“You want some bread? There’s that loaf of Italian you baked, in there.”

“You should call her,” he says.

“Call who?”

“Your mother.”

“I call her. Now and then.”

“You should call her more often.” He sniffs and erupts into a fit of coughing that sounds violent and takes half a minute to pass.

“You sound like you’re getting a cold,” I say. “Maybe we should get out of here, take you someplace warm for a couple of weeks.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. Florida,” I say, because it’s the only warm place I can picture him going to.

And then he gets this sad look on his face—all the lines conspire to make it happen—and for all I know he is sad. He’s sick, Dr. Cox has told him more than she’s told me, and maybe he knows something more specific that’s worth a genuine, heavy sadness. But what he says next surprises me. “I know you’d like it if your mother and I got back together.”

I’ve got spaghetti on my fork. My mouth is open. All I can manage is “What?”

“It’s natural,” he says. “You want your mother and father to be together. Anybody would.”

“Dad, I’m thirty-seven. I don’t even—I don’t care about that anymore. I don’t know if I ever cared about it.”

“You did,” he says. “Boy, you really did. And you still do.”

“Dad.” I put the fork back down on the plate. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You need to listen to me,” he says.

“Mom’s fucked-up. You know that, right?”

“Don’t talk about your mother that way.”

“I’m sorry, but she’s nuts. She has a way of not seeming like it, but she’s really got some problems.”

“You only get two parents in this world, Matthew. You’re born, and you’ve got two people who love you from that very moment, who have to love you. Just two.”

“Well, one of them’s a basket case who isn’t so happy about being a mother.”

“That’s not because of me!” he says, his neck and face turning red. I watch him smash a half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray, this man who usually smokes them down to the filter. He’s pulling another one out of the pack before he speaks again. “If she feels that way—and she shouldn’t—it was because of all that other crap. Roy, your stepfather, he cut out on her with no warning—”