Not for me.
For himself.
‘Tell him this isn’t what it looks like,’ he said quickly.
‘Tell him my mother didn’t mean it.’
My father heard every word.
‘Thomas,’ he said, and I have never heard such controlled fury in a human voice, ‘do not speak to my daughter again unless it is to help her get to the front door.
I’m calling an ambulance now.’
The paramedics arrived within minutes.
My father arrived just after them, still wearing his dark winter coat over the suit he had been wearing at a holiday judicial reception downtown.
He crossed Margaret’s threshold without greeting anyone, went straight to me, touched my face with one hand, and asked, ‘Can you walk?’
I started crying the second he said it.
Not because of the pain.
Because it was the first gentle question anyone had asked me all day.
He rode with me to the hospital.
