his hands, and so he'd done what he always did when he was scared.
He got loud about being right.
