Free The Light of Hidden Flowers by Jennifer Handford Page B

think of anything. Makes me feel like a dolt!”
    “Sports?” I asked.
    “Yes, that’s it.” Lucas nodded wildly. “I work out at the gym. I run, play a bit of basketball.”
    “I used to run in high school,” I said. “Because my father made me . . . insisted that I play a sport. And I used to play tennis, but hardly ever now.”
    “We should go running sometime,” he said. His tone was sweet, considerate. His baby blue eyes were worth looking at.
    “I’d die,” I said. “But it would be fun.”
    “I’d dangle dill pickle chips in front of you,” he said.
    “I’d make you eat some.”
    After lunch, Lucas walked me to my car. A breeze mussed his hair. I reached up and cleared the blond swath from his eyes. “This was fun,” he said.
    “This was fun,” I agreed.
    “The restaurant was great.”
    “I think I like food more than you,” I said. “I think I ate more than you.”
    “You haven’t seen me with pie and ice cream,” he said.

    I hadn’t converted him to my food religion, but maybe that was okay. I’d make a project of it. The good news was that he seemed sold on me, and judging from my sweaty palms, I apparently was interested in him. Lucas Anderson was cute and smart, smelled of soap and toothpaste, liked fruit, pie and vanilla ice cream, taxes and laws, and apparently, me.
    As I slid into my seat, Jenny called. “Everything okay?” I asked.
    “It’s your father. He’s at the country club and apparently misplaced his car keys. Do you have a spare set?”
    “No,” I said. “But I’ll go pick him up. Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
    As I drove to the club, I listened to public radio. The newscaster interviewed an elderly gentleman who had suffered a brain tumor. Was that a possibility for Dad?
    That night, I typed a search into my computer: brain tumors.
    The most prominent symptom of a brain tumor was headaches. I tried to remember if Dad had had many headaches lately. Other symptoms included seizures, changes in vision, difficulty walking. And then, there it was: memory loss.
    Tumors were most readily removed through surgery. In instances when the tumor was positioned in such a way as to preclude surgery, radiation or chemotherapy was used. The only problem was the damage to the healthy cells, of course. Such damage could lead to the loss of certain faculties.
    My first thought was Dad losing his ability to speak. My father bound and gagged. A storyteller who had lost his words.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    I sat on Dad’s sofa while he scowled at the computer screen. I saw him differently these days—actually saw him, for the seventy-year-old man that he was. I was so used to focusing on measuring how he saw me that I’d rarely reevaluated my assessment of him.
    “If you would just come out of your shell,” Dad would say to the teenaged me. “Then the world could see what’s inside that beautiful mind of yours.” My father—who understood human nature so well, yet never fully got me—deployed his brand of pragmatic optimism against me as the only panacea he knew. “Pretend you’re social, even if you’re not,” he’d say. And as horrible as it sounded to the outside observer, my father wasn’t criticizing me. He loved who I was, but he also believed firmly in emulating the achievements of others. And to him, sociability equaled success.
    As I studied him now, he hardly seemed like the same man.
    Dad looked up. “Tell me about this Lucas fellow,” he said. “You like the guy? Is he good enough for my daughter?”
    Since our lunch at the Fruit Stand, Lucas and I had seen each other two other times.
    “Lucas is a nice guy,” I said.
    “But does he do it for you?”
    “Dad!”
    “I’m not talking about . . . that . I’m just asking if he floats your boat. Does he raise your blood pressure, give you chills, make your heart race?”
    “He’s a nice guy,” I said. “A really nice guy.”
    Dad lifted his eyebrows at me, clearly doubting that “nice