Free Monday Mornings: A Novel by Sanjay Gupta Page A

French. What should we do then?”
    Nick remained focused on his black Converse low-tops. “I dunno,” he said again.
    “Cat got your tongue?” George gave his son a playful swat on the shoulder, knocking him sideways and nearly off his feet. He’d forgotten how slight his kid was. Nick looked up, annoyed.
    “Dad!”
    “Sorry, Nick. Didn’t mean to,” George’s voice trailed off.
    “I sort of made plans today.”
    “Oh. Uh…okay. Just thought you might want to hang out with the old man. Catch a game. Got great seats.” George paused.
    “Football’s not really my thing, either,” Nick added.
    “Okay.” George was at a rare loss for words. He hadn’t come with a Plan B. He tried to think what his son’s thing was. As a boy, Nick had been obsessed with dinosaurs, extreme weather, asteroids, black holes. Either his nose was in a book, or he was watching a show on Discovery or Animal Planet or the History Channel. On the playground in preschool, while the other kids climbed the equipment or chased one another, Nick would sit off by himself, drawing in the sand or throwing it up in small handfuls and watching the wind carry it away.
    George had signed him up for youth football, baseball, and basketball. Nick resisted every practice and played only the minimum required. He was awful. The kids on his team tormented him, their taunting and physical shots tempered only by the size of Nick’s father, who sometimes came to practice and watched. In short, Nick’s sports were torture for both father and son.
    When Nick was ten, George’s ex put a stop to it. Much to George’s relief, she pulled Nick from all sports, signed the boy up for science camp and cello, and bought a family membership at the city’s natural history museum. Still, it puzzled George how a male child with half his genetic code could be so different. Shouldn’t Nick be twice as big as he was now? Where was the hunger for physical contact? Where was the desire to measure himself as a man?
    Father and son passed an awkward moment of silence. “Well, have a good day, Nick. I’ll see you next Saturday, for sure. Okay?”
    “Okay,” Nick said, his voice brighter. He was already walking back toward the couch.
    As George returned to his Jeep, he found himself walking with a little more bounce in his step. He was relieved to be free of a day of awkward conversations and heavy silences. It was as though he and Nick spoke different languages. By Saturday or Sunday night, depending which weekend day Villanueva had with his son that week, George was usually spent.
    Even before he reached the car, George’s palpable sense of relief was followed by a surge of guilt so strong he felt he could reach out and touch it. Shouldn’t he want to spend the day with his son? Isn’t that what fathers did? Good fathers, anyway. He sat down in the Jeep, gripped the steering wheel, and stared at the sunny sky. Then he put the key in the ignition, started the car, and backed out of the driveway.

CHAPTER 7
     
    P
    ark loved operating on Sunday morning. The hospital was quiet. There were no scheduling problems or fights for OR time. Even the emergency room was at an ebb following the Saturday-night high tide of gunshot wounds, stabbings, drug overdoses, broken bones, heart attacks, and lesser maladies. As he walked from the physicians’ side of the garage through the general parking area, he didn’t encounter the usual tide of wheelchairs, walkers, strollers, and clots of families clogging the elevator down to the lobby. Nor were there the visitors or patients—usually older and whiter—who would gawk at him and then his hospital name tag and back. Chelsea was more diverse than much of Michigan but somehow it still managed to surprise a certain percentage of the population that the lean, intense Korean man sharing the elevator with them was a full-fledged neurosurgeon. They spoke to him as if he were a five-year-old, overly enunciating their words and amping up