He started screwing things up at work, things he’d done nearly everyday for three decades: signing invoices for new engine parts, filing old model tear sheets into the archives, sending out mass mailings to the company’s other branches. Work became a bewildering jumble of papers and envelopes on his desk. His boss, Jay Mowers, would stop by his cubicle and ask for a compilation of engine additions, and Frank would stare back at him with such pure, honest confusion, that it was both sad and frightening. Jay suspected the shortened daylight hours and cold, grey weather of mid-January as cause for Frank’s melancholy and inattentiveness. But after nearly two weeks of Frank’s blank stares, slow walks around the office, and a continuous shuffling of papers—repeating the only actions he knew were right (getting coffee, turning on his computer, putting on, then taking off his reading glasses)—Jay had no choice. He found him at his desk one day, after having received nothing from him in the past month, and gave him a week to figure it out. Soon after, when one of the doctors pronounced him “mentally unfit,” Frank was put on disability.

    In early March, Dr. Aschenburg told Julia and Iris their father had colon cancer. They thought it was some kind of mistake: “It’s his brain, you idiots! Didn’t you look there?” They might’ve taken their father somewhere else, but Dr. Aschenburg was the fourth specialist they’d consulted in a month.
    “We don’t believe the cancer is causing his memory problems,” he told them, his bald head and glasses shining, “but unfortunately we will have to wait until after his surgery to do more tests. We’re actually very lucky to have caught it this early.”
    “Oh, yeah. Lucky,” Julia repeated after the doctor had walked away. “‘Your father has cancer, but lucky, very very lucky.’”
    “Oh, Jesus, Dad,” Iris said, beginning to cry.
    They were going to wait until they got to his house or at least into the car to tell him. They thought if maybe they got him out of the hospital, this “other thing” would sound less like cancer and more like one of the many blurred details of his day, something for someone else to deal with. But when their father walked back into the waiting room, a nurse lightly guiding him, their faces were scared and pale, their eyes red, and they knew he saw in their expressions that something was wrong.
    Later that evening, he asked three different times, between gulps of coffee and then a chocolate shake, if he were going to need surgery.
    “Yes, Dad. Tuesday,” Iris responded.
    “Fuck,” he whispered, slowly rubbing his fingers over his face, under his glasses. “Fuuuck.”
    On the way to their cars, Iris turned to Julia and said, “I can come over after work on Monday, do all the prep, and take him Tuesday morning. I can probably get Wednesday off, too, but I’m running out of vacation days…and he’ll need someone when he gets home. At least for a couple months...”
    Julia slouched against her ’85 Monte Carlo, pushing her hands in her pockets. Iris had worked in Accounting at Aetna for six years, and Julia assumed her older sister could afford to miss a few extra days. “They’ve got me working the lunch and dinner shifts this week, and it’s not like I have vacation time. I might get tomorrow off, but I don’t know what good that would do.” She kicked a stone in the driveway.
    “I’m just thinking about after his operation and recovery, even.” Iris shifted her weight, “I mean, with all his memory loss and bills and cooking and things.” She paused, moving closer. “He hardly eats anything if we don’t make something for him. How long can living on coffee last? We’d probably need someone here every couple days at least…” She raised her eyes to the grey sky. “Well, it might even be a year…”
    Julia opened her car door. She looked toward her father’s house, thinking about Iris’s boyfriend Ethan and their apartment in Palatine. He’d probably be up waiting for her. At Julia’s own cramped place in Ravenswood, the only sound to greet her would be the radio she’d left on that morning. Through her father’s living room window she saw the humming glow of the television. “Can we talk about this later?” She sighed, slowly closing the door to her sister’s possible response.
* * *
    One of the doctors had told Iris and Julia that his memory problems could be due to his alcoholism. He’d said they didn’t yet know exactly how drinking caused memory loss, but the two were undoubtedly connected. For the last part of his fifteen-year marriage to their mother, he drank, (even more just before the divorce) almost always getting drunk, nearly every night after getting home from his job and often on the weekends when he was supposed to be watching his daughters, their mother working late. He’d pass out on the couch, forgetting to turn on the lights and to shut the shades, the house growing dark, the television volume turned up louder than the girls’ mother allowed. The flashing grey of a late-night movie would light their father’s lifeless face, the characters’ voices screaming. On coming downstairs from where they’d be playing together, they’d find the living room shadowy and unfamiliar, their father insensible. They’d shake him as hard as they could, trying to wake him, their little arms hardly able to move the weight of the unconscious man, heavier than anything they’d ever known. Julia would begin to cry, asking her older sister when their mother was coming home.

