“Can I ask you something?” I said.
He looked up.
“When you were little,” I said. “Did your mom ever say things about your body?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“I was a chubby kid,” he said finally. “Did you know that? Up until about twelve.”
“I’ve seen the pictures.”
“She used to call me her little dumpling.” He laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. “In front of people. At church. She’d pat my stomach and say, My little dumpling. And everybody would laugh.”
“Did it bother you?”
“I don’t know. I guess.” He pushed his eggs around with his fork. “I remember once, at Christmas, I cried about it. In my room. And my dad came up and sat on my bed and told me Mom didn’t mean anything by it. He said she just said things without thinking, and it would hurt her feelings if I made a big deal of it.”
He stopped.
I watched him hear himself.
“Oh,” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I told Oliver.”
“Yeah.”
He put his fork down.
“Her own mother was worse,” he said. “Grandma Ruth. She used to tell Mom she’d never get a husband if she didn’t lose ten pounds. Mom told me that once, laughing about it. Like it was funny.” He rubbed his eyes. “I guess everybody in my family’s been laughing about it for seventy years.”
Patricia arrived that afternoon, around three o’clock.
She was carrying a canvas grocery bag with clean clothes for Oliver, his pajamas with the rockets on them and a fresh pair of socks, and a box of his favorite crackers, the little ones shaped like goldfish.
She looked exhausted. Her makeup was smudged under her eyes. Her hair, which was always set perfectly, was flat on one side, like she’d slept on it in a chair. She was wearing the same blouse she’d worn to her birthday dinner.
She came down the corridor fast, almost running, and stopped in front of us outside Oliver’s door.
“How is he?” she said. “David, how is he? Nobody would tell me anything. I called all night.”
“He’s resting,” David said.
“What did they find? What is it?”
“They found a mass,” David said. “Near his kidney. They don’t know yet what it is. The specialist was here this morning. They’re doing more tests.”
Patricia put her hand on the wall.
“A mass,” she said. “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
She sat down in one of the plastic chairs along the hallway wall. The grocery bag slid off her arm onto the floor.
“I’ve been sick with worry,” she said. “I didn’t sleep. I sat up all night by the phone.” She pressed a tissue under her eyes. “Your father would have known what to say at a time like this. He always knew what to say.”
David didn’t respond.
He just stood there in the hallway with his arms at his sides.
Patricia looked up toward Oliver’s door.
“Can I go in?”
“Not yet,” David said.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“David, please,” she said. “I’m his grandmother.”
David reached into the back pocket of his jeans.
He took out the yellow card. He’d been carrying it around all day. He held it out to her.
“Read this first,” he said.
Patricia frowned. She took the card from his hand.
She unfolded it.
I watched her eyes reach the drawing on the front.
Her whole face went soft.
“That’s my old chair,” she whispered. She touched it with one fingertip. “And there’s Biscuit, look, with his whiskers.” She laughed a little, a wet laugh. “And that’s my Teddy Bear.”
“Read the inside, Mom,” David said.
She opened it.
Her mouth moved silently while she read. I watched her get to the second line.
I wish I could be little again so you could hold me like before.
She stopped.
Her lips stopped moving.
She sat there in the plastic hospital chair, not looking away from the page, for what felt like a very long time.
“He made this for me?” she said finally.
“Yes,” David said. “Yesterday afternoon. He worked on it for two hours. He was going to give it to you after cake.”
Patricia touched the little drawing again. The boy in the blue shirt.
“I used to read to him there,” she said. “Every Saturday. He’d fall asleep on me before we finished the book. Every single time.”
“Then you started telling him he was too big,” David said.
“He was getting older, David.” Her voice got defensive. “He’s seven. He’s heavy. My back isn’t what it used to be. I didn’t think…”
“You told him,” David said, “that he had a pregnant belly. At your birthday dinner. In front of twenty people.”
Her face crumpled.
“I was joking,” she said. “It was a joke. Everybody laughed. I never thought he would take it like this.”
“He thought you didn’t want to hold him anymore.”
Patricia looked up at her son.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I love that child. I love him more than anything in this world.”
David crouched down in front of her chair, so that his face was level with hers.
