After The Fight
867 Words
They did not finish the conversation that evening.
Not because they avoided it. Because Kola came home at nine to find a message from the hospital. His father had had a difficult afternoon. A small setback. Nothing critical but enough to require presence.
He knocked on her study door.
She looked up.
He told her.
She closed her laptop immediately. “Do you need me to come.”
He looked at her. She saw him process the offer. The genuine quality of it.
“No,” he said. “But thank you.”
“Call me if that changes.”
“Yes.”
He left.
She sat in the study for a while after she heard the front door close. She thought about the morning. The document. The fight that had not finished. The things said and the things underneath the things said that were more true than either of them had managed to reach during the actual argument.
She thought about what he had said.
I have spent a very long time making decisions alone.
She had said the same thing with different words her whole life.
She went to bed at eleven. She did not sleep immediately.
He came home at half past one.
She heard the door. She heard his footsteps on the stairs. She heard them pause outside her room for a moment and then continue to his.
She looked at the ceiling.
She got up.
She knocked on his door.
“Come in,” he said.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed still in his work clothes with his jacket over the chair and his tie loosened and the look of a man who had been sitting in a hospital room watching his father sleep and had arrived home carrying something heavy.
She sat in the chair across from him.
“How is he,” she said.
“Stable,” he said. “The doctors say it was stress related. They want him to reduce visitors for two weeks.”
“That includes you.”
“That includes me,” he said. “Which he argued about until the nurse threatened to sedate him which is how I know he is genuinely alright.”
She almost smiled.
“Kola,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “The conversation.”
“Not tonight,” she said. “Tonight is not for that.”
He looked at her.
“I came to check on you,” she said simply. “That is all.”
Something in his face shifted. The particular shift of a man who was not accustomed to being checked on and did not know immediately what to do with it.
“I am alright,” he said.
“You do not have to be,” she said.
He looked at his hands. “He looks smaller,” he said. “In the hospital bed. He was always such a large presence. The kind of man who filled a room without trying. And now he looks.” He stopped.
“Like someone who needs looking after,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That is frightening,” she said. “When a person you have thought of as permanent starts to look temporary.”
He looked at her. “Yes,” he said. “That is exactly it.”
She sat with him in the quiet.
She did not offer solutions. She did not tell him his father would be fine or that things would improve or any of the things people said when they could not tolerate the weight of someone else’s uncertainty. She simply sat.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said: “I am sorry. About the document. About the decision I made. You were right. It was not mine to make.”
“I know you were not trying to deceive me,” she said.
“Intention does not fix the effect,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It does not. But it matters to me anyway.”
He nodded.
“We are both,” she said, “people who are very practised at protecting ourselves and very unpractised at letting someone else have access to the parts that need protecting. That does not excuse it. But it is the true thing underneath it.”
“Yes,” he said.
“So we work on it,” she said. “Both of us.”
“Both of us,” he agreed.
She stood.
“Sleep,” she said. “The hospital is not going anywhere and neither is the conversation. Both will be there in the morning.”
“Yes.”
She went to the door.
“Adunola.”
She turned.
“Thank you,” he said. “For coming to check.”
She looked at him sitting on the edge of his bed in his work clothes at half past one in the morning looking like a man who had needed someone to come and check for a very long time.
“That is what this is for,” she said.
She went back to her room.
She slept better than she had in weeks.
- Writer
