Free Torch by Cheryl Strayed Page B

on the phone her father said, “It’s a shame that the brains got wasted on Claire. If only one person in the family gets the brains, you hope they go to a boy. It’s just like with you and Tim, the brains got wasted on you.”
    She set the receiver back into its cradle without a word, but quietly, not slamming it down. Who
were
these assholes? What had happened to them? Her childhood had been filled with a reasonable amount of joy. Barbecues and birthday parties, pushing a pin through a paper plate and holding it up to the sky in their backyard to see the solar eclipse.
    She called the next Sunday and nobody mentioned the Sunday before.
    Years passed. She was thirty, then thirty-five. Slowly, stingily, she forgave them without their knowing about it. She accepted the way things were—the way
they
were—and found that acceptance was not what she’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t a room she could lounge in, a field she could run through. It was small and scroungy, in constant need of repair. It was the exact size of the hole in the solar eclipse paper plate, a pin of light through which the entire sun could radiate, so bright it would blind you if you looked. She looked. And something astonishing happened: she loved them, felt loved by them, all the love traveling back and forth through that small shaft. She saw her parents in their most distilled form, being precisely who they’d always been. The people who sent her garbage in the mail. The people who made her cry each Sunday. The people who would gladly give their lives to save hers. The only people who would do that. Ever, ever. Her mom and dad.
    She’d told them about her cancer the previous morning. It seemed better, somehow, for her to tell them in the morning. She’d allowed only a few tears to escape when she told Claire and Joshua, but when she’d heard the voices of her parents, she cried hard enough that it took her several minutes to get a single sentence out. “I … I … I have …”
    Her father got calm and her mother got hysterical, the way they’d been for as long as Teresa could remember. Her mother pounded against something, on the bed frame or a table, Teresa could hear it over the phone. She claimed she was going to leave the house at once and get on a plane to fly to Minnesota. Teresa’s father emphasized that this was just the beginning, that cancer was easily cured these days, that she was young and she should not—that he would not—get too worried yet. By the time they hung up it had been decided that they would come in one month. That they would call Tim and tell him and ask him to come too and they would all be together again for the first time in ages. She hung up the phone feeling slightly giddy and sick to her stomach, the way she always did at the prospect of a visit from her parents.
    In bed she lay awake, thinking about what she would feed them when they came. They were meat and potatoes people; she and Bruce and the kids were vegetarians. This always caused an uproar, even though when her parents visited she cooked them beef, chicken, pork—some kind of meat each night.
    Bruce rolled onto his side and let out a small groan.
    “Are you awake?” she asked, sitting up.
    He didn’t answer and she sat silently watching him, pondering whether she had the energy to get out of bed to get herself something to drink. She stared at the painting of the trees that hung at the foot of the bed. She’d painted it herself. Three trees, winter trees, not a leaf among them. Bare and black and big as boys against a landscape of snow. One tree represented love, another truth, the other faith. She couldn’t remember which was which now, though when she’d painted it she’d gone to such pains, such excesses to paint those trees. Which way the branches should reach, how thick the trunks should be, making small imperfections to show where an animal might have come to scratch or chew the bark. She stared at the painting so long in the