Pop slipped in the shower and cracked two of his ribs. He didn’t tell us—he just pretended everything was okay, even though he was limping a little bit. He came up to the big house for breakfast and dinner as usual and helped me with my homework every day after school.

But two days later, he couldn’t get out of bed and we had to call an ambulance.

He stayed in the hospital for two weeks, and then he caught a bout of pneumonia and had to stay for four more. I thought he’d come back to his apartment after that.

But he couldn’t. Luca said the fall had shaken him, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He said it’d take longer for Pop to heal, so Pop moved into the RRC—but only temporarily. It’s this big place that’s not really a hospital, and not really a nursing home, but something in between. He even had to walk with a walker while his ribs were still recovering.

Luca said we’d go visit every weekend. But it was too hard to go from seeing Pop every day to only once a week. So Luca bought me a bus ticket and traveled the 787 with me twice to make sure I’d be okay. I promised not to talk to strangers and to let the RRC receptionist know when I arrived and when I was leaving, so he could call in and check on me. That’s what it’s like to have a policeman for a father.

Luca let me go there every Wednesday afternoon, plus every weekend he’d take me too. It still wasn’t the same as having Pop back home, but at least it was something.

That afternoon I knocked on Pop’s bedroom door and he called “Come in, Fred!” because he knew the bus timetable as well as I did by then.

Pop’s room at the RRC smelled like English Breakfast tea and this cinnamon cologne he sprayed on himself every morning. It was how his apartment still smelled even though it was just sitting there empty in our backyard like a giant garden ornament.

“So did Luca tell you about the baby?” Pop asked me right away. He was sitting in a reading chair by the window, a paperback book open in one hand and his gray eyes focused on me.

“You knew!”

Pop and Luca spoke on the phone a couple of nights a week.

He nodded. “For a while now.” And then he sighed when I gave him a hurt look. “It was not my news to tell you, Fred.”

I slipped my backpack from my shoulders and went to give him a kiss on the cheek, and then sat cross-legged on the floor by his feet.

“You know, Maria—your mother—would be happy for him.”