Status Updates From To the End of Reckoning

“Lukas,” Dad said quietly, “I have something to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said. I felt increasingly far away, as though I were looking down from above. My stomach was hollow and my mouth was dry.
“I am very proud of you.”
“TBI,” I said. “Maybe true, but irrelevant.”
“No,” he said, “it is true and it’s very relevant.”

“The still lifes are good quality,” he continued, “but these abstract pieces? Nonsense.” He turned his back to us and wandered to the window.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a low voice. “You worked in psychiatry, right? He has a brain injury. A seven percent reduction in frontal lobe volume ... It’s his brain. It’s complicated.”
“Are you sure he isn’t just an asshole?” Joanna asked.
“That may be part of it too.”

“Dr. Kwan could probably have told us what it means,” I said.
Dad snorted. “He would have said some nonsense about meeting children’s needs and supporting families and matching them with blah blah bullshit. We’ll figure it out for ourselves.”
It was surprising that it had taken so many years for someone to run my father over with a car.

He’s still smart. He’s so smart, he always has been. And now he has this thing, what did you call it? No filter. Like, he saw every single one of the chairs, right? What else could he see? I bet he’d be a great detective.

He was disinhibited, to be sure, but he wasn’t the first person to complain about the service at L’Italiano. The waiter probably didn’t even know what “limited dendritic arborization” meant (I had to look it up). The issue was the perseveration, the relentlessness, the step too far, beyond the signals that would warn other people to stop.