“What are you worried about? Not your ex again, is it?”
“No.” Marvia lowered her face into her hands. When she looked up again there were tears on her cheeks.
“What is it?”
She took his hand. Her own was cold and it trembled. “It’s my dad.”
Lindsey knew what was coming. He felt a panicked impulse to change the subject but he couldn’t. This was one time Marvia needed him, and he needed to be strong for her.
“He isn’t doing so well. You know he’s got a time bomb in his chest, waiting to explode. It’s in his lungs.”
“I know.”
She looked into his eyes. “Well, the bomb is exploding. Dad belongs in the hospital and he won’t go. One day he refuses to admit that he’s even sick. Another day he says he’s dying and there’s nothing the doctors can do for him so he might as well stay home.”
Lindsey nodded. He’d known that Marvia’s father had pulmonary asbestosis and that it would someday kill him, but he’d always imagined that day as a remote future time, never as the present. Marvia was still clutching his hand. He put the other on top of hers. “Maybe he’s right. I mean, if he’s right, that there’s nothing the doctors can do.”
She shook her head. “There isn’t. Not really.”
“Then maybe he should stay home. Wherever he wants. I mean, why not?”
Marvia disengaged her hand, sniffled into a handkerchief and managed a feeble smile. She lifted a mussel deftly with chopsticks and chewed it slowly.
Lindsey asked, “What about your mom?”
Marvia swallowed the mussel and followed it with a sip of Xingha. “She’s okay. She hasn’t quit work or anything. Dad can still get around the house a little, and Jamie’s only home for about an hour before Mom gets home. Once he is gone—” She hesitated. “Am I a monster to talk about it like that?”
Lindsey said, “No, no,” soothingly. He used the tone you’d use to calm a frightened infant. He could just as well have recited the fifty state capitols, so long as the tone was right.
Marvia said, “Who’s going to take care of Jamie once Dad is gone? Mom still has to support herself, there wasn’t that much money from the company. And I can’t afford to quit my job.”
“How about Jamie’s dad?”
Marvia made a miserable sound. “Maybe. I don’t know. He sends me a note once in a while. On his new wife’s office stationery, no less. You know. Ferré, Borden, Squires, Ferré, Quaid: Corporate and Estate Law. James Senior is going great guns. He’s Mister War Hero now. Claudia’s father is bankrolling him. The media out there in Texas love him. They’ve got a big house in Austin and a ranch somewhere in Waythehellout. That’s their legal residence, out there in the boondocks, and he’ll probably be in the House of Representatives in a couple of years. I think he wants to run for John Tower’s old Senate seat, eventually, eventually.”
Senator James Wilkerson, R-Tex.
Lindsey drew a deep breath. “Have you told Jamie about your dad? Does he understand.…” He hesitated, then said it, “Death?”
“He does. I mean, he sees the news on TV. He knows what death is, that it isn’t just like getting killed in a video game. But he’s never really seen it. I don’t know how he’ll deal with it. He knows that his granddad has a very serious disease, he has to know what the outcome can be.”
She was crying a little. Lindsey dabbed at the corner of her eye with the corner of his napkin and she managed a small laugh. She said, “Thanks.”
The subject of marriage had not come up, but Lindsey had got Marvia’s ring size and he was going shopping soon.
The waiter brought them Vietnamese coffee, and there was a quiet spell while the strong coffee dripped into the sweetened condensed milk. It felt to Lindsey like time to change the subject. Across Jefferson Street the popping sounds had long since stopped, and now the police cruisers were also gone. After his first sip of coffee, Lindsey asked Marvia if she’d worked the Art Museum case. It might have started as Arson’s case, he knew, but once the body of Annabella Buonaventura had been found, it was Homicide’s.
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