“I’m familiar with the feeling,” I say drily.
“And then other times I think, maybe it wasn’t a fuck you. Maybe he was just that dysfunctional that he thought he was protecting you. It could have been his last gesture of care as your father.”
My throat burns. “I really think it was the first one.”
“You’re probably right.” He puts his hands into the pockets of his slacks, which somehow doesn’t make him look dejected. Instead he looks thoughtful. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s for the best. Your mom dying.”
I swallow around a knot. “No. It’s not.”
He looks toward the front of the library where a temporary wall has been erected, more protective than the heavy layers of plastic sheeting that were there before. “I have a hard time with…”
“Being nice?”
“I was going to say death. Accepting it.”
“A hard time.” My laugh sounds hollow. “Yes, I think I have that, too. I don’t accept it. I can’t. How can anyone accept it? The end of someone you love. It’s not a thing you can accept.”
He stares at me, his dark eyes opaque, because it doesn’t matter what I say. Death doesn’t care whether I accept it or not. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“No.” I think of Sutton playing gin with my mother. I can’t imagine Christopher doing the same thing, but I’m tired of pushing people away. And that isn’t what I need from him anyway. I need something more personal. More selfish. “Maybe.”
Christopher leans over the counter and picks up a yellow construction hat. “You should be wearing one of these. This is an active construction zone.”
I groan. “Not you, too. Sutton’s always on my case.”
“It’s important, Harper.” He places it lightly on my head, and I stick out my tongue.
“How am I supposed to be creative with this thing on? It’s like a jail for my head.”
“It will keep your head in one piece.” He looks up at the wall, studying it. “Did you know they invented the hard hat around the time this was carved? Out in the Hoover Dam, you had these guys on planks of wood hanging on rope seven hundred feet off the ground.”
I shiver, looking up. The wall is only thirty feet high.
“They got tired of debris falling and hitting them in the head. Sometimes killing them. So they invented a way to steam canvas, to make it hard enough to protect them.”
“You know what’s wild? How fragile human beings are, that we actually survived this long.”
“My dad had it. Prostate cancer.”
A fist around my heart. A squeeze. “I didn’t know that.”
Or maybe I didn’t want to know that about him. Maybe I kept myself closed off to him, the way he kept himself closed off from me the night after the poker game. We’re both products of our childhoods, raised not to trust love, determined to buy it so we can see the price up front.
He leans against the library circular, crossing one foot over the other. “He fought it, you know. Doing everything the doctors told him. It was brutal. It killed him faster than the cancer would have.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and I am. I’m desperately sorry. No one should have to watch their parent die like this. I don’t know what kind of death would be better, though. I don’t understand death, so maybe I’m more naive than I realized.
Or maybe death isn’t meant to be understood.
“I don’t know… maybe I thought I could spare you that, cutting off the trust fund so it couldn’t pay for that experimental treatment. I was relieved when I heard she was going to stop treatment altogether.”
My eyes close, pressing out a few tears. They’re ever present with me now. I only have to look at something she would have liked in a store, see a food she would have loved to eat before they start falling. I’m a wreck, and she’s more at peace than I’ve ever seen her.
Christopher shakes his head slowly. “Then I saw you that night. You were so lost. I would have done anything to fix that. Found a doctor from across the world. Invented a cure myself.”
I reach over the counter and touch the back of his hand. He clasps my hand, even covered with clay and dust. “Who was there for you?” I ask him. “When your father died?”
He blinks, looking uncertain. It’s a strange expression on him. Foreign. “What do you mean?”