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“That's the Hulk!” Cancer Boy laughs.

“Necktie caught in office shredder.”

“Hippo bite.”

“Bee sting!” Cancer Boy shouts.

“But the weird thing?” I suggest, “It wasn't the insect, but the letter
B
.”

“Bad dim sum,” Dad declares of the next patient.

“Blown up by leaf blower.”

“She got a wiener dog stuck in her hoo-hah!” Cancer Boy shouts gleefully, and as all heads in the hallway turn toward us, I realize there's no topping that.

*   *   *

Back in our hospital room Cancer Boy proves a quick study as degenerate gambler. When he hits on nineteen and pulls a deuce, I have to think he's counting cards. He's also broken the house bank of all its M&Ms.

“That's it, kid,” I fold. “No bank, no blackjack.”

He scoops up his winnings greedily. Dad still has four M&Ms and presses a red one between his lips, crushing it in tiny nibbles between his front teeth. Cancer Boy nudges three of his my way.

“What's this for?”

“Tip,” he shrugs.

“I told you: the kid's a ringer.” Dad lies back on his bed.

“We're going to check all the hospital security cameras, and if we catch you cheating, you're banned. I'll put your picture up all over the hospital, and you won't be able to get a game of pinochle in the geriatric unit.”

“What's that?”

“Never mind!” I pop a single M&M. “Why are you in the hospital anyway? Wait, don't tell me: you're a big-game hunter, and you were hurt trying to shoot Monopoly.”

“I have
cancer
!” he says, incredulous.

“No!”

“Yes! Why do you think I'm bald?”

“I thought maybe you had a hair-spray accident while smoking.”

“I'm too little to smoke!” he laughs.

“Don't sell yourself short; you're not too little for anything. But don't smoke. It gives you cancer!” I chew my second M&M.

“Still no goddamn
SportsCenter,
” Dad mumbles, flipping channels.

“I already
have
cancer, you big dummy!” he laughs harder.

“Well, I told you to give up smoking, but do you listen to me? No. Never, not once, in all the time we've known each other.”

“You're stupid!” he howls. “You just met me!”

“And yet, I feel I hardly know you.”

He turns to Dad. “He's stupid!”

“Dumb as a bag of doorknobs,” he agrees. “But he grows on you.”

“Now, we've all been through a lot: Dad has fibrillated excessively, my arm is leaking like a pus-faucet, and the boy here lost all his hair in a terrible hair-spray fire.”

“Did not!” He's still laughing.

“But we've bared our derrieres, and there's no stronger bond among men.” I swallow the third and final M&M whole.

“What's a derriere?”

“Our
butts
!” I shout, just as the boy's mother walks into the room.

“The nurse told me you were down here,” she says, exhaling perhaps for the first time since arriving at his room to find it empty. “What are you doing?”

“Baring our
butts
!” he howls, doubled over with laughter.

“Also, gambling,” I add, “in case you're not concerned enough.”

She looks at me, indeed concerned for that instant before her eyes drop to my nubby shoulder and she melts. “I hope he's not bothering you.” Another giant mood swing triggered by a barely perceptible eye-shift.

Introductions are made, and then the alligator in the room is acknowledged.

“He was attacked by an alligator!” Cancer Boy brags. “They have it in their bathtub!”

“Surprisingly, one of those things is true.” I try to sneak one of the kid's M&Ms, but he scoops them up.

“I'm saving these for later.” He drops them into the pocket of his gown.

“Don't hoard! The key to being a good gambler is to enjoy your winnings.”

“I throw up less in the mornings,” he explains, suddenly quiet, and whatever unfairness I've carried since the accident leaves me to perch like a parrot on this boy where it belongs.

“It's good to see him laugh,” his mother says, and she wishes us well before taking him back to the pediatric ward. Dad snaps off his television, and all that's left is the quiet din of a meaningless universe.

