The Father In The Chair
On the fourth day he was in the chair. The chair was a wide recliner by the window with a fleece thrown over the back of it, and Mairead and another woman I had not met had got him into it with the hoist before we arrived, so that when my mother and I came in at eleven he was sitting up looking out at the car park and the heather bed and the low sky, and he was more himself than I had yet seen him.
"Well, Maeve," he said, when I came in.
"Daddy."
"Sit down there."
There was a second chair at the window, a low chair, and I sat in it. My mother did not sit. My mother had decided, I realised, that this was a day for us; she took off her coat and put it on the back of her chair and said, "I'm going to talk to Mairead," and she went out.
He watched her go. He watched the door close behind her. He turned his head back to the window. The morphine patch was at his collarbone, visible above the neck of his pyjamas. His hands were on his thighs, palm down, the way he had sat in his own chair at home for forty years, a posture of a man waiting for the news.
"She has you brought in," he said.
"She has."
"She's been at me about it."
"Has she."
"She's not said it. But she's been at me about it." He looked at me. "She wanted you over. And she wouldn't say it."
"She said it in the end. She rang me."
"On a Tuesday, I'd say."
"On a Tuesday."
"Ah, she'd wait for a Tuesday. A Tuesday