Charlie looked at the warden, worried about his father’s health, secondarily worried about what his father might say.

“You…need—” Winston began to cough; what started as a throat-clearing quickly turned into a deep hacking. Charlie softly patted his father on his shoulder, looking sadly to his wife. What a thing to witness, the rapid erosion of a mountain.

“We think there’s a chance your father may be coming down with pneumonia,” Denno said. “Doctors are watching him around the clock, of course.”

“What doctors?” Margaret asked. “I don’t see any here.”

Denno scanned the room and shrugged. He wandered off, presumably to find one.

Something distant in Winston’s eyes lit up; he leaned into his son. “Trust,” Winston whispered in Charlie’s ear. “Don’t.” He collapsed heavily onto his pillow.

Charlie thought back to when he was a child lying beside his father in bed, listening to serials on the radio Charlie had built by hand in Cub Scouts. They’d started with comedies like Sam ’n’ Henry and The Goldbergs and moved on to dramas: Aunt Jymmie and Her Tots in Tottyville. Eventually they’d graduated to Westerns, do-gooder tales, mysteries, and true-crime: Empire Builders, The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, The Bishop and the Gargoyle. When a show ended, Charlie would turn off the radio and he and his dad would talk about the plot, the twists, the actors whose voices they’d come to recognize. They were a team, a pair of aficionados, critiquing the sound effects, raising their fingers when a common trope was leaned upon too heavily. Those were some of Charlie’s happiest memories.

Occasionally, on the nights when he smelled as if he’d been pickled in gin, Winston could get a bit silly. The popularity of radio serials exploded in the 1930s, and demand apparently exceeded the supply of new ideas and good writing; Charlie had noted the frequency with which some freshly wounded victim would spit out his last utterance with the only fight left in him, economizing the words so that “The murderer’s name is” would exhaust all remaining oxygen, leaving the identity of the killer a mystery unless the victim was able to point to some object that at first glance made no sense. Charlie would pretend to take one in the gut and then gasp, muttering, evoking laughter from his father. When Winston was sufficiently in his cups, the two would act it out together, collapsing on each other’s chests with the ridiculous last words: “The…murderer’s…name…is…”

Winston’s current state recalled that theatrical shortness of breath; Charlie couldn’t help but smile despite it all. Winston saw him smiling and reached out to touch his cheek.

“Pa,” Winston exhaled.

“Pa?” Charlie asked.