19.

It was a simple proposition. The doctor told my mother that if he called her an hour into the surgery, the news wouldn’t be good: the tumor would have spread too far, making it inoperable. He would close my father back up. If, on the other hand, he called two or three hours after the surgery began, why, then—then my father had a fighting chance. The doctor would dig the cancer out of his lungs.

I can see my mother in the kitchen the morning of the surgery, wearing an apron and a new dress, baking banana bread and doing dishes, as if becoming a perfect housewife would help my father’s chances. My brother is playing with sticks.

The truth is, my mother hardly ever wore an apron or a new dress. Dressed in an old housecoat with a washed-out design that looked like the memory of green-stemmed irises with purple blooms, she liked to sit at the kitchen table smoking Larks and discussing how the family fortune had been lost. She let the dishes pile up. She was really an intellectual who’d been trapped by family life. She’d written a novel—typed it on four-by-six-inch notebook paper and kept it in her little University of Iowa three-ring binder. When I was three or four, I scribbled drawings on the back of her work with my set of giant Crayola crayons, and then the notebook disappeared. She probably threw it away.

Ring. The sound of the phone came an hour into my mother’s kitchen chores. After that abrupt first ring, time slowed down. A second seemed to take an hour. The second ring went on forever, its sound broken into separate, jangling tremors, each one of them draining color from my mother’s face, as if a faucet slowly closed, turning off her supply of blood.

My brother came over and stood beside me. He held my hand.

“It’s probably my friend Brian Jeffrey,” I said.

In slow motion, each step covering an infinity of ground in an infinity of time, I went to answer the phone, which was in its own little nook built into the wall, with a dark wood shelf and a dark wood panel underneath that hid the connector for the wires. That nook was one of the few elegant touches in our tiny house.

My mother stands frozen in the kitchen, moving so slowly, as if through the slurry of partly frozen water.

“Hello,” I say, picking up the receiver.

The center of the phone dial has our phone number. It begins PL in oversized letters. The beginning of Pleasant. PL8-7810 is the whole number. When I was little, you didn’t have to dial it all—just 7810 was enough. Then it became 8-7810. By the time my father was sick, it was 758-7810. I look at those numbers as if they somehow will save my dad.

“Is Mrs. Ryan there?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Dr. Chen.”

Yes, Janesville’s first Chinese doctor, back there in 1965. I hold the phone out toward my mother in the kitchen. She steps toward me, the film in frame-by-frame slow motion. When I hand her the phone, she drops it, and it spins on the floor, like the turning arrow on Wheel of Fortune, pointing at me, my mother, nothing.

“Yes? Oh, I see,” my mother says after she picks up the phone. “Yes. Of course. Right away. Yes. Yes.”

My mother is taking off her apron as she speaks. She looks at her shoes.

“Right away. Yes. Yes.”

She hangs up and stares off into space.

“How is he?” I ask. “How’d the surgery go?”

“We’ve got to leave now,” she says. “Be there when he wakes up.”

She wants to drive, and I let her, even though I haven’t passed up a chance to drive a car since I got my driver’s license.

Traveling Milton Avenue to the Main Street Bridge, we pass through downtown. The stores have been there forever, I think. Forever. Time slows again . . . slower and slower the stores go by. They never change. They’ll never go away, will they? Not the Clark gas station with its little plaque—On this spot in 1898, Carrie Jacobs Bond wrote “I Love You Truly.” Not Harrison Chevrolet, Wisconsin Bell, Woolworth’s . . . slowly, slowly going by. My mother bent over the steering wheel, looking straight ahead, hypnotized by the vaporous draw of an opaque future.

“Where’s my watch?” my dad says when he wakes up. “What time is it? Did he get it all?”

“There, there, Earl,” my mother says. A nurse propels the gurney my father’s lying on through the warren of hallways in the basement of Mercy Hospital. My mother and I trot beside it, trying to keep up. My mother tries to hold my father’s hand as we move along, but the nurse keeps pushing him out ahead of us, as if my father is on his way to an urgent meeting somewhere. A second nurse trots along with an IV on wheels. Its tube is hooked to my father’s arm. A clear plastic bag sits on the end of his bed, holding dark blood and tissue, the black, oozing detritus of his surgery.

“It’s kind of early, isn’t it?” my father asks the world, the heavens over him.

I look over at my father. He has fat tears in his eyes. Since he’s lying down, they don’t drain away. He shakes his head. “No.” He seems to be mouthing the word, “No.” His mouth quivers with his silent crying. My mother pats his hands as she trots along, saying, “There, there,” over and over. My father sobs, gagging on his tears.