Fat Charlie had nodded, and gone in to his mother. She had held his hand, and was asking him whether or not he had remembered to pay her gas bill, when the noise began in the corridor—a clashing, parping, stomping, rattling, brass-and-bass-and-drum sort of noise, of the kind that tends not to be heard in hospitals, where signs in the stairwells request quiet and the icy glares of the nursing staff enforce it.
The noise was getting louder.
For one moment Fat Charlie thought it might be terrorists. His mother, though, smiled weakly at the cacophony. “Yellow bird,” she whispered.
“What?” said Fat Charlie, scared that she had stopped making sense.
“ ‘Yellow Bird,’ ” she said, louder and more firmly. “It’s what they’re playing.”
Fat Charlie went to the door, and looked out.
Coming down the hospital corridor, ignoring the protests of nurses, the stares of patients in pajamas and of their families, was what appeared to be a very small New Orleans jazz band. There was a saxophone and a sousaphone and a trumpet. There was an enormous man with what looked like a double bass strung around his neck. There was a man with a bass drum, which he banged. And at the head of the pack, in a smart checked suit, wearing a fedora hat and lemon yellow gloves, came Fat Charlie’s father. He played no instrument but was doing a soft-shoe-shuffle along the polished linoleum of the hospital floor, lifting his hat to each of the medical staff in turn, shaking hands with anyone who got close enough to talk or to attempt to complain.
Fat Charlie bit his lip, and prayed to anyone who might be listening that the earth would open and swallow him up or, failing that, that he might suffer a brief, merciful and entirely fatal heart attack. No such luck. He remained among the living, the brass band kept coming, his father kept dancing and shaking hands and smiling.
If there is any justice in the world, thought Fat Charlie, my father will keep going down the corridor, and he’ll go straight past us and into the genito-urinary department; however, there was no justice, and his father reached the door of the oncology ward and stopped.
“Fat Charlie,” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the ward—on that floor—in the hospital—was able to comprehend that this was someone who knew Fat Charlie. “Fat Charlie, get out of the way. Your father is here.”
Fat Charlie got out of the way.
The band, led by Fat Charlie’s father, snaked their way through the ward to Fat Charlie’s mother’s bed. She looked up at them as they approached, and she smiled.
“ ‘Yellow Bird,’ ” she said, weakly. “It’s my favorite song.”
“And what kind of man would I be if I forgot that?” asked Fat Charlie’s father.
She shook her head slowly, and she reached out her hand and squeezed his hand in its lemon yellow glove.
“Excuse me,” said a small white woman with a clipboard, “are these people with you?”
“No,” said Fat Charlie, his cheeks heating up. “They’re not. Not really.”
“But that is your mother, isn’t it?” said the woman, with a basilisk glance. “I must ask you to make these people vacate the ward momentarily, and without incurring any further disturbance.”
Fat Charlie muttered.
“What was that?”
“I said, I’m pretty sure I can’t make them do anything,” said Fat Charlie. He was consoling himself that things could not possibly get any worse, when his father took a plastic carrier bag from the drummer and began producing cans of brown ale and handing them out to his band, to the nursing staff, to the patients. Then he lit a cheroot.
“Excuse me,” said the woman with the clipboard, when she saw the smoke, and she launched herself across the room at Fat Charlie’s father like a Scud missile with its watch on upside down.
Fat Charlie took that moment to slip away. It seemed the wisest course of action.
He sat at home that night, waiting for the phone to ring or for a knock on the door, in much the same spirit that a man kneeling at the guillotine might wait for the blade to kiss his neck; still, the doorbell did not ring.
He barely slept, and slunk in to the hospital the following afternoon prepared for the worst.
His mother, in her bed, looked happier and more comfortable than she had looked in months. “He’s gone back,” she told Fat Charlie, when he came in. “He couldn’t stay. I have to say, Charlie, I do wish you hadn’t just gone like that. We wound up having a party here. We had a fine old time.”
Fat Charlie could think of nothing worse than having to attend a party in a cancer ward, thrown by his father with a jazz band. He didn’t say anything.
“He’s not a bad man,” said Fat Charlie’s mother, with a twinkle in her eye. Then she frowned. “Well, that’s not exactly true. He’s certainly not a good man. But he did me a power of good last night,” and she smiled, a real smile and, for just a moment, looked young again.
The woman with the clipboard was standing in the doorway, and she crooked her finger at him. Fat Charlie beetled down the ward toward her, apologizing before she was even properly within earshot. Her look, he realized, as he got closer to her, was no longer that of a basilisk with stomach cramps. Now she looked positively kittenish. “Your father,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” said Fat Charlie. It was what he had always said, growing up, when his father was mentioned.
“No, no, no,” said the former basilisk. “Nothing to apologize for. I was just wondering. Your father. In case we need to get in touch with him—we don’t have a telephone number or an address on file. I should have asked him last night, but it completely got away from me.”
“I don’t think he has a phone number,” said Fat Charlie. “And the best way to find him is to go to Florida, and to drive up Highway A1A—that’s the coast road that runs up most of the east of the state. In the afternoon you may find him fishing off a bridge. In the evening he’ll be in a bar.”
“Such a charming man,” she said, wistfully. “What does he do?”
“I told you. He says it’s the miracle of the loafs and the fishes.”
She stared at him blankly, and he felt stupid. When his father said it, people would laugh. “Um. Like in the Bible. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Dad used to say that he loafs and fishes, and it’s a miracle that he still makes money. It was a sort of joke.”
A misty look. “Yes. He told the funniest jokes.” She clucked her tongue, and once more was all business. “Now, I need you back here at five-thirty.”
“Why?”
“To pick up your mother. And her belongings. Didn’t Dr. Johnson tell you we were discharging her?”
“You’re sending her home?”
“Yes, Mr. Nancy.”
“What about the, about the cancer?”
“It seems to have been a false alarm.”
Fat Charlie couldn’t understand how it could have been a false alarm. Last week they’d been talking about sending his mother to a hospice. The doctor had been using phrases like “weeks not months” and “making her as comfortable as possible while we wait for the inevitable.”
Still, Fat Charlie came back at 5:30 and picked up his mother, who seemed quite unsurprised to learn that she was no longer dying. On the way home she told Fat Charlie that she would be using her life savings to travel around the world.