It was on a clear day in May, when I was having dinner with Bernard and some friends in his dining room—Bernard had made the first of the season’s lamb—that Freddy called. My father had not been able to bring himself to do it. It was Freddy who said that there had been aberrant test results, and that they would be doing surgery on my mother in five days, to make sure that she really was OK. “It’s all very unclear,” said Freddy. “They seem to think she’ll be fine, but they’re a little vague. I guess we just can’t tell what’s going on until they get inside her and look.” His voice had that same upbeat tone that we had all used to protect my mother in the first months of her illness. I did not need to challenge him on it. I hung up the telephone, and ran down the hallway, past the dining room and all the people in it, and I locked myself in the bathroom. I lay on the floor and curled myself into a tight bundle and clutched my knees under my chin and closed my eyes and tried to remember the complacence in which I had been living for the better part of that long winter. After some time, Bernard came and knocked on the bathroom door and asked whether I was all right, but I was unable to answer him. I stayed curled on the ugly yellowed carpeting of his bathroom and made no sounds at all, because if I had opened my mouth a wail would have poured out of me that would not have stopped.