“I don’t have any money,” I said.
Something flickered across my mother’s face.
Then it was gone.
“What trust?” I asked. “Whose trust?”
“Estate housekeeping,” my father said.
He checked his Rolex.
“A formality. Sign the page, and I’ll pay every dollar of this hospital bill myself.”
“You told me he was in Arizona,” I said.
“He is in Arizona,” my mother snapped.
“Forty-one miles,” the surgeon said.
All of us looked at him.
He still held the cross in his fist.
“I grew up in Lindenwald, Ohio,” he said. “Forty-one miles from this bed. I have never been to Arizona in my life.”
My mother came around the bed so fast her bracelet rang against the rail.
She leaned over me with her face an inch from mine, and I smelled that same sharp, sweet perfume, and for one terrible moment I was eighteen again, with a tray table and a pen.
