Bridge of Sighs

not.
             
     
    T HAT NEW YEAR was when my father was really diagnosed for the first time. There’d been the earlier scare, his cyst with the “abnormal cells.” Afterward he’d gone in for regular exams, but they were expensive and he was feeling good, so gradually he stopped. But that fall he tired easily, and my mother said he’d been sleeping poorly. What I noticed was that he was forever rubbing his right side, just above his ribs, and wincing. “It ain’t nothin’,” he kept saying. “Just a knot. It’ll work out.” Except it never did. And then Sarah, who had the advantage of not having seen him every day, immediately remarked that he’d lost weight. “That’s it,” my mother said, fixing him with the stare that always made him look at his shoes. “Monday morning,
you’re
going to the doctor.”
    It wasn’t until after the holidays, though, that he could get an appointment with a specialist, who located the tumor under his arm, right where the cyst had been removed years earlier. My mother was furious, convinced that he’d known for months that something was wrong and refused to do anything about it. The operation to remove the growth was relatively simple, but the chemotherapy that followed exhausted him, making me even more indispensable at home than I’d been the first semester. In mid-January, with the reluctant aid of my academic adviser, I dropped two required courses that met on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, replacing them with Tuesday/Thursday electives that allowed me to catch the late bus and work a four-day weekend at Ikey’s, then take the afternoon bus back to campus. Predictably, my mother was livid when she heard what I’d done. “What’s the point of college,” she demanded, “if you’re only there three days a week?”
    “It’s just this one semester,” I countered, the same promise I’d made to my adviser, who’d dutifully warned me that putting off required courses might jeopardize my graduating with the rest of my class. Once my father got his strength back, I told my mother, once he was out of danger, I’d cut back at Ikey’s and rededicate myself to becoming a university student in earnest. This argument I knew I could win. After all, I was on scholarship, not wasting the money she’d put aside that now was paying for my father’s operation, hospital stay, post-op treatments and convalescence. My mother could argue until she was blue in the face, but they
did
need me and I knew that for a fact.
    This victory, however, came at a cost. The conflict that had simmered for so long between my mother and me now came to a rolling boil, and we were at each other constantly. Like so many of the family conflicts I’d witnessed since I was a boy, what we were really arguing about couldn’t be acknowledged: in this case, whether my father was going to recover. His surgeon was optimistic. The operation had been a success, he told my mother. They’d caught the malignancy early, before it could spread. Had he waited another couple of months, well, the situation might’ve been entirely different. Of course he couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be subsequent tumors, but neither was there any cause for undue pessimism. That last was the part my father heard most clearly. “Quit worryin’ every minute,” he told my mother when she said he was returning to work too soon or trying to do too much. “I ain’t gonna die from this little bit I’m doin’, and Louie’s right here if I need any help.” She clenched her teeth and said nothing. My mother prided herself on being what she called realistic and always defended her realism vigorously, but now she couldn’t because she knew that optimism, which came to her husband and son naturally, was exactly what a sick man needed to get well. But I knew she was seething inside, and she took out her frustration on all of us. “What the hell do you
want
from me, Tessa?” I heard my uncle ask her one day.
    “What do I
want
?” she exploded. “What do I
want
? What I want is for somebody in this family to—” But she stopped there, glaring homicidally at Uncle Dec, and then at me, before storming out.
    “Go easy on her, Bub,” he said, somehow aware of how angry I was at her. “If she ever snaps, you can kiss this place goodbye.”
    “You’re full of shit,” I told him, the only time in my life I’d ever said such a thing to my uncle, or perhaps to anyone.
    For an instant he looked ready to