    “Down at Southern, I-I could play with the girls, I could play with them, but I couldn’t even hit a ball back with the men. They were these big guys from Australia and Germany and they just hit so hard. They’d hit the racket right out of my hand.” It was the second time Julia had heard this story that day, probably the twentieth time in her life. “College—that was a great time,” he said with a smile. She was finding it harder and harder to believe that her father—this man who now drank the majority of his meals, Ensure and ice cream shakes, who was now sitting on his couch wearing nothing but boxers and a pair of socks and shoes—had ever held a tennis racket. To Julia, the empty coffee mug looked heavy in his hand.
    The other stories she’d heard just as many times, if not more, but she still enjoyed them, because they were of names she knew, the musicians her parents had introduced to her.
    “I saw The Who in an old barn in Frankfurt, Illinois with my best friend Danny. We must’ve been eighteen, nineteen…It was just before they got big in the States, really big, but oh, man if that wasn’t a great show. Pete Moon, best rock ’n’ roll drummer ever.” He would always pause just then, laugh, and say, “I brushed shoulders backstage with Janis Joplin. Yeah, my buddy Paulie and I snuck in and she kind of bumped me as she was going onstage, stumblin’ a little.” Here, he would pause again, smiling, and touch his left shoulder. “Yeah, she bent down to fix her high heel and she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Oh, boy,” he’d say, shaking his head, “Man, she was homely, though. Ugly. But she could sing. Oh, could she.” He’d laugh again, thinking of a life that was real to him. “Yeah, we were pretty wild.”

    Coming back from work Sunday night, Julia let herself fall into her old, fraying couch as she listened to her mother on the answering machine, her voice low and scratchy, like she’d been woken from a long sleep. “Julia, it’s Mom. I talked to Iris about your dad yesterday.” There was a pause and a sigh, as though she’d wanted to say more, but then decided against it. “Call me when you get this. Love you, bye.”
    Some nights, Julia wouldn’t go right home after work to her empty apartment and answering machine. Sometimes she let herself be persuaded by her co-workers to have a couple drinks downtown, although she usually felt they were only asking to be polite. Most of the people she described to Iris as friends were really acquaintances at best: waiters, waitresses, bartenders, people about her own age whom she worked with at Louie’s and all the restaurants and bars that came before. On the nights Julia ignored their seeming insincerity, she combed her dark hair and put mascara on in the small employee’s bathroom before walking out into the cold that made her teeth hurt. Those were the nights Julia came home tired and a little drunk, dropping her keys on the table, herself on the couch, only to hear her mother’s voice on the answering machine, telling her to call her, asking how she was. Julia would feel guilty and scolded without knowing why.
    “Mom?”
    “How are you, Julia? Are you alright?” There was always prudence in her mother’s voice when she spoke with her, as though special care or sensitivity were needed.
    “I’m okay, Mom,” she said, yawning into the receiver.
    “Are you sure? You sound tired.”
    “Well, I’m a little tired, but I’m fine.”
    “I think Iris is worried about you,” she paused, sighing, “I’m worried about you.” Her mother said it gravely, as though she’d never felt this way before.
    “Oh, Mom. I’ll be fine,” Julia said, looking around her living room. She saw her bunched up socks on the floor by the couch, remembering that she’d slept there the night before, having watched the late, late show and reruns of Cheers.
    “Oh, I know. I’m just sorry you guys have to go through this, your dad being so young. This can’t be easy for you.” No, it wasn’t easy, Julia thought, but what could she do about it? There was a long silence. Julia examined her cuticles, picking at the dry skin on her fingers. “Iris said you decided not to go to COD this year?” Okay, here we go, Julia thought, dropping her hand. For a while, she’d thought about going back to school, maybe taking a few biology classes at the community college in Glen Ellyn, trying to get something moving from the unchanging rhythm of work and apartment and work and apartment, but when—what she now called—“this thing” with her father had begun a half a year ago, she’d decided against it. She’d told her sister that she didn’t think it was fair to her father.
    “Iris, he doesn’t even remember the conversations we have and I’m gonna go and memorize plant species? It just puts a bad taste in my mouth.”
    “Julia, we’re going to take care of this. It won’t hurt his feelings if you want to get a better education.”
    “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not afraid of hurting his feelings, it’s just…” But she hadn’t been able to explain herself in a way that she thought Iris would understand, and thought that maybe she was only making excuses.
    “Mom, I just don’t think it’s a good time right now. Besides, the second semester’s already started.”
    “Julia, you’re a smart woman. You can do anything you want to. It’s just that…you really can do so much more.”
    “I know, Mom. I know.”

