From the Corner of His Eye

giving her the anticancer drugs and transfusions that she required. While radiation therapy is prescribed for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, it is much less useful to treat myeloblastic cases, and in this instance, it wasn't deemed helpful, which made treatment at home even easier.
        In the first two weeks, when she wasn't on pie caravans, Agnes received guests in numbers that taxed her. But there were so many people she wanted to see one last time. She fought hard, giving the disease all the what-for that she could, and she held fast to hope, but she received the visitors nonetheless, just in case.
        Worse than the tenderness in the bones, the bleeding gums, the headaches, the ugly bruises, worse than the anemia-related weariness and the spells of breathlessness, was the suffering that her battle caused to those whom she loved. More frequently as the days passed, they were unable to conceal their worry and their sorrow. She held their hands when they trembled. She asked them to pray with her when they expressed anger that this should happen to her-of all people, to her, and she wouldn't let them go until the anger was gone. More than once, she pulled sweet Angel into her lap, stroked her hair, and soothed her with talk of all the good times shared in better days. And always Barty, watching over her in his blindness, aware that she would not be dying in all the places where she was, but taking no consolation from the fact that she would continue to exist in other worlds where he could never again be at her side.
        As terrible as the situation was for Barty, Agnes knew that it was equally difficult for Paul. She could only hold him in the night, and let herself be held. And more than once, she told him, "If worse comes to worst, don't you go walking again."
        "All right," he agreed, perhaps too easily.
        "I mean it. You have a lot of responsibilities here. Barty. Pie Lady Services. People who depend on you. Friends who love you. When you came on board with me, mister, you bought into a whole lot more than you can walk away from."
        "I promise, Aggie. But you're not going anywhere."
        By the third week of October, she was bedridden.
        By the first of November, they moved his mother's bed into the living room, so she could be in the center of things, where always she had been, though they admitted no guests now, only members of their family with its many names.
        On the morning of November third, Barty asked Maria to inquire of Agnes what she would like to have read to her. "Then when she answers you, just turn and leave the room. I'll take it from there."
        "Take what from there?" Maria asked.
        "I have a little joke planned."
        Books were stacked high on a nearby table, favorite novels and volumes of verse, all of which Agnes had read before. With time so limited, she preferred the comfort of the familiar to the possibility that new writers and new stories would fail to please. Paul read to her often, as did Angel. Tom Vanadium sat with her, too, as did Celestina and Grace.
        This morning, as Barty stood to one side listening, his mother asked Maria for poems by Emily Dickinson.
        Maria, puzzled but cooperative, left the room as instructed, and Barty removed the correct book from the stack on the table, without anyone's guidance. He sat in the armchair at his mother's side and began to read:
        "I never saw a Moor-never saw the Sea-Yet know I how the Heather looks-And what a Billow be."
        Pulling herself up in the bed, peering at him suspiciously, she said, "You've gone and memorized old Emily."
        "Just reading from the page," he assured her.
        "I never spoke with God-Nor visited in Heaven-Yet certain am I of the spot-As if the Checks were given."
        "Barty?" she said wonderingly.
        Thrilled to have inspired this awe in her, he closed the book. "Remember what we talked about a long time ago? You asked me how come, if I could walk where the rain wasn't… "
        "… then how come you couldn't walk where your eyes were healthy and leave the tumors there," she remembered.
        "I said it didn't work that way, and it doesn't. Yet… I don't actually walk in those other worlds to avoid the rain, but I sort of walk in the idea of those worlds…"
        "Very quantum mechanics," she said. "You've said that before."
        He nodded. "The effect not only comes before a cause in