Page 17 of The Damage Man

And yet.

Evan thinks of the cheesy inspirational poster from the changing room. The words of Jack Johns, his handler and father figure: Next time. The two best words in the English language.

Is there a seed of something inside him that might be called hope?

“X?”

His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll do this.”

Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack.

“Oh,” she says.

A single syllable but the tone of it is awful. It holds sadness. And worse, something adjacent to pity.

“What, Joey?”

“He’s in Blessing, Texas, still. But. He’s … he’s not doing well, X.”

Impatience seethes in him. “Hospital?”

“Hospice.”

Sound seems to vacuum itself from the vehicle, leaving behind a barely audible tinnitus ringing, the air-held memory of a struck tuning fork.

More breathing. Then more sounds of typing. “Count Your Blessings Hospice Home,” she says. “I’ll text you the addy.”

The cute-as-pie name, for some reason, enrages him. A punch line to an inconsequential life and a whimper of an ending. Evan takes a breath and then another breath. His heart rate is steady, pulse normal, body temperature perfect. He just needs the noise to finish coming back into the world.

“X? You okay?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, he’s your father.”

“Jack was my father.”

“I know, I just mean, still. You know.”

“Diagnosis?”

“Hang on. Let me … Medical.… Lung cancer. Stage four.”

Evan recalls the yellow stalagmites climbing the incisors of Jacob Baridon’s winning smile. The man had a loose-and-easy posture and moved with a kind of masculine elegance that evades Evan, who is all calculated angles and machine precision. A retired rodeo cowboy chasing tail and living down to his last dollar. Carefree and careless. Right up until he hit the Count Your Blessings Hospice Home.

Joey’s fingers have sped up, her nervous energy channeled into movement. “I’m just … hang on … hacking into his phone … seeing if…”

He lets her gallop.

Two minutes pass or maybe five.

Her breath puffs unevenly across the receiver. It likely smells of Red Vines and Dr Pepper. He imagines her burrowing through an insignificant man’s insignificant digital imprint, searching out something, anything, a crumb of meaning that might bring Evan comfort.

Her voice arrives as if from some great distance: “He made a bunch of searches about you online recently.” The words carry a lovingly solicitous note that cheese-grates his discomfort, a mother offering a crying child an ice cream cone.

“A bunch?”