In the background, the songbirds kept cooing to each other:

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

Their voices echoed and bounced through the hallways, no one answering their songbird calls.

The thing about my father is that he’s always been charming. The nurses told me he was their favorite patient. They even said they wished he could stay. This was why my mother couldn’t stand to be in the hospital with him. Drinking had turned him into a liar. When I came back to see him the next day, his finger was even more swollen.

“Have you asked anyone to X-ray you?” I asked.

“They would know if there was something wrong with it,” he said. “They put ointment on my legs. Ask Lindsay. She’s the nurse.”

Of course he was already on a first-name basis with all the nurses.

His swollen finger looked like a snail without a shell. I couldn’t find Lindsay, but an older woman came into our room and passed by wordlessly. She was going to see the loser, my father’s roommate. She looked as distraught as I did. It was clearly not the first time she had visited her son in the hospital. I could see the shame radiating off of her, and I understood it.

“I’m bored here. And his TV’s too loud.”

“Do you want me to tell him to turn it down?”

“No, don’t talk to him,” my father said.

It seemed irrational for my father to be giving me commands at the moment; it was as if he was worried we might hit it off and he’d be stuck with the loser forever.

I listened to his mother ask him questions—Did he eat? Was he still hungry? Did anything hurt anymore?—while she tried to fold his blanket. His answers came in grunts, and a nurse, maybe Lindsay, whisked by us and onto the other side of their curtain partition. I thought about how torturous it would be to be my father’s roommate here, about entire vacations ruined by his snoring. I was sure the man had unkind things to say about my father, too, especially when he was wheeled past us on his hospital bed and hardly looked in my father’s direction. My father leaned up to see him go, as if jealous of his jailbreak.

“Where’s he going?” my father asked.

The nurse looked at him and said, “Surgery,” and winked.

What the hell was wrong with everyone here? I wanted to know. No one seemed to understand the severity of the situation but me.

“Do you like my socks?” my father asked me.

They were yellow, like chicks, soft and fuzzy, with traction on the bottom so he wouldn’t fall.

“Are you going to steal them when you go?” I asked.

“I think they’re free with the stay.”

“You could have just bought them at the store and saved yourself the trouble.”