For all that, I didn’t answer right away that I loved him back. Maybe that seems spiteful, or maybe your time with Danny has left you old enough to understand. “I love you too” is only ever an echo. I wanted to be sure my words were not just his bouncing back. I waited until the next morning, when he stopped at the hospital before his drive home to you and your grandmother in Cleveland. At first I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. I was about to say those three words again when he blinked several times and lifted up his glasses with one hand to dab at his eyes. “It was the glasses that stopped me,” he told me. “I’ve wanted to fly planes since I was a boy, even younger than when you started with cameras, but back then a pilot needed perfect vision. By the time that changed, well, I’d settled into a life—but sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d moved us all to Dayton and gone to flight school.”

They mean well. They always have. Perhaps you already know that. Maybe you even suspect it of me, but considering my own belated insights, you’re allowed to take your time.

The six weeks Lillian was in the hospital getting chemo, we visited Detroit six times. According to her doctors, she had a better than fifty percent chance at remission, and I guess that made my grandparents superstitious. Ordering dinner at the Howard Johnson’s where we always stayed, I asked for a hamburger instead of the fried clam strip platter I’d gotten the last two trips, and Grandma flinched. Her voice shook as she asked if I was sure I didn’t want the fried clams, since I always seemed to enjoy them so much. Until that moment, I’d thought it was just coincidence that we always stayed in the same room, and that Grandpa always picked the same restaurant booth for us to sit in, and that he always ordered the steak while Grandma got chicken. Now it occurred to me that a better than fifty percent chance of remission meant an almost fifty percent chance of dying. I ordered the fried clams.

For chemo not to kill you before it cured you, it couldn’t happen all at once: after being on it for a few days, my mother had to go off it to give her body a chance to recover. I could measure how good or bad a week she’d had by how many film canisters were on her bedside table. She seemed in slightly better shape during recovery phases, but either way, we had to wear face masks and couldn’t touch her, since her immune system was shot. The chemo had knocked out her white blood cells along with the cancer cells, it being a poison that couldn’t tell the difference.