Most nights Daddy would come home late, long after Ryles Jazz Club was closed and the last outbound Green Line train from Boston pulled into Newton Highlands station.

He would walk through town in the dark and into our sleeping house, still dressed in his favorite patchwork coat and his faded linen shirt. He would put his satchel by the door, pour himself a glass of wine, and fall asleep at the kitchen table, where we would often find him in the morning, with his cloth fedora still tipped over his eyes.

He was tall and willowy like a dancer. Soft-spoken. His eyes were deep and gray and he had such long eyelashes that whenever I looked at him, I was moved to take his hands into my own and stroke them.

When I was small enough to fit in his lap, I would cuddle up and scratch my fingers into his beard and kiss his chin until my lips tickled. This was before the virus left him a pale shadow lying in the hospital bed we set up for him in the dining room so he wouldn’t have to climb the stairs.

The dining room was the first place to fill with morning light, and it had a high ceiling so he wouldn’t feel quite so closed in. Mother hired men to carry out the dining room table and move in the grand piano so he could spend the day playing music. When he was tired, he could lie down in the hospital bed. When he needed a bathroom, he could stagger across the hall.

When we knew the end was really coming, Mother began closing off the rooms of our house. She told me it was because it was easier this way, to keep things clean, and with AIDS, clean meant safe. Daddy was allowed to be sick in the dining room and bathroom. I was allowed to be well in the kitchen and upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. The other rooms, the places we used to pass through every day of our lives — his study, Mother’s music studio, my old bedroom, the living room, the guest bedrooms — these were all off-limits because it was too hard to know where the germs were hiding.

That’s when Mother first brought me into her bed at night, to make sure I was sleeping in a clean place. Eventually, she moved me in full-time and began calling it “our room,” meaning that it belonged to her and me, rather than her and Daddy.

Nobody knew very much about the disease. We didn’t know if it could be left on doorknobs or toilet seats. We didn’t know if you could get it if an infected person coughed or breathed on you. We didn’t know if it traveled through tears, or if you could catch it through a kiss. So when Daddy started dying, the dining room and the downstairs bathroom were also off-limits to me. I would sit in the hallway or at the kitchen table and call out to him, Daddy, Daddy, and if he was awake, he would call back to me, June Bug, June Bug, which is how I knew he was still okay.

Even in his last weeks, Daddy’s music filled our house, played with shaking hands amidst jags of coughing, but music nonetheless. Sometimes Mother would bring her cello into the dining room and play with him, making her instrument wail like the velvet voice of Ella Fitzgerald, scatting around his melody, the sweet, mournful riffs of a soul getting ready to say goodbye.

Even though she kept me from touching him, and even though she always made sure to scrub her hands with bleach and hot water after tending to him, Mother never left Daddy alone for too long. She would move between him and me, reading me poetry in the kitchen with a glass of milk and a grilled cheese sandwich, but then, when he called out, pulling on a pair of disposable latex gloves to hold his hand while he wept. Our trash bins filled with latex gloves, translucent and dry as snake skins.

She had all kinds of ways to keep me occupied. Sketchbooks. Modeling clay. Watercolors. When she went to him for too long, I would call for her, making sure my voice was loud enough for both of them to hear me. There was always something I needed. A book I couldn’t reach. A meal I couldn’t make.

“Mother!” I called out on the last day of his life, my voice so shrill, I knew it would make her jump to attention. “Mother! Aren’t you going to make me something for lunch?”

Her tired voice came from the dining room. “Just a minute, June. Daddy needs me.”

“I need you!” I called back. “I’m hungry!”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, June. You are ten years old. Just make something yourself for once.”

I punished her when she returned, shrinking away when she reached toward me.

She went to the counter, and I could hear her making my lunch. She brought back a glass of milk and a bologna and Wonder Bread sandwich.

When she offered me the plate, I pushed it out of her hands, and it crashed to the floor. There was a puddle of milk and sandwich fixings everywhere, but the plate didn’t break; it just clattered and spun. I remember how disappointed I was, because a broken plate would have been much more dramatic. I started to cry.

“Honey,” said Mother, “please try to understand. I’m doing the best I can. I really am.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “I told you I was hungry and you didn’t care.”

“I did care.” Mother sighed. She started to clean up the mess. “I do care, sweetheart. But Daddy needed me just then. You can make your own lunch. Daddy can’t clean himself up. Can you try to understand that? He needs me more than you do right now.”

“Daddy always needs you!” I screamed in her face.

“God help me, June. Your father is dying. Pretty soon we won’t have him anymore. You’ve got your whole life to spend with me.”

“Why doesn’t he hurry up and die then!” I screeched. “Why don’t you hurry up and die, Daddy! Hurry up and die right this second for all I care!”

Mother slapped me.

I held myself, stunned by the force of our anger.

Mother knelt on the floor beside me.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I whispered, reaching out to her.

She leaned her head against the wall and sobbed.

“I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t want Daddy to die.”

She lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes were filled with shadows.

“I know that, honey,” she said, softly. “We’re both tired — we don’t know what we’re saying or doing anymore. You didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“I did mean to hurt you,” I said. “But I’m sorry.”

Mother kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were warm. “I forgive you,” she said.

“I want to tell Daddy I’m sorry too. He might have heard what I said.”

“You can’t go in his room, sweetheart. You know that.”

“I’ll stand in the hall. I’ll tell him from there.”

“Okay,” Mother said. “I’ll come with you.”

She took me by the hand, and we walked from the kitchen into the hallway.

Daddy was lying in his hospital bed in the dining room, facing us.

His eyes were open and he was smiling like he had been waiting for us to come.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

But it was too late. He was gone.