Free The Life of Glass by Jillian Cantor

said. “I’ll come back soon.”
    “Oh please do,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
     
    I took the long way home because I wanted to ride, wanted to pedal and pedal and pedal and push harder and faster. I was really sweating by the time I got in the house, so I took a soda out of the fridge and took it into my room to drink it.
    I turned on the ceiling fan, and I took off my shirt, which was soaked through with sweat, and I rummaged in my drawers until I found an old bikini top of Ashley’s. And then I sat on the floor and flipped through my dad’s journal. I hadn’t picked it up in a few weeks, but now I needed it again. Needed it to give me hope or inspiration or an iota of what I’d actually gotten from him when he was still alive.
    I read through a few pages, trying to find something interesting, something that would make me laugh or see things differently. That’s what I loved about his facts and his stories, the way they made you think about things that you never ever thought to think before, as if to remind you that there was always some completely new way to look at the world.
    I found this one story about an eighty-nine-year-old woman named Ida Mae who went skydiving for the first time when she married a sixty-year-old skydivinginstructor. It’s the kind of eighty-nine-year-old I would’ve imagined Grandma Harry to be if she wasn’t stuck inside Sunset Vistas, her memory cells falling away by the second.
    Then I turned the page, to a list of random facts about weather. I learned that lightning strikes six thousand times a minute and that men are six times more likely to be struck than women. I thought about the summer monsoon storms, the great big bolts of lightning that lit up our sky, our city. We could watch them, high above the mountaintops, beautiful and dangerous all at the same time, from our back patio.
    Just before my father got sick, one of those lightning strikes hit a tree in a forest on top of one of the mountains that surrounds us. It ended up burning thousands of acres and most of a small town before it sizzled out. We saw the cloud of smoke, big and thick and oddly white and puffy, hanging up above the mountain for weeks.
    It was there when we went to Dr. Singh’s office that day and found out that something terrible had happened in my father’s body too. That’s the way my father first explained his illness to me. “It’s kind of like the fire, Melon. Right now it’s burning out of control. But the doctors are going to try to stop it. They’re going to giveme medicine to keep it from spreading.”
    The next week my father started his treatment, and I came to learn that by “medicine” he meant chemo, and with chemo there was another kind of destruction: hair that fell away in clumps, pale skin that stretched across a body that became bony and way too thin when it couldn’t hold down food.
    Dr. Singh was a short, skinny, dark-haired man who looked nothing like a firefighter, which confused me for a few weeks. But then a miraculous thing happened. The firefighters finally won, the smoke died down, the forest stopped burning.
    When the road up the mountain reopened and my father was between rounds of chemo, he drove me up there. The devastation startled me—all the beautiful evergreen and oak trees stripped bare, the world of the forest, ashy and dead-looking.
    “One little strike of lightning, Melon,” my dad mused, “and look at all of this.”
    I wondered if that’s when my dad found the facts about lightning, that week, just on the brink of something terrible. I pictured the way the facts might make him feel better, might make him calmer. Lightning was so common, and very rarely did it destroy as badly as ithad on the mountain.
    I closed the journal and put it back on my desk, and then I noticed a little piece of paper on my floor that must have fallen out of the front pocket of the book. I picked it up and opened it and read it over a few