My father’s face reddened some more and then he surprised me for the first time in a long time. He actually laughed. ‘Damn it, boy. Good for you. I can’t say I agree with you and I don’t, but damn it anyway, good for you. I always wondered if you had the balls my father and grandfather had, and I’m glad to see that you do.’
He leaned over the table, gently punched me on the shoulder, which was about as emotional as I’d ever seen the old man. ‘OK, stay here. Do what you think’s best. And if your young ass gets lost again, I’ll come back to look for you. Deal?’
I found myself actually smiling. ‘OK. Deal.’
‘Hello there,’ came a lovely voice. I looked up and my father turned round in his chair as Miriam approached, bringing a tray overflowing with dishes and saucers and coffee cups. She smiled at me and said, ‘It took some convincing the nice servers but I’ve got all of us some breakfast. May I join you?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, and my father joined in, stepping up to help her with the tray and then retrieving a chair for her. Smiling all the while, he said, ‘Young lady, if Samuel hadn’t said yes, I surely would have.’
She smiled back at that and I said, ‘Miriam, I’d like you to meet my father, Ronald Simpson, lately a colonel in the Canadian Army, who’s been here for the past few days looking for his lost son.’
They shook hands and Miriam said, ‘What a wonderful father you are, to come look for Samuel.’
My father just blushed at that. I looked at Miriam and said, ‘Yes, you’re quite right, Miriam.’
‘Excuse me?’ she asked, and even my father looked a bit confused. I went on, looking at them both. ‘You’re absolutely right. He was a wonderful father, to come find me.’
Miriam started talking but my father, speaking gruffly, said, ‘Come on, kids, let’s eat, before it gets cold.’
Which was what we did.
Miriam had gotten the three of us bowls of oatmeal, with some toast and sausage links on the side, and coffee and orange juice. As we ate I felt this odd calmness come over me, as though things were finally making sense, were finally coming together. All through breakfast my father was a charming gentleman, something I found hard to believe, though I had memories from my childhood of how, maybe at Christmas time, my father would smile and joke and even sing. He told a few tales of when I was younger to Miriam, stuff about falling down a heating vent when it was open for repairs, or going door-to-door trying to sell discarded cigar butts, and even I smiled at the old stories.
When breakfast was finished, Miriam said, ‘Colonel Simpson..
My father shook his head. ‘Please, call me Ronald. Or Ron.’
Miriam smiled, nodded. ‘Very well, Ronald. Can I ask you something?’
‘Ma’am, the time when I cannot answer a question from a beautiful lady such as yourself will be the day I’ll hear dirt falling on the lid of my coffin. Go ahead. Ask away.’
Miriam said, ‘In the time you’ve spent here, have you heard anything about the armistice talks? Are they proceeding?’
My father wiped his fingers with a paper napkin. ‘Yes, they are proceeding.’ And he shot me a look as though he was reminding me of our previous talk. ‘And I’m sure they will succeed eventually. Perhaps today. Perhaps next week. But in the long run… as I’ve told Samuel, I don’t think in the long run that being here with the UN will be healthy. I sense bad times coming, once the people—everywhere, not just in the states with active militia — once the people decide the UN has been here long enough and must go.’
Miriam reached under the table, squeezed my leg. ‘Thank you. And I’ll tell you, in the long run I don’t intend to remain in the UN. And perhaps neither does your son.’
That got my father’s attention. ‘Really?’
‘Truly,’ she said. ‘I am considering joining Médecins Sans Frontières, and Samuel has expressed an interest as well. One of these days.’
‘Ah, Doctors Without Borders. A noble group. It sounds wonderful. But a bit of advice?’
I felt like warning Miriam that advice from my father usually had some sort of price tag attached to it, but I let it slide. Miriam said, ‘All right. Advice I can take.’
My father looked at us both. ‘Don’t stay in the States. Go somewhere else.’
I said, ‘All right. Advice taken.’
A smile from the old guy. ‘Fair enough.’ He glanced at his watch, said, ‘Time’s not waiting. There’s a chartered flight leaving for Toronto in the hour. Sure you can’t come?’
‘Positive,’ I said.
‘A pity.’ My father got up, leaned over and gave Miriam a peck on her cheek. Then he held out his hand. I gave it a firm shake and he said, ‘Write more, Samuel, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Good. You two take care, and remember what I said. Get out of the States.’
He walked away, past the long line of aid people and soldiers and doctors still waiting for breakfast. Then he was gone.
Miriam said, ‘He’s certainly something, Samuel.’
‘That he is,’ I said. ‘That he is.’
When I brought the dirty dishes up to the washing station, there was a woman standing there, scraping a dirty plate viciously with a knife. I looked, and then looked again. Karen Tilley.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Karen, how are you?’
She looked up at me from her chore, her red hair unwashed and a tangled mess. ‘I’m breathing, I guess. How the hell are you?’
‘I’m doing all right, considering—’
Karen tossed the plate into a gray plastic bin filled with other dishes, making a loud rattling noise. ‘Hell, I think you’re doing just fine, pal, just fucking fine. You’re standing here, breathing and living and everything seems to be working right. You’re not dead, shot and left behind—shot dead for the crime of being in this hellhole and trying to help people.’
I put the tray of dirty dishes down gingerly, started cleaning them as well. ‘I’m sorry about Sanjay, Karen.’
She snorted. ‘Spare me your fake sympathy.’
‘Nothing fake about it. Sanjay… I can’t believe what he did there, toward the end.’
‘Bullshit,’ she said, now tossing the silverware into a bucket half-filled with greasy water. ‘I know what you all thought about me and Sanjay. Slutty American woman, spreading her legs for a little exotic flesh from the Far East.’
‘Not true. You and he were professionals. I didn’t care what you did in your tents at night. And I know what he did when the shooting took place, that he thought I was coming back and he—’
It was as if Karen wasn’t listening to a single word I had said, as if this talk had been prepared for days. She said, ‘Well, the hell with all of you. Sanjay and me, we had something special, something romantic, something to call our own out there, and it’s gone. Thanks to you.’
I froze, a dirty oatmeal bowl in my hand. ‘Me?’
‘Of course you, you moron,’ she said, wiping her hands on her sweater. ‘I know exactly what happened, how you had to be Mr Helpful, Mr Goodie-Two-Shoes, Mr I’m-So-Sweet. You had to get up that morning and make some hot water so that your girlfriend and Charlie and Jean-Paul and Peter would all look up to you, would think, hey, this kid’s worth it. A little hot coffee to score points. Right?’
‘No, I was just boiling the water to—’
‘Asshole,’ Karen said, stretching out the two-syllable word. ‘If you hadn’t gone out like that, to play Boy Scout, we would have skipped breakfast. I know we would. But we had to wait for you to come back, so there we were, sitting out in the open, dumb and hungry, waiting for you. We waited, Sammy, boy did we wait, and you know what happened next, right?’