 

POSSIBLE CAUSES OF ONE-ARMED AFFLICTION

Alligator attack
*

Infection

Cancer

Defusing a bomb

Run over by train

Machete fight

Propeller accident

Clumsy axe murderer

Threshing-machine mishap

Shot by your own Confederate troops

Malfunctioning automatic sphygmomanometer

Stupid fucking SUV driver

*
For brevity's sake “alligator” also stands in for shark, lion, angry badger, and all potential predators of arms.

 

REGRETS

The next couple of days pass like a kidney stone, slow and painful. My arm is still draining and Dad continues to be observed—although, thankfully, he suffers no further episodes. While I'm under the intermittent barrage of IV swaps, bandage changes, fever checks, blood taking, drug dosages (and once, just to annoy Dad, a sponge bath), Dad is left relatively unmolested. In his boredom he plays the television like a first-person shooter, never relenting in his fevered manipulation of the remote, images flashing in front of us almost too quickly to register. When he finally settles on something, he usually dozes off shortly thereafter; if I reach over to snap off the TV the abrupt silence is enough to awaken him and start the cycle all over again.

But this time instead of reactivating the TV he turns as if to make sure I'm still here. I wave with my good hand and Dad nods back, managing a smile that quickly fades. He looks a little sad, and regretful—things I'd never seen cross Dad's face before.

“Do you ever have regrets?” I ask him.

“Jesus God,” he groans.

“Really,” I press. “If we were to die right now, what would you regret?”

“How would
we
die at the same time right now, by meteor?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, if
we
died, of course I'd regret that my son didn't live longer than me.”

“Fine. What if it was only
you
who died?”

“Everything we do, we do for a reason. As long as it's a good reason,” Dad shrugs, “what's to regret? You did the best you could with what you knew at the time.”

“What about things you didn't do? Opportunities that never happened?”

“Like what?”

“For me, I regret never having sex with two women.”

“What are you talking about? You've had sex with a lot more than two women.”

“I mean at the same time.”

“Oh,” he says, thinking. “I never had sex with two women either. In my life.”

This information stuns me. Dad has only been with Mom? And now, if she hadn't already, Mom has trumped Dad with her firefighter.

“That's … remarkable.”

“Only because you believe in instant gratification—you see what you want and you have to have it. And every shiny thing around you is something new you want, and you can't imagine what it's like not to want it and not to have it.”

“You say that like it's a bad thing.”

“Do you think I ever even looked at two women and thought for a second
I want to have sex with those two women together
? As if that was even possible in my life?”

“I guess not…”

“Of course I did,” Dad laughs, surprising me. “What am I, made of wood?” We're both laughing, and I find it comforting that my dull, reliable father, who had chosen the safe haven of a life modulated away from extreme emotional poles, had a hidden streak of hedonism in him. “But one of them was always your mother,” he clarifies.

Just then Mom enters, with a pint of Fleischmann's and three Dixie cups she's pulled from the water cooler.

“I brought a little something for my boys.”

“You're the best mom ever,” I gush.

Mom pours freely and then does so again. It isn't long before Dad is draining the last of eleven drops into his cup as a nurse arrives with the news that we're being discharged. It's a good thing we live close by, although it still takes Mom twenty minutes of white-knuckled focus punctuated by occasional giggling to get there.

*   *   *

As we pass through the not exactly immaculate housekeeping of my father, I find myself still a little tipsy and thinking about germs again. It's estimated that the average person touches his face three thousand times a day. So perhaps one upside of one-handedness is that I touch my face half as much (I paw at my face while thinking this), or even accounting for using one's favored hand, one-third as much. That's a thousand times a day fewer chances for transmitting some contagion from a doorknob to myself. Twisting Jackie's doorknob exposes me to a different kind of danger, as I find her packing.

“Was it something I said?”

“My, what a healthy ego we have,” she chides me, twisting the knife of the plural pronoun. “You're not the motivating factor in my every decision.”

