The fact that nobody called the next morning was somewhat reassuring. I spent Sunday close to home, jumping every time the phone rang. That night, I spoke to Mother again, who told me Dad had improved tremendously, though he was still weak. On Monday, he would be out of ICU. Monday morning I noticed our Abyssinian was running to and from his litterbox every five minutes and clearly needed to go to the vet. I decided to stay home that day, so I left a message at DS and notified my temp agency of the situation. Then I telephoned the hospital and got through to Dad, who initially seemed like his old self, but quickly became very tired. Hearing his voice was reassuring.

After getting off the phone I crammed the cat into his carrying case. The vet is well within walking distance, and has been treating every cat I’ve owned there since I moved to San Francisco in 1988. The cat howed most of the way down the hill and hissed, growled and yowled in the waiting room. The vet, after an examination, said I should leave him there for tests.

Late in the afternoon I walked back down the hill to retrieve him. they ahd been unable to get a clean sample because he pissed all over the examining table, but at least he was pissing. He screamed abuse at me almost all the way back up the hill, and even when I opened his cage and let him out into the apartment he was plainly furious, and hissed, grunted and avoided me for half an hour afterwards.

The news from Mom that night was better. Dad had improved, though he was weak.

I went to work the next day, worrying about whether anyone would be able to get in touch with me. As soon as I got home that evening, I called Mom.

“Well hello, Auntie!” she said when she heard my voice.

That was how I learned that my brother and his wife had had their baby. The most beautiful baby ever born, apparently.

The other good news was that Dad had been moved from ICU and I could call him the next morning. Mom said he was feeling good enough to grouse, and the birth of his first grand-child had definitely helped.

At work the next day I discovered that would be my last day there. They had someone they were getting ready to hire. I wasn’t sorry. I certainly didn’t dislike Giacamo, but there was never enough for me to do, and Giacamo always seemed to be troubled by some un-named impending disaster. Since he was going to leave before I did, I agteed to toss my key through the mail slot when I left. I did so feeling the usual sense of a little death. One more place that was familiar that I’d never see again…

Slowly the week sloped back up to normalcy. Dad felt better. I felt better. Another visit to the vet showed the cat felt better, and our Abby was eating and pissing vigorously.

That Thursday, when I telephoned Giacamo to tell him I’d be on on Tuesday to get my timecard signed, he said he had not seen the key when he came in. “I’m not accusing you of anything,” he hastened to assure me, “but could you have dropped it into your purse?”

“Absolutely not!” I said. “Maybe you kicked it under something.” He said he would take another look. It seemed a fitting end to the week.

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.