    The first time Julia and Iris both went over to clean his house, the small one-storey had the qualities of a prolonged incompletion, as though their father had been abducted a couple weeks before, the space frozen in his unfinished tasks. An old pizza lay on top of the stove, one-fourth eaten, hardened, and dried. An expired carton of Half and Half was left on the counter, found amongst rings of coffee stains, a dirty blender, and last month’s mail. The dishwasher door was open and inside the glasses were filmy with soap. Opening up the cabinets and drawers with caution, they discovered things they recognized with a haunting familiarity—an incomplete set of ice cream bowls they’d given him for Christmas ten years ago, the popcorn maker he’d use on the weekends they’d visit after the divorce, scattered Father’s Day mugs.
    They washed the dishes together at the sink, Julia’s hands in the hot, soapy water working a rag inside a glass and Iris drying, then putting everything away in the cupboards. Iris had scrubbed the inside of the cabinets and lined the bottoms with new contact paper they’d bought that afternoon, a light blue with little, white flowers on it. Iris put all the glasses on one shelf, all the mugs on another shelf, and the plates and bowls on another. “We just need to get things organized,” she said.
    Every so often they looked up from the dishes in the sink and the stains on the counter to their father sitting on the couch in the living room, nearly forgetting he was there. The light from the television reflected off his glasses, his hair oily and unbrushed. Once, he got up from the couch, bringing a dirty mug into the kitchen, and placed it carefully into the sink, as though he felt he should be helping. He sat back down again, becoming a part of the disorder around him.
    Julia scrubbed at an old pizza tray, crusted over with baked-on cheese and tiny bits of sausage. Nearly all of it had washed off with a little force, but one small, stubborn bit remained. It wasn’t coming off, so she unwrapped the green scouring pads they’d bought and worked it over the steel in small, hard circles. With a frustrated groan, she threw the green pad into the sink and scratched at the spot with her thumbnail, knowing that within a week it would be soiled again.
    When Julia was there alone, she mostly nosed through his things; she didn’t like to clean if her sister wasn’t there. With Iris, Julia felt there was more of a sense of purpose, a feeling that this was their duty as daughters. As though cleaning out his refrigerator and folding his towels and washing his dishes was half the battle won, and his mind and the cancer in his colon didn’t matter so much, because they were next. When they’d first walk into his house, Julia would clear off a chair next to her father on the couch, allowing herself to sink deep within it, while Iris would open up the refrigerator to see what should be kept and what should be thrown away. Julia always envied her sister’s ability to change a space into what others called a home and not just a house, but Julia was sure that she herself couldn’t tell the difference, and even if she could, she knew she wouldn’t be able to accomplish that herself. Even with the additions she made on occasion, her apartment in the city always seemed overwhelmingly bare. Empty spaces on the bookshelves and food not in the cabinets.
    One day, as her father was in his room taking a nap, she discovered his daily planner under the couch. She opened it up and found he’d written in a quivering penmanship the actions of his days in short, plain lists, simple variations of the same thing: “Woke up at 6:30, made coffee, read Tribune, watched news.” Some days, as the accounts in the planner would have her believe, he not only made coffee, but drank it as well. Other days, he apparently drank coffee without having made it. Often he “got the Tribune,” but didn’t read it. Intrigued, Julia flipped weeks back through the pages to her forgotten birthday, where her father’s thick, inky print had written: “Woke up at 6, made coffee, watched CNN, erection.”

    After the doctors cut out part of his colon and the cancer that had attached itself there, Iris got a call at work from the hospital. Their father had become “unruly,” as the nurse told her on the phone. He’d torn out his catheter bag and IV and demanded to be allowed to leave. “Fuck you! I’m going home. Where are my keys?” He said he’d been there for a week, though it had only been two days. Iris left a message on her sister’s machine telling her to come to the hospital, but Julia didn’t get it until late that night, after she’d already returned to her apartment from work, and she felt too tired to drive out to the suburbs; the expressway was still exhausting, even without rush-hour traffic. She decided it would be better if she called. His voice was a tired shadow of the usual sharpness in his tone, as though he were talking into a handful of cotton balls, and Julia wondered if it was due partly to a bad connection. Iris had been there earlier, her father told her. This made Julia uncomfortable, knowing that he was alone and now she was the only person that was keeping him from being alone, at least for a few moments. She’d never had many conversations over the phone with him. They’d always been terse, to the point (“Dad, I’m coming over. Be there in an hour.”), on and off before the phone company ticked the minute mark.
    “How do you feel, Dad?”
    “Shitty.”
    “Yeah?”
    “My stomach hurts.”
    “Well, they’re giving you painkillers, aren’t they?”
    “Yeah.” Sometimes, she wished he would just lie to her. To Julia, it seemed that most people lied in such situations, that no matter how horrible they felt, no matter how bad their condition was, they always felt “okay.” She wanted her father to lie to her, at least in this moment, to allow her that space to say, “He says he’s fine, but I know better. I know him,” but he didn’t, and in his truth he gave her no room to feel inculpable, no room to tell someone, “Oh, and he’s being so brave, so patient.” She felt selfish and angry and sick inside.
    ”You there?” She asked after a silence.
    ”Yeah, I gotta go to the bathroom. Bye.”

    Saturday in the car, on the way home, Julia turned to her father and said, “Dad, if there’s anywhere you want to eat, just tell me. If you see something that looks good, just let me know, okay?” When he didn’t respond, she turned to him, taking her eyes off the road, “Okay?”
    “Yeah, okay. Jesus.”
    He stopped her at a Chinese buffet, just before the Stevenson entrance ramp in Joliet, nearly empty save for a booth occupied by four Latinos—two large men and their girlfriends—and what appeared to be the owners and their daughter, just getting ready to eat dinner. Her father paid the woman who’d gotten up from their table and walked around to the other side of the cash register, and Julia saw the thick fold of bills he put back in his pocket, at least a couple fifties behind many other notes, and she reminded herself to tell Iris about it later.
    Watching her father, she filled her plate with egg rolls and chow mein, though she was not very hungry. The food looked old and waxy, like it’d been sitting out all afternoon, kept warm by the low flames in the buffet. She wasn’t sure if he’d seen the silverware, partially hidden by the large stack of dinner plates, or if he would see them at all, so she took two forks and walked past the family and the two couples and sat down in a long booth to watch her father from afar as he got his food. He sat down in the booth across from her, half off the side of the seat, as though this were a place he could not get comfortable. He’d found the silverware on his own, Julia noticed, and they ate without speaking, the silence broken only by the fast, intermediate clacks of her father’s jaw and the smacking of his food, which made her think he wasn’t chewing well enough. Picking up a fried dumpling, he’d take a bite, wrinkle his nose in distaste, then set it down, take a couple bites of a donut, then a mouthful of a mealy watermelon slice, spitting out the seeds onto the table. He’d then take another bite of the dumpling he’d dropped on his plate only moments before.
    When his food was half eaten, he stood up and shuffled slowly back towards the buffet. Julia saw the two muscular men eye her father; his khaki pants were too big for him now, gathered at his waist by a black leather belt, the end, long and dangling, his shirt tucked in tightly. The men turned their eyes to meet hers, then back to their meals. Her father returned to the table with tapioca pudding and more of the watermelon. At least he’s eating, she thought, as she put her napkin on her untouched plate of food. Even if it’s bad Chinese and sweets, he’s eating.
    After noisily slurping his pudding—some left on the corner of his mouth—he slid out of the booth saying he had to go to the bathroom. She watched her father walk past the table of Latinos talking in Spanish, quickly glancing up at him, and the Chinese family eating their dinner. The mother, seeing his expression of searching and confusion, pointed around the corner towards the hallway they’d walked through when they first arrived. Julia heard him mutter a “thank you” and watched as he disappeared around the corner. Alone, head down, waiting for him, she drank her cola and watched the two Latino couples across from her, picking at the last of their meals, the men leaning back in their seats, their arms around their girlfriends. Every so often one of them said something funny and they’d all break into laughter, the women squeezing deeper into the big torsos of their boyfriends. She quickly looked away when one of the men caught her staring at them. “Poor gringo,” they must be saying to each other, Julia thought. She hadn’t showered that morning or put on any makeup. The quick look she’d given herself in the mirror before she left her apartment had reflected dark circles under her eyes and a pale face.
    Just as she turned her eyes in the direction of the bathroom, she saw her father shuffling around the corner with his belt and zipper undone and his shirt bunched loosely into his pants. Julia saw the back of the girl’s head turn up, then towards her mother, whispering something in her ear. Her father sat down again on the edge of the seat and before she could tell him to button his pants, she caught the looks of the men across from them and she swore she heard one of them say, “Fuckin’ crazy, man.”

    Julia told her boss at Louie’s, who she felt was about to fire her anyway, that she wasn’t coming into work on Sunday and instead she got up early and drove northwest out of the city to her sister’s in Palatine. Iris kept her apartment immