Chapter Thirty-Two

Dr. Chun has obviously had a lot of practice making bad news sound like just the news you were hoping for. He is quiet and patient, warm and matter-of-fact. He doesn’t stutter. He looks us in the eyes without blinking. And I believe that he cares.

He asks whether my father has experienced mood changes, whether he’s had trouble sleeping, whether he’s shown signs of forgetfulness. Whether he’s fallen recently, or had trouble with his balance.

He explains that often in older people, the symptoms of glioblastoma multiforme are confused for other signs of mental deterioration like Alzheimer’s.

He explains that the tumor has likely been growing for some time.

He tells us that the median survival rate is roughly fifteen months. But he also says, gently, that he expects, given the size and location of the tumor, that my father will have less time than that.

He tells us that our focus now should be on my father’s quality of life, during the little quantity of it he has left, and I know, deep down, he is already dead.

Chapter Thirty-Three

We drive home mostly in silence. I’m full of a terrible burning, a frantic urge to blow something up.

One month. Six months. It’s hard to know. But it will be fast from here.

My father can’t be dying. My father is indestructible. He is the rule. He is the law.

He is all I have.

He dozes with his head against the window. His breath smells old. Something white is crusted to the corner of his lip.

The weather is changing. A bleak covering of clouds is rolling across the sky but the heat is still crackling, electric, and the air churning through the car vents smells like singed rubber.

When my phone rings—Joe again—my father startles awake. I thumb it silent. Then, after a pause, turn it off entirely.

“Who was that?” my father asks me. Catching sight of the name on the screen, he asks, “Joe? Is that your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend, Dad,” I tell him, for the ninetieth time. Since I’ve been home, my father has found creative ways to work my love life into nearly every conversation. Does your boyfriend mind you work so much? Why don’t you ask your boyfriend to help you with that steering issue? I can’t tell whether he’s doing it deliberately, whether he’s making a dig, or whether he really has forgotten, over and over again, that I have no one. Joe is the closest to a functional relationship I have—and he’s gay, and mad at me more than half the time.

“A girl needs a boyfriend,” he mutters, turning back to the window.

I think of what Dr. Chun said, and imagine my father’s tumor like a chunk of hard metal, a residue of chemical waste.

“Did I ever tell you how I met your mother?” My dad speaks the words to the window.

“You did, Dad. A hundred times at least.”