Chapter 4

Don looked at his watch.

8-and-a-half hours since he had picked Charlie up at the clinic.

4 hours since Alan had come home and they had found Charlie sick in the bathroom.

2 hours since the emergency surgery had begun.

1-and-a-half hours since Alan had spoken to him.

45 minutes since he had gone outside and walked around in the cool air, phoning Megan and waking her up, telling her not to count on his coming to the office later that morning.

23 minutes since the last time a nurse had come to the surgical waiting room to tell them things were going "as well as could be expected".

22 minutes spent thinking about what the hell that was supposed to mean.

17 minutes since his father had turned a page in the magazine he was holding.

7 minutes since Don had declared his coffee officially cold and thrown in away.

4 minutes since… "I just don't understand what you were thinking."

With difficulty Don pulled his mind off the passage of time and focused on his father's words. Dad was speaking to him again, but Don didn't quite get what he was saying. "When?"

Alan looked up from the magazine. "You should have told me. Or you should have made Charlie tell me."

"But…I…it…He said it was no big deal. And I can't make his decisions for him. He's 30 years old, Dad! As soon as I picked him up and saw what kind of shape he was in, I called in to work and stayed with him…" Don stopped talking. He was sounding like he had when he was 10 and his parents made him walk Charlie to school. Charlie had refused to hold his hand — not that Don had really pushed him on that — and he ran ahead, tripping over a tree root in the sidewalk and skinning both knees. Both his parents had been angry with him over that…

"…me on the course," Alan was saying, and Don tried to focus again. "I would have come home instead of going out for dinner."

"You heard the doctor, Dad. He was okay, this was sudden, unexpected…I didn't think I had to interrupt you…"

Alan threw the magazine angrily onto the table in front of him and glared at Don. "No. You didn't think. Your brother is sick, he…he had a biopsy for God's sake, and you didn't think…"

"Tonight is the first I heard about that, too," interrupted Don quietly. "I said it before. Charlie is an adult. I can tell him he should tell you things, but I can't make him do it."

Alan's eyebrows arched. "Things? What else are you helping him hide from me?"

Don sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Nothing, Dad, really…I just meant…" He was suddenly exhausted, and frightened, and 10 years old again. The despair in his own voice disgusted him. "Why are you so angry at me?"

Alan squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them again and stood, began wandering around the waiting area. He found that he couldn't answer Don right away, because he didn't understand himself why he was so angry. He started to think out loud, staring at the wall and not at Don. "My wife is gone," he said. "My oldest son insists on working the most dangerous job he can find. Every time I see him could be the last. My youngest son is pursued by mathematical demons every second of his life, never learned how to outrun them. Instead he embraces them, and follows them wherever they ask him to go. He's in as much danger as his brother…sometimes he's even standing next to his brother sharing the same danger. I could lose them both at once." He pivoted and looked at Don. "I'm angry because none of you have considered me. I'm angry because leaving me is just a side effect of your lives." Alan strode out of the waiting area, then, while Don sat in shocked silence.

He had never heard his father speak this way. Alan was the consummate optimist. He knew that his Dad worried — about Don's job, Charlie's 'demons', as he had just called them — but he had worried over them for so long that Don didn't really register it, anymore. It just was. Grass was green, sky was blue, Alan worried. Don hadn't realized how much it was costing Alan. When this was over, when Charlie was better, the two of them would have to talk about this. Maybe they had been selfish, chasing their own dreams to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe they hadn't been grateful enough for Alan, careful enough of him…

Don shivered a little and crossed his arms in front of his chest. Charlie would get better, He would. And then they could have a talk about the kind of sons they wanted to be. He would make Charlie understand the kind of brother he wanted to be, too. He didn't want to be called at 10 the night before Charlie needed a ride home from a biopsy he didn't even tell him about. He wanted to take him to the appointment, and sit in the waiting room, or go back with him and hold his hand, if he would let him. When their mother had been diagnosed with cancer, Don had uprooted himself from his life and job in Albuquerque to come back to L.A. and do whatever he could. If Charlie didn't know that he loved him that much too, then their father was right. Don had failed, somehow. He had let misunderstandings and old resentments take too much control over their relationship.

He was going to change that, he was. When this was over, when Charlie was better.

Don uncrossed his arms and looked at his watch again.