Dad looked at the photograph.
“That has nothing to do with you.”
“It seems like it might.”
He walked toward the window.
Outside, rainwater still shone on the terrace.
“I was twenty.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No. It’s context.”
I waited.
Ten years earlier, I wouldn’t have.
I would have pushed.
He would have closed down.
We would have walked away with both of us more certain the other was impossible.
Military medicine had taught me many things that had nothing to do with medicine.
One was that silence could be diagnostic.
Sometimes you waited and let it tell you where the pain was.
Dad finally spoke.
“I wanted to become a cardiothoracic surgeon.”
That was not what I expected.
“You?”
He glanced at me.
“I did, in fact, possess interests before becoming your father.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant.”
There was almost humor in it.
Almost.
He picked up the photograph.
“The summer after my sophomore year, your grandfather arranged for me to volunteer at a military hospital. He assumed it would cure me of what he called an impractical fascination with medicine.”
“But it did the opposite.”
“Yes.”
Dad ran his thumb across the photograph.
“I loved it.”