“Then why,” he said quietly, “did he think he had to become smaller to get his grandmother back?”
Patricia stared at the card in her lap.
She opened her mouth.
She closed it again.
For once in her life, she didn’t have an answer.
We stayed like that for a while. Patricia in the chair. David crouching in front of her. Me standing against the wall with my arms crossed. A nurse walked past and looked at us and kept walking.
“I was worried about his stomach,” Patricia whispered after a long time. “You know I was. I asked Sarah in the car to make sure the doctor looked at it properly. I asked you, David, on the phone. Didn’t I? I said, make sure they check it.”
“I know you did, Mom,” David said. “That’s why the jokes hurt even more.”
Patricia wiped her cheeks with her tissue.
“You knew something was wrong,” David said. “You knew he was scared. You drove him to the doctor. And then you sat at that table and laughed at the exact thing he was scared of.”
“I didn’t think of it like that.”
“I know you didn’t. That’s the problem.”
“Please,” Patricia said. “Please, David. Please let me see him.”
David glanced toward Oliver’s door.
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Not until he wants to,” he said.
Patricia started crying harder. Not quietly. The way she must have cried in her kitchen that day, with Oliver standing in the hallway listening.
“You’re shutting me out,” she said. “My grandson is sick, and you’re shutting me out. After everything. After your father. I’m alone, David. I’m all alone in that house. And you’re keeping me away from my own grandson when he might be…”
She couldn’t finish.
I saw it happen on David’s face. The thing I’d seen a hundred times in twelve years of marriage. The little flinch. The way his shoulders came up. The way he started to reach for her.
He’d been doing it his whole life. Since he was a chubby little boy crying in his bedroom at Christmas.
Then he stopped.
He took a breath.
He shook his head.
“Mom,” he said. “He’s the one who’s sick. This isn’t about making you feel better.”
Patricia lowered the card into her lap.
She looked at her son for a long time, like she was seeing someone she didn’t quite recognize.
She didn’t argue again.
After a while, she picked up the canvas grocery bag from the floor and held it out.
“His pajamas,” she said, in a small voice. “The rocket ones. And his crackers.”
I took the bag from her.
“Thank you, Patricia,” I said.
She nodded. She stood up. She held the yellow card against her chest with both hands.
“Can I keep this?” she said. “It’s mine. He made it for me.”
David looked at me. I nodded.
“Yes,” David said. “It’s yours.”
She walked away down the long hallway toward the elevators. She looked so small. Seventy years old, in yesterday’s blouse, holding a piece of yellow cardstock.
I’d been so angry at her all night. I was still angry.
But watching her walk away, I felt something else too. Something I didn’t want to feel.
Later that evening, David sat with Oliver while I went to get some water from the machine down the hall.
When I came back, I stopped in the doorway.
David was sitting on the edge of the bed. Oliver was propped up on his pillows in his rocket pajamas, with the goldfish crackers open on the tray table.
David was speaking softly.
“I should have listened,” he was saying, “when you told me Grandma’s jokes hurt. In the car. I should have listened, and I didn’t. I’m sorry, buddy.”
Oliver picked at Stomper’s missing eye with his fingernail.
“I didn’t want her to cry,” he said.
“I know.”
“Will she cry if I don’t want to see her?”
David thought about it. He didn’t rush. He didn’t say the easy thing.
“Maybe,” he said.
Oliver’s eyes went wide. Like he couldn’t believe his father had said it out loud.
David took his hand.
“Grown-ups are allowed to be sad, buddy,” he said. “It’s okay for Grandma to be sad. But it’s not your job to stop them. It’s never your job.”
“But then you’ll be sad,” Oliver said.
“I might be,” David said. “Sometimes. That’s not your job either.”
Oliver thought about that.
I could see him thinking. He has a little wrinkle that comes between his eyebrows when he’s working something out, like when he’s trying to sound out a long word. It was there now.
“Can I tell you,” he said slowly, “when someone makes me sad?”
“Every time,” David said. “Every single time. Even if it’s Grandma. Even if it’s me. Especially if it’s me.”
Oliver looked at him for a long time.
Then he leaned over sideways and put his head against his father’s chest.
David put his arms around him.
I stood in the doorway holding two paper cups of water and watched them.
