Despite the absurdity of storming out of my own rental, I’m out in the sunshine before I realize I have nowhere to go.

The same thing that makes Joe a good lawyer makes him a crappy friend: he’s right almost all of the time.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I’ve got four voicemails from my dad’s home line and half a dozen texts from TJ, a thirty-three-year-old war vet who lives down the road and spends all his time going house to house, checking the trees for signs of insect rot. TJ is the closest thing my dad has to a friend.

His texts are borderline incoherent, all abbreviations and shattered punctuation, but I get the message clear enough: I’m late to pick up my dad for his doctor’s appointment.

TJ is still humping around in the yard when I arrive. He lifts a hand to wave, and then turns back to his inspection, sifting the leaves of one of our crabapple trees. His left arm swings useless when he moves.

There’s nothing wrong with TJ’s arm except, thanks to a case of PTSD, he doesn’t know it’s there.

“Waste of time, waste of money, these so-called doctors,” my father grumbles, as he eases into the passenger seat. “All they do is take your money and fumble with a lot of doodads and in the end, what? They send you home with a prayer, a bill for five hundred dollars, and a prescription to see another doctor.”

He stops my hand when I try to belt him in. “I can do it, dammit. I throw my back out and you act like I’m a cripple.”

But I notice it takes him several times to work the seatbelt home. His hand is shaking.

When I was a kid we didn’t go to the doctor. My dad said all we needed was God’s love, and when I had my first visit—nine years old, my mom whittled by sickness—I thought the doctor’s office was the cleanest, brightest place I’d ever been. By then I knew not going to the doctor was one of the things that made me a freak, so the waiting room felt like the heaven my dad always talked about, a place where nothing existed but quiet and a blinding whiteness that struck down every shadow. I got a lollipop from the receptionist, and when my mom and dad were with the doctor, I paged through magazines, rubbing perfume samples on my wrists and my shirt.

Then it was the oncology wing of a hospital in Indianapolis, although to me it was a doctor’s office only bigger, even more miraculous. More magazines. More cold air faintly tinged with the smell of Winterfresh gum. More people in clean white coats, like angels with their wings folded around them.

Dr. Aster spends a long time examining my dad. I make it through every magazine in the waiting room: two months-old copies of People, a Home & Garden full of smiling housewives, copies of Outdoor and Fishing. I wonder how many people are sitting here, in this waiting room, reading about smallmouth bass just before they get news that changes them forever.