Free It Takes a Worried Man by Brendan Halpin Page A

bathroom floor a few minutes ago. Now he is slumped across two seats and occasionally lifts his head to cough or sneeze, and after we sit there for forty-five minutes or so, I think, well, this is just a great place for someone with a compromised immune system to be hanging out.  I mean, there must be a better way for them to do this than having us sitting in the emergency room waiting room, which is probably one of the most septic places in the city, for close to an hour, inhaling God knows what kind of Ebola viruses people are spewing out.
    Despite my annoyance and anxiety, I can’t stop myself from singing the only two lines of “Fever” I know until Kirsten finally snaps, as she usually does when I sing the same bit of song over and over, which is almost daily: “Hon, either sing some more lines of that song or pick another song.”
    “But it’s ‘Fever,’” I protest. “Get it?”
    “I don’t know that song.  Nan, do you know that song?” She doesn’t. The joke is lost, so I stop, which is just as well.  I was starting to annoy even myself.
    Eventually they take Kirsten toward the back, and I want to go back with her just to basically say goodbye, though she really doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, and as I leave, Rowen is clinging to me, tears streaming down her face, saying, “Daddy! Don’t go!”and I try to explain that I’ll only be gone a minute, and she can sit with Aunty Nan, but she is past listening, so I just pry her fingers away, and I go back to the emergency room, and Kirsten has disappeared. In the ten seconds it took me to pry myself away, she is gone.
    I finally have to ask to find her, and I go in and kiss her goodbye, and I’m feeling all morose, and she is totally upbeat.  “I’ll call you! See you in the morning!”
    When we get home, Rowen falls asleep instantly, and I cook dinner and open a bottle of wine. Nan and I have just started eating, and my glass is about half empty, when the phone rings. It’s Kirsten. “I’m coming home!” she says.  I am annoyed that once again we have been told something categorically (“automatic overnight”) that turns out to be not so categorical, but mostly I am just happy she’s coming home and I get to sleep next to her tonight.

What Love Is
    “My hair is falling out in clumps,” Kirsten tells me on the phone when I call from work. “We’re shaving tonight.”
    I am delighted. My hair has been getting big again. Though I have straight hair, it does not really get long–it just gets big, like Adam Rich from
Eight is Enough
. So it has been getting big for a while now, but I have resisted going down to Sal’s barber shop because I figure why spend 12 bucks on a haircut when I am going to shave off all my hair soon anyway.
    When I get home it is difficult for me to look at the pile of hair Kirsten has on her lap. She has been sitting on the couch obsessively pulling at her hair, and she has now gathered together a ferret-sized pile.
    I have to go to Kmart to buy some clippers, so I head over there after Rowen goes to bed. It is a miserable fall night–about 40 degrees and rainy, which is a kind of weather that has always pissed me off–I figure if it’s that cold, it should be snowing. U2′s new song, “Beautiful Day” seems to be playing on every station. I love this song. It is about the only non-country song that has really spoken to me since this whole thing started, and while, you know, it ain’t “The Long Black Veil,” Bono’s melancholy insistence that it’s a beautiful day just about mirrors my state of mind as I drive through cold rain to buy clippers to shave my wife’s head.
    I find the clippers quickly. Well, what I actually find is a 24-piece haircutting kit with instructional video
How to Cut Hair at Hom
e in English and Español. (I guess it’s something like
Como Cortar el Pelo en la Casa
in Español, but I don’t really know because I took French in high school)
    I sneak over to