“No more arguing!” Dad orders from the hallway, and Mom starts giggling.

I hug Jackie, and she lets me for a beat, before pulling away to resume packing.

“The simple fact is, I have a job, a husband, a mortgage to pay,” she ticks off a joyless trifecta of responsibilities. “I've stayed longer than I thought I would. I'm sure everyone's going to be fine without me.”

“We'll be fine,” Dad says, drifting farther down the hallway.

“Not that we won't miss you!” Mom laughs, and Dad joins her.

Jackie stares back at them, confused.

“It was nice to have you here and to spend the time with you,” I agree.

“I agree,” Dad agrees with my agreement, before being pulled into their bedroom by Mom and slamming the door behind them.

“Good God, I cannot figure those two out.”

“They both live without regrets,” I tell her. “If you can imagine such a thing.”

Jackie sits down quietly. “I admit to feeling a little overwhelmed here. My life in California is pretty uncomplicated.”

“That's good. You can die of complications.”

“Try not to.”

“You'll be back. We have some sheriffs to sue. We'll be thousandaires!”

“Sue them without me. When you win, bring your private jet to LA.”

“How are things between you and Steve?”

“We're fine. The way it works is, every six months he does something incredibly stupid, he's appropriately ashamed, and behaves perfectly for another six months.”

“Twice a year, I have my teeth cleaned only to have to do it again. So he's no worse than plaque.”

“Marriage is work. You know that.”

“Actually, I didn't. Which is probably why mine didn't … work.”

“What happened with you two, anyway? You never told us anything.”

“It's been a very long time; why spoil things now?”

She shrugs.

“Once, very early, we'd just gotten married,” I remember. “We had this little apartment with a swinging door in and out of the kitchen…”

“I remember. Cute place.”

“One time, I was coming in as she was coming out with hot coffee. It spilled on her—the way I saw it, I spilled it on her—and burned her. It wasn't a bad burn, like something you had to go to the hospital for or anything. She just ran it under cold water and seemed fine. But I remember that moment, when she gasped and tried not to drop the coffee and rushed to the sink: I hurt her. I felt such a sensation of remorse, like I never had before: I hurt her. It didn't matter that it was unintentional—I had done something that caused her pain. I actually felt light-headed, as if I might faint. I thought I was going to cry; I had to try so hard not to. She kept assuring me she was okay and even laughed that I was getting so emotional … but I couldn't get past the fact that I had hurt her, that she was in pain because of me. It was a completely alien concept.”

“Okay,” Jackie squints at me, confused.

“After a few years, I hurt her almost regularly … and I didn't feel like that anymore.”

“God, that makes me want to cry.”

“Please don't. I couldn't handle it; I'm in a very fragile emotional state. Did I mention that I haven't been stoned for like, three days?”

“Did you even hear from her after the accident?”

“No, but come on—we split up five years ago. I don't even know where she is. It's not like we wish each other dead; we just don't mean anything to each other anymore.”

“I'm sorry I didn't come. Mom and Dad convinced me to wait until you came home, but I felt so guilty…”

“You have nothing to feel guilty about.” I sit next to her on the bed. “I was pretty out of it; I wouldn't even have known you were there. If you had to miss work for a month, this was the month. Look how much fun we had! It was much less exciting in rehab.”

“I could have used a little less excitement. I'm completely exhausted.”

“Thanks for coming home to help. I know I'm a shitty patient.”

“The shittiest.”

She buries herself under my good arm and we sit like that a long time, left unspoken the fact that she gets to leave and I do not.

 

DRIVE

Dad has bought a new pre-owned car—a van, of all things, in what the brochure no doubt calls “sand” or “biscuit” or “cinnamon” but more closely resembles the sickly pallor of a man on his deathbed, like the old “flesh” color of a discontinued crayon. Before I can make him feel bad about buying a flesh-colored van, he tells me: