her tea. "Things usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet."
She looked across the table and smiled at me with the smile you give
people when you know you have the answers to all their questions. And
so we talked about movies.
MOM AND DAD SURVIVED the winter, but every time I saw them,
they looked a little worse for wear: dirtier, more bruised, their hair more
matted.
"Don't you fret a bit," Dad said. "Have you ever known your old man to
get himself in a situation he couldn't handle?"
I kept telling myself Dad was right, that they knew how to look after
themselves and each other, but in the spring, Mom called me to say Dad
had come down with tuberculosis.
Dad almost never got sick. He was always getting banged up and then
recovering almost immediately, as if nothing could truly hurt him. A
part of me still believed all those childhood stories he'd told us about
how invincible he was. Dad had asked that no one visit him, but Mom
said she thought he'd be pretty pleased if I dropped by the hospital.
I waited at the nurse's station while an orderly went to tell him he had a
visitor. I thought Dad might be under an oxygen tent or lying in a bed
coughing up blood into a white handkerchief, but after a minute, he came
hurrying down the hall. He was paler and more gaunt than usual, but
despite all his years of hard living, he had aged very little. He still had