Free The Lost Father by Mona Simpson

learned to read the newspaper, except for her horoscope. It was a habit she could not sustain like so many others. We felt far away from the people sitting at the table making up rules.
    My grandmother had a working sense of community. The way she saw it, we made the fabric of the many. “Just be glad you aren’t—” my grandmother used to say, filling in the blank to give the necessary relief, the way she’d match a purse to a dress.
    There were fathers and daughters whose separation meant honest tragedy. For a long time I tried to believe we were that. But we were not. “He walked out on his own two feet,” my grandmother used to say.
    T HAT SAME WEEK I had to fly home to see my mother. I was really mad. I hadn’t been speaking to her exactly and then she called and said that word. Cancer. It wasn’t the first time. Of course she was crying. It took nothing to set my mother crying. Crying was nearer her natural state than repose. Something had to trigger her to stop.
    She’d called me late on Wednesday and it was a holiday weekend, so the flight cost a fortune. Nine hundred dollars. I was mad at myself for minding but I couldn’t help remembering all those other times flights were in the paper, a hundred and thirty-nine dollars each way. Poverty doesn’t make squalor but it does let you see it in yourself.
    She was going to have to have her insides cut out and she wouldn’t get her period anymore. “They say after, your hair goes gray and I don’t know, you just age,” she said. She was going to need chemotherapy and radiation, she told me. That sounded really bad. A full hysterectomy. “I just don’t want it,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll even feel like a woman anymore, honey.”
    All this time, I had been trying to get away from her, but it chased me, something, I couldn’t get free. For one thing, she was in trouble. The convalescent hospital she’d been working for had been closed. There was some kind of investigation. I didn’t think she was working and I couldn’t see how she would be able to afford her life. She didn’t tell me much, she just hinted. I hated thinking about it, I was afraid to let myself imagine what would happen. This had been going on for a while now and it would probably go on a long time.
    That Thursday I left the hospital early. I forgot about finding my father. My mother had already stopped it so many times in my life and now this. But she didn’t even know. All she knew was she was getting her femininity cut out.
    It was a wind-bright autumn day, changing, and I needed to get home and pack. Four o’clock light gilded the city behind me, all points and towers. My block still seemed a quiet forgotten neighborhood subject to a different lower light. At the corner, a wrought-iron fence protected one small churchyard and a poor row of flowers. The walls of the stucco church curved out convexly and all the windows were boarded with green shutters. The stucco took on a violet hue. I didn’t want to go. But I never liked to leave anywhere.
    I packed and dressed and carried my old suitcase with me. In the elevator my upstairs neighbor stood with his cane. It was reddish wood, silver-handled. At the ground floor, I offered to help him with my arm.
    “I don’t need,” he said. We walked together outside. “Cane just for looks. New York everybody push and shove, steal my taxi. I use cane, the people they just look and say oh-oh old man, and they very nice. Keep away.”
    A film was running at the Pleiades Palace, where I stopped on my way, and I pushed the heavy velvet curtains aside to get to Timothy, sitting on a high stool by the ticket booth. He had a tiny light there. He wasn’t watching, he was reading a big-print book.
    “So it’s cancer again?” he said, looking up.
    We just stood there a minute, the words and pictures moving below us like an outside rain.
    I COULD IMAGINE her doing absolutely anything anywhere. It seemed to me on the plane that day that