Commonwealth(13)

“And he’s married now?”

Franny shook her head. “Single.”

“But there was a third one.”

“Didn’t work out.”

“Wasn’t there a fiancée though? Somebody after the third one?” Fix knew full well that Bert had had a third divorce but he never tired of hearing about it.

“There was for a while.”

“And the fiancée didn’t work out either?”

Franny shook her head.

“Well, that’s a shame,” Fix said, sounding as if he meant it, and maybe he did, but he had asked her the same questions a month before and he would ask her again a month from now, pretending that he was old and sick and didn’t remember their last conversation. Fix was old and sick, but he remembered everything. Keep examining the witness—that’s what he had told her over the phone when she was a kid and her ID bracelet had gone missing from her locker. She had called him from Virginia at five o’clock, the minute the rates went down, two o’clock California time. She called him at work. She had never called him at work before but she had his business card. He was a detective by then, and he was her father, so she figured he’d know how to find the bracelet.

“Ask around,” her father had told her. “Find out who was changing classes and where they were going. You don’t need to make a big deal about it, don’t let anyone think you’re accusing them, but you talk to every kid who walked down that hall and then talk to them again because either there’s something they’re keeping from you or there’s something they haven’t remembered yet themselves. You have to be willing to put in the time if you’re serious about finding it.”

Patsy was his nurse today, a child-sized Vietnamese woman who swam in her XXS lavender scrubs. She waved at him from across the crowded room as if it were a party and she had finally caught his eye. “You’re here!” she said.

“I’m here,” he said.

She came to him, her black hair braided and the braid caught up in a doubled loop like a rope to be used in the case of true emergency. “You’re looking good, Mr. Keating,” she said.

“The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.’”

“It all depends on where I see you. I see you at the beach lying on a towel in your swim trunks, I don’t think you look so good. But here”—Patsy dropped her voice and looked around the room. She leaned in close. “Here you look good.”

Fix unbuttoned the top buttons on his shirt and pulled it back, offering her the port in his chest. “Did you meet my daughter Franny?”

“I know Franny,” Patsy said, and gave Franny the smallest raise of the eyebrow, universal shorthand for The old man is forgetting. She pushed a large syringe of saline to clear the port. “Tell me your full name.”

“Francis Xavier Keating.”

“Date of birth.”

“April 20, 1931.”

“That’s the winning ticket,” she said, and pulled three clear plastic pouches from the pockets of her scrub top. “Oxaliplatin, 5FU, and this little one is just an antiemetic.”

“Good,” Fix said, nodding. “Plug ’em in.”

From outside the seventh-story window the bright Los Angeles morning came slanting in across the linoleum floor. Patsy skated off to the nurses’ station to input the details of treatment while Fix stared up at the silent advertisement playing on the television that hung from the ceiling. A woman walking through a rainstorm was drenched and dripping, lightning shooting down around her. Then a handsome stranger handed her his umbrella and as soon as he did the rain stopped. The street was now some British gardener’s idea of the afterlife, all sunshine and roses. The woman’s hair was dry and billowing, and her dress trailed behind her like butterfly wings. The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.

“You know who I always think about when I’m here?” Fix asked Franny.

“Bert.”

He made a face. “If I ask you a question about Bert or his pyromaniac son, that’s called making conversation, being polite. I don’t think about them.”

“Dad,” Franny said. “Who’ve you been thinking about lately?”

“Lomer,” he said. “You didn’t know Lomer, did you?”

“I didn’t,” she said, but she knew that story too, or some version of the story. Her mother had told her a long time ago.

Fix shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t remember Lomer. You were sitting in his lap the last time he came over. He was carrying you around everywhere with him. He didn’t even put you down when he ate his dinner. It was just a couple months after your christening party, I remember now. You were a pretty baby, Franny, and you were sweet. Everyone made such a fuss over you and it drove your sister crazy. Before you came along, Lomer paid all his attention to Caroline, which was how she liked it. I remember Lomer saying to her, ‘Caroline, come up here, there’s plenty of room,’ but she wasn’t having it. She couldn’t stand to see the two of you together.”

“Well, there you go,” Franny said. To the best of Franny’s memory, the only lap Caroline had ever wanted to sit in was their father’s, even after they had moved to the other side of the country.