A heat wave hit The city last weekend. Our apartment was stiflingly hot, and I’d gotten disquieting news from home. Dad had undergone a biopsy. He has cancer. They would learn the following Tuedsay how quickly it is likely to spread and what treatments would be best. That kind of cancer is usually a slow-moving disease and it had undoubtedly been caught early.

On Saturday, Michael and I sat for much of the afternoon in the little park near Grace Cathedral. It was a gloriously sunny day. We sat on a bench and read, trying to stay in the shade. There were the usual dogs and children. A plump little boy with a black buzz-cut tried, unsuccessfully, to skip rope. A little Asian girl tottered past on roller blades. A graduation was being held at the Masonic Temple and we saw a young man stilll in his robes, talking to his parents. A female priest from Grace came into the park, talking with a small circle of folk. She was dressed in a wine-colored shirt with a dog collar.

When we walked back to the house, Michael was drowsy from the sun, so he lay on the couch to take a nap. He was asleep when the phone rang. It was Mother. Dad was in intensive care with a very high fever and possibly pneumonia, some infection probably picked up at the hospital when he’d gone for his biopsy.

I wasn’t fit for much of anything that night but sitting by the phone. I found, thank God, a perfectly horrible and mindless movie to watch on television, while Michael filed and sometimes glanced nervously in my direction. “How can you watch this crap?” he asked. I shrugged. I needed to lose myself in something and this loud film, punctuated with machine gun fire and special effects involving tentacled monsters that filled the screen and dvoured their victims in grisly, obscene gulps, was exactly what I needed.

It wound to a close, and I changed the channel to Minelli’s Madame Bovary. This, too, was something I could wrap myself in, a black and white world with an overwrought musical score.

But by the end, while poor Emma lay dying, I began feeling sick with anxiety. Michael looked over to see me silently wiping tears from my face. He held me while I cried.

The thought of Dad dying is as unthinkable as the thought of the sun going out forever. I couldn’t get my mind around it, and the effort to believe it possible made me feel rotten inside.