Maybe this wasn’t him. Jack looked for familiar features. He couldn’t see much of the mouth as it hung open behind the transparent green plastic of the oxygen mask. The skin was tanned more deeply than he’d ever remembered, but he recognized the age spots on his forehead, and the retreating gray hairline. His blue eyes were hidden behind closed lids, and his steel-rimmed glasses—the only time his father took off his glasses was to sleep, shower, or trade them for prescription sunglasses—were gone.

But yeah, this was him.

Jack felt acutely uncomfortable standing here, staring at his father. So helpless…

They’d seen very little of each other in the past fifteen years, and when they had, it was all Dad’s doing. His earliest memories of home were ones of playing catch in the backyard when he’d been all of five years old and the mitt was half the size of his torso, standing in a circle with his father and sister Kate and brother Tom, tossing the ball back and forth. Dad and Kate would underhand it to him so he could catch it; Tom always tried to make him miss.

His lasting, growing-up impressions were of a slim, quiet man who rarely raised his voice, but when he did, you listened; who rarely raised his hand, but when he did, a single, quick whack on the butt made you see the error of your ways. He’d worked as a CPA for Arthur Anderson, then moved—decades before the Enron scandal—to Price Waterhouse where he stayed until retirement.

He wasn’t a showy sort, never the life of the party, never had a flashy car—he liked Chevys—and never moved from the west Jersey house he and Mom had bought in the mid-fifties. Then, without warning, he’d up and sold it last fall and moved to Florida. He was a middle-class man with a middle-class income and middle-class mores. He hadn’t changed history and no one but the surviving members of his family and steadily diminishing circle of old friends would note or mourn his passing, yet Jack would remember him as a man who always could, as Joel McCrea had put it in Ride the High Country, enter his house justified.

Jack stepped around to the left side of the bed, the one opposite the IV pole. He pulled up a chair, sat, and took his father’s hand. He listened to his breathing, slow and even. He felt he should say something but didn’t know what. He’d heard that some people in comas can hear what’s going on around them. It didn’t make much sense, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

“Hey, Dad. It’s me. Jack. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand, or move a finger. I—”

His father said something that sounded like “Brashee!” The word startled Jack.