“You sound like a woman when you talk like that,” he said.

They were in a semiprivate room on the fourth floor of the hospital. His father had been there for three days. IV tubes snaked out of his arms, and he hadn’t eaten solid food in more than a month. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin was translucent. Up close, Steve thought his father’s breath smelled of decay, another sign the cancer was announcing its victory.

Steve turned toward the window. Outside, he could see nothing but blue skies, a bright, unyielding bubble surrounding the room. No birds, no clouds, no visible trees. Behind him, he could hear the steady beep of the heart monitor. It sounded strong and steady, with regular rhythm, making it seem that his father would live another twenty years. But it wasn’t his heart that was killing him.

“How is he?” Kim asked later that night when they were talking on the phone.

“Not good,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer he has, but…”

He trailed off. He could imagine Kim on the other end, standing near the stove, stirring pasta or dicing tomatoes, the phone cocked between her ear and shoulder. She’d never been able to sit still when talking on the phone.

“Did anyone else come by?”

“No,” he answered. What he didn’t tell her was that according to the nurses, no one else had visited at all.

“Were you able to talk to him?” she asked.

“Yes, but not for long. He was drifting in and out most of the day.”

“Did you say what I told you to say?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What did he say?” she asked. “Did he say he loved you, too?”

Steve knew the answer she wanted. He was standing in his father’s home, inspecting the photos on the mantel: the family after Steve was baptized, a wedding photo of Kim and Steve, Ronnie and Jonah as toddlers. The frames were dusty, untouched in years. He knew that it had been his mother who put them there, and as he stared at them, he wondered what his father thought as he looked at them, or if he even saw them at all, or if he even realized they were there.

“Yes,” he finally said. “He told me he loved me.”

“I’m glad,” she said. Her tone was relieved and satisfied, as though his answer had affirmed something to her about the world. “I know how important that was to you.”

Steve grew up in a white ranch-style house, in a neighborhood of white ranch-style houses on the intracoastal side of the island. It was small, with two bedrooms, a single bathroom, and a separate garage that housed his father’s tools and smelled permanently of sawdust. The backyard, shaded by a gnarled live oak that held its leaves year-round, didn’t get enough sun, so his mother planted the vegetable garden in the front. She grew tomatoes and onions, turnips and beans, cabbage and corn, and in the summers, it was impossible to see the road that fronted the house from the living room. Sometimes Steve would overhear the neighbors grumbling in hushed voices, complaining about declining property values, but the garden was replanted every spring, and no one ever said a word directly to his father. They knew, as well as he did, that it wouldn’t have done them any good. Besides, they liked his wife, and they all knew they would need his services one day.

His father was a trim carpenter by trade, but he had a gift for fixing anything. Over the years, Steve had seen him repair radios, televisions, auto and lawn mower engines, leaking pipes, dangling gutters, broken windows, and once, even the hydraulic presses of a small tool-manufacturing plant near the state line. He’d never attended high school, but he had an innate understanding of mechanics and building concepts. At night, when the phone rang, his father always answered, since it was usually for him. Most of the time, he said very little, listening as one emergency or another was described, and then Steve would watch him carefully jot the address on pieces of scratch paper torn from old newspapers. After hanging up, his father would venture to the garage, fill his toolbox, and head out, usually without mentioning where he was going or when he would be back home. In the morning, the check would be tucked neatly beneath the statue of Robert E. Lee that his father had carved from a piece of driftwood, and his mother would rub his back and promise to deposit it at the bank as his father ate his breakfast. It was the only regular affection he noticed between them. They didn’t argue and avoided conflict as a rule. They seemed to enjoy each other’s company when they were together, and once, he’d caught them holding hands while watching TV; but in the eighteen years Steve had lived at home, he never saw his parents kiss.

If his father had one passion in life, it was poker. On the nights the phone didn’t ring, his father went to one of the lodges to play. He was a member of those lodges, not for the camaraderie, but for the games. There, he would sit at the table with other Freemasons or Elks or Shriners or veterans, playing Texas hold ’em for hours. The game transfixed him; he loved computing the probabilities of drawing an outside straight or deciding whether to bluff when all he held was a pair of sixes. When he talked about the game, he described it as a science, as if the luck of the draw had nothing to do with winning. “The secret is to know how to lie,” he used to say, “and to know when someone’s lying to you.” His father, Steve eventually decided, must have known how to lie. In his fifties, with his hands nearly crippled from over thirty years of carpentry, his father stopped installing crown molding and door frames in the custom oceanfront homes that had begun to spring up on the island; he also began to leave the phone unanswered in the evenings. Somehow, he continued to pay his bills, and by the end of his life, he had more than enough in his accounts to pay for the medical care his insurance didn’t cover.

He never played poker on Saturday or Sunday. Saturdays were reserved for chores around the house, and while the garden in the front yard may have bothered the neighbors, the interior was a showpiece. Over the years, his father added crown molding and wainscoting; he carved the fireplace corbels from two blocks of maple. He built the cabinets in the kitchen and installed wood floors that were as flat and sure as a billiard table. He remodeled the bathroom, then remodeled it again eight years later. Every Saturday evening, he put on a jacket and tie and took his wife to dinner. Sundays, he reserved for himself. After church, he would tinker in his workshop, while his wife baked pies or canned vegetables in the kitchen.

On Monday, the routine started all over again.

His father never taught him to play the game. Steve was smart enough to learn the basics on his own, and he liked to think he was keen enough to spot someone bluffing. He played a few times with fellow students in college and found out he was simply average, no better or worse than any of the others. After he graduated and moved to New York, he’d occasionally come down to visit his parents. The first time, he hadn’t seen them in two years, and when he walked through the door, his mom hugged him fiercely and kissed him on the cheek. His father shook his hand and said, “Your mom’s missed you.” Apple pie and coffee were served, and after they finished eating, his dad stood, reaching for his jacket and car keys. It was a Tuesday; that meant he was going to the Elks lodge. The game ended at ten and he would be home fifteen minutes later.

“No… no go tonight,” his mom urged, her European accent as heavy as ever. “Steve just got home.”

He remembered thinking that it was the only time he’d ever heard his mom ask his father not to go to the lodge, but if he was surprised, his father didn’t show it. He paused at the doorway, and when he turned around, his face was unreadable.

“Or take him with you,” she urged.