I didn’t say anything. We sat in silence for a while. The clock on the mantel ticked. Somewhere in the kitchen, my dad was making a lot of noise rearranging pots that didn’t need rearranging. Making sure we knew he was there.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
Ben looked down like he’d forgotten he was holding it. He held it out to me, then hesitated, then set it on the coffee table between us instead.
I opened it.
It was a hospital bracelet. The one for fathers. The one he never came back to get at check-in.
“I went back to the hospital,” he said. “I asked the nurses if they still had it. The one with our names. I know it’s stupid. They thought I was crazy. But one of them, the nurse with the purple scrubs, she remembered you. And she found it in a drawer at the nurses’ station. She said she’d kept it because she had a feeling someone would come back for it.”
