Sing

CHAPTER 16.

MONICA

I slept in a random waiting room, despite promising Brad I’d go home. I got up aching everywhere and sat in the cafeteria, writing a song on a napkin. Something moved on the table. I snapped out of it. My notebook, with the NOPA inside was being slid toward me. Declan stood over the table.

“I thought you might want this,” he said. “You left it here the other day.”

“Thanks.” I stuffed it in my bag. “You’re like a regular here, these days. Piece of furniture.”

“Like fiberglass and cheap chrome?”

“The Drazen sense of humor is genetic, apparently.”

“Not so apparent.” He sat down. “I haven’t heard my boy crack a joke in twenty years.”

“He’s funny.” My voice cracked. I put my head down. I couldn’t look at him, because I was about to say ‘he was funny.’ My eyes were stinging and my face got red. I didn’t want this man made of fiberglass and chrome to see me cry over his prodigal son.

“Margaret told me,” he said.

I sniffed and tried to get my shit together. “Why aren’t you ever upstairs with them?” I clutched my tea, letting it heat up my icy hands.

“This is as close as I’m allowed. They don’t want me there. My wife, at least. We sleep on opposite sides of the house. Decades of neglect will do that.”

“I’m sure it was purely benign.” My raw emotional mood made my feelings hard to hide, and in that unguarded moment, my voice dripped with inappropriately rude sarcasm. I wasn’t being a woman of grace.

But he seemed to take it in stride. “I had a very, shall we say, intense mid-life crisis.”

“You shared a mistress with your son. Pretty intense.”

“Is that what he told you? Interesting. I guess he could have seen it that way. She was a very manipulative girl, but yes, I did plenty I was pleased with at the time, and now...well now I need a golf cart to get to my wife’s bedroom and my son won’t see me.” He massaged his coffee. “Would he be upset if he knew you were at a table with me?”

“Yeah.” I suddenly felt guilty for being there. Jonathan would not like it. Not one bit. If he was going to get well, he needed to know that I was safe, and I was sure he didn’t think of me as safe around his father. I put the granola bar in my bag.

“I should go upstairs. It was nice talking to you.”

“Yes, it was.”