Hope

She had the proof to prove it to me that her dying father’s idiot wife, who was not her mother, was a real idiot. My friend said that this woman spelled the word wife w-i-l-f on the hospital informa­tion request form, so that my friend had to do every­thing for her father, because he said to her, “You have to help me!”

She had taken care of the funeral arrangements, and her father was not dead yet.

My father’s dying was not planned for so carefully by his daughter, and it is over with. He’s dead.

We had appointments—my friend and I—at the ex­act same time, and if it had not been for her arriving, just when she did, at the third-floor hallway of the Professional Medical Arts Building, I would have left after arriving there first, all alone, and knocking and knocking and hammering and yelling at the office door, and twisting and twisting the doorknob.

We were well along in our discussion, comforting one another about our fathers, we had even compared our teeth, when our dentist arrived, his staff, his hygienist, and so forth.

My friend had told me, by then, how awful her father was—she had proof—and so had I told her that my father wasn’t that awful, but that he might as well have been—because I had hated him as much as she had hated hers by the end.

Once inside the office, while I was in the chair, the hygienist had the nerve to ask me a question after she had put a pick tool and a plastic tube into my mouth.

It was unbelievable, unbelievable that a daughter such as I am, whose father had been so loving to her all of her life, who wanted to tell me what I needed to know anytime that I needed to know, that I should deliber­ately ask my father a question after the doctors had rendered him positively without the power of speech, that I should ask him a question, and then act as if it were a matter of life or death that my question had no answer.

Every time I do not know what else to think, I go back to how my hands were grabbing onto my father’s ankles or onto his toes. I felt so incredibly nervy. He was down in his bed. I was at the end of it. My father put his head forward toward me, crazy to tell me the most essential thing I will ever need to know.