Dr. Vance looked at me for a long moment, his eyes scanning my tired face before he looked down at Leo.
“She needs to be here for these visits, Arthur,” he said in his plain, slow way. “This is not a one-person job.”
“I can handle the schedule,” I said, rubbing my left wrist where the watch used to be. “Just tell me what we need to do.”
“He is gaining weight, which is good,” Dr. Vance said, noting something on the chart. “But we need to watch his heart.”
I looked at the empty chair next to me, realizing for the first time how quiet the apartment would be when we got back.
The question hung in the quiet room, cold and sharp.
Goldi did not wait for me to answer. She stood up from the laminate kitchen table, her hands pressing flat against her lap as she looked toward the window.
She walked to our bedroom and dragged her single brown suitcase from the closet. The scuffed leather was a relic from her college days that usually sat under a layer of winter blankets.
I followed her to the doorway, my fingers finding my left wrist where my wedding watch used to sit. I rubbed the pale ridge of skin, a habit since I had pawned it on High Street to cover Leo’s first cranial ultrasound.
“Goldi, what are you doing with that suitcase?” I asked, my voice sounding thin in the quiet of our two-bedroom apartment.
She did not look up from the bed. She folded her blue cardigans with a rapid efficiency, her breath coming in the short, shallow puffs of someone who had just run up the stairs from Oak Street.
“We need to be practical, Arthur,” she said, her words rushing together in that breathy cadence. “We have to look at the numbers.”
