Chapter 33

THAT MAY NIGHT, I stay at Rochelle’s instead of the cottage. If not for this last-minute decision, I would have been there when, at dawn, my dad decides to start the rototiller. I would have been there and could have helped him, or I could have pushed the bloody thing up the slope with him. Or I could have set it on fire, or, perhaps, I could have changed his mind.

As it happens, though, I am not there. And my father cannot get it started. He is determined; he wants to prepare the soil for the corn he wants to plant. He tries and tries, and finally it starts but gets stuck in the damp grass, and he can move it no farther and there, right there on the summer lawn, my dad collapses.

What is he thinking in that instant? Does he know what is happening to him? Does he think of his father, dead at fifty-two? Does my mother see him when she stands by the window, stretching, unaware, opening the curtain?

Does time go in fast motion or slow?

And all the while, as my father falls, I am fast asleep at my friend’s house. Confused when she wakes me, when she tells me we need to leave right away, when she looks so alarmed, when she says, “Your father has had a heart attack. Hurry.”