But he hasn’t told me how she’ll look, dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Just like the last time he brought me to see her in a hospital room, after I’d moved out of the house and gone to live in the Geronimo Hotel, a faded adobe-colored wreck of a place near the university, where you could pay your rent by the week. He’d said, “Your mother wants to see you,” and picked me up in front of the stuccoed courtyard with its sad grass. But then he’d driven in silence past the turn for the house, driven without a word but “You’ll see where we’re going” right to the hospital parking lot, and never told me how she’d dropped a cigarette lighter onto her nightgown and covered her breasts with third-degree burns; “I got what I deserved,” she said as soon as she saw me, “to be burned at the stake.”

(Do you tell the story out of horror, a kind of purgation? Out of an old but abiding rage, because part of you wants to get even? Or because it’s your single truest possession: what do you own as much as you do what frightens you most? Maybe it’s simple: you tell the story to find out why you have to tell it.)

My father lets me find things out for myself, so he hasn’t said she’s jaundiced now, her skin an evil yellow; hasn’t said her long hair’s falling out, every day, when he comes to the hospital and sits beside her and brushes it. He hasn’t said that her stomach’s enormous, as if she’s hugely pregnant, since her poisoned liver’s given up and swollen her abdomen with the toxins it will not admit.

There is so much he has not told me: how he’d decided to let her die at home, after this last year she’s spent in bed or in a wheelchair, obliterated on vodka and prescription tranquilizers. Where have they come from, these boxes of Miltown? Was he just going to keep her as quiet as he could, keep her from living in pain, and wait it out? Maybe he thought, How could she want anything else now, but to die? What else has she wanted for years? And so was he being perversely, brutally kind, bringing her the pills and the vodka? But then she got so sick, he couldn’t bear it, even he had to fold and put her in someone else’s hands. “I’ve never seen anyone,” her doctor said to me, “brought to the hospital in such an advanced state of deterioration.”

Maybe he thought if he gave her the pills she wouldn’t drink, wouldn’t be driven by her furies to lash at him and at herself. Maybe if he kept her still she’d live.