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“—medication, because you said last night it wasn’t lasting—”
“Sarah.” His voice was soft but it stopped me. “The socks are great. Thank you. Sit down.”
I sat. On the very edge of the chair, ready to spring up again. He watched me do it and shook his head a little, but he was smiling.
“You know what you are?” he said.
“What am I?”
“You’re a hummingbird. You never land. You just hover over a thing and drink from it and zip off to the next thing.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’ve been here nine minutes and you’ve stood up four times.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then closed it, because I realized I was, at that very moment, half out of my seat.
I sat back down.
“See,” he said. “You can do it. Now don’t move.”
We talked. About nothing, mostly, the way we always had. The pigeons. My terrible shoes, which he continued to insult from his deathbed. A game show playing on the little wall-mounted TV. He told me a story about a coworker from some job he’d once had, a man who ate a hard-boiled egg at his desk every single day at exactly ten in the morning, and how the whole office could set their watches by the smell.