And I realized that was the first time I’d ever seen my husband hold our son without looking over his shoulder toward his mother’s feelings.
The weeks that followed weren’t easy.
I won’t pretend they were.
The specialist, Dr. Kwan, was a tall, quiet man with a bow tie covered in tiny cartoon planets. He sat down on a rolling stool in Oliver’s room three days later, so that he was lower than Oliver, and he talked to Oliver first, before he talked to us.
“You’ve got a lump inside your tummy,” he told him. “Next to your kidney. Do you know what a kidney is?”
“It cleans your blood,” Oliver said. “And makes pee.”
Dr. Kwan raised his eyebrows. “That’s exactly right. Very good.”
“We learned it in science.”
“Well,” Dr. Kwan said, “this lump isn’t supposed to be there. It’s been growing, and that’s why your tummy got bigger, and that’s why it hurts. So we’re going to take it out. And then we’re going to give you some special medicine to make sure it doesn’t come back.”
Oliver looked down at his stomach.
“So my tummy wasn’t big because I’m fat?” he said.
The room went very quiet.
Dr. Kwan looked at me. Then back at Oliver. He took his time before he answered.
“No,” he said. “Your tummy got bigger because something was growing inside it that shouldn’t be. That’s not your fault, and it has nothing to do with how much cake you eat or anything like that. Okay? Nothing you did made this happen.”
Oliver nodded slowly.
He didn’t say anything else.
But that night, for the first time since the birthday dinner, he fell asleep with his hands down at his sides.
The growth was serious. Dr. Kwan explained it to David and me later, in a little room with a box of tissues on the table. It was a kind of tumor that happens mostly in young children. They’d caught it, he said, before it had spread very far. That was the good news. There was a lot of good news, actually, about this kind of tumor, if you had to have one.
But it was still cancer. That word was still in the room.
Oliver had surgery the following week. Four hours. David and I sat in the waiting room and didn’t speak. David held my hand so tightly my wedding ring left a mark.
When the surgeon came out and said, “It went well. We got all of it,” David put his face in his hands and cried. Loud. In front of the whole waiting room. He didn’t care who saw.
After the surgery came the treatment. Chemotherapy, every week for a while. Then every few weeks.
There were days when Oliver was tired. Days when he threw up in a pink plastic basin and then apologized to the nurse for making a mess. Days when he was frightened, and held my hand so hard during the needles that his fingernails left little moons in my skin.
And there were days when he was angry. Really angry. Angry about being in the hospital again. Angry about missing soccer. Angry about missing his friend Marcus’s birthday party, where there was going to be a magician.
One afternoon, he threw Gerald the Triceratops across the room and yelled, “I hate this! I hate it! I hate everything!”
Then he looked at me, scared, waiting to see if I’d be upset.
I picked Gerald up off the floor and handed him back.
“You’re allowed to hate it,” I said. “I hate it too.”
He looked surprised. Then, slowly, he started to laugh. And then he was crying, and laughing, and I was holding him, and we both said “I hate it” about twenty more times until it was mostly just funny.
His hair started falling out in the fourth week.
He found it on his pillow in the morning. Little clumps of brown. He held a piece of it in his hand and stared at it.
“Will I look weird?” he asked.
“You’ll look like you,” I said.
“Will people laugh?”
I didn’t promise that they wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I’d stopped making promises I couldn’t keep.
“Some people might say dumb things,” I said. “And if they do, you can tell me. Every time.”
“And you won’t tell me not to take it so seriously?”
He said it very casually, looking at the hair in his hand. But he said it.
David was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee. He heard it.
He came and sat down on the bed.
“Never,” David said. “I’ll never tell you that again.”
That weekend, David shaved his own head, in our bathroom, with Oliver sitting on the counter holding the clippers for the last stripe. They laughed so hard they had to stop twice.
Patricia sent messages all through those weeks.
Long ones, at first. Paragraphs and paragraphs. How is he? Is he eating? Did the surgery go well? Please tell him Grandma loves him. Please tell him I’m praying for him every night. Please let me come.
David answered every one of them. He told her the truth about how Oliver was doing. He sent her a picture of Oliver after surgery, giving a thumbs-up from his hospital bed.
