When we broke apart, he reached for his backpack and unzipped it. He pulled out a square green bakery box, the smallest one that Borrowed Thyme used, and held it out to me. I had a feeling that I should protest, just out of politeness or out of respect for his dad’s profits, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it convincingly. As I took the small box, I found myself smiling. There were very definite benefits to dating someone who worked in a bakery, I had found out. “What is it today?” I asked as I opened the lid and peered inside. A cupcake sat inside, yellow cake with white icing. A T had been placed on top of the icing with mini chocolate chips. “This looks great,” I said, feeling my stomach growl just looking at it.
“Lemon cupcake,” he said. “And my dad’s new lemon-vanilla frosting. He wants your input.”
“Happily,” I said, closing the box carefully. I had learned the hard way that if I didn’t wait until after dinner—and then share with my siblings—it was Henry who bore the brunt of it the next time he came by the house. “Thank you.”
“And, um,” Henry said as he pulled out a small plastic bag filled with cookies, “these are for your dad. Double chocolate chip, fresh-baked.”
“Thanks,” I said, as I placed the bag next to my cupcake box, feeling a now-familiar lump start to rise in my throat. When I’d told Henry about the fact that my dad wasn’t eating much, he’d taken to counteracting this (along with his father, I’d later learned) by trying to find the one dessert or bread that might bring my father’s appetite back again. Despite their best efforts, this didn’t seem to be working. My dad always made a big show over the treats, oohing and ahhing, but he only had a bite or two before claiming that they were just too good to keep all to himself.
My father was doing about the same—that is, doing a little bit worse every day, even though it wasn’t possible to see until I looked back and realized that, this time last week, he hadn’t slept from afternoon until dinnertime and had been able to walk up the stairs without Warren’s help, my mother walking behind, ready to catch him if he tumbled backward. He’d stopped reading late into the night, and his voice, the one I used to be able to hear across the house, had continued to diminish, and now I could sometimes barely hear him across the dining room table.
We were still doing our diner breakfasts twice a week, even though he’d taken to just ordering toast, and even then, only eating a few bites of it, no matter how Angela scolded him. But even though he didn’t eat much, we continued to do our questions. I couldn’t remember how it had happened, but we had moved past the questions on the placemat quiz, and had just started talking. I had always loved my father, of course—even though I hadn’t yet found the right moment to tell him this. But it wasn’t until we started having our breakfasts together that I really got to know him.
I learned about how my dad had almost gotten fired from his first law job, and about the trip around Europe he took after college, and how the first time he’d seen my mother, he’d fallen in love. The one thing that I had been most surprised by, though, he’d told me two days before. We’d been talking about our shared past, all those childhood moments that I, at one point, had been sick of hearing about. It wasn’t until now, when every day I had with my father was suddenly numbered, that I realized just how precious they had been. A thousand moments that I had just taken for granted—mostly because I had assumed that there would be a thousand more. My father had just finished telling the story (even though I’d heard it at least twenty times) about how I’d come to his office for Take Your Daughter to Work Day when I was six and had drawn all over a very important piece of evidence, when he stopped laughing and just looked at me over his coffee cup.
“Here’s one I bet you don’t know,” he said, giving me a smile. He was thinner than ever, and his skin continued to darken from yellow to a darker tan, like he had had a very unfortunate experience at a tanning bed. It made his teeth look startlingly white in contrast.
I still couldn’t get used to the physical changes that were happening so quickly in my father, proof that there was something very, very bad going on inside of him. Something that wouldn’t stop until it killed him.
But these changes didn’t hit home until I saw the proof, like in a picture, or saw the way that other people looked at him. My father was attracting attention now, in a way that made me feel simultaneously embarrassed, angry, and protective. Other people in the diner would stare just a moment too long, looking back to their eggs quickly when I met their eyes.
“What’s that?” I asked, moving my cup to the edge of the table so that Angela would give me a refill the next time she came by. I didn’t really even want more coffee, but the more filled my cup was, the longer our time here would be. These mornings were the only time I had alone with my father, and I had started trying to extend them as long as possible.
My dad smiled and leaned back in his seat, wincing slightly as he did so. “When you were first born,” he said. “I used to go into your room and watch you sleep. I was terrified that you weren’t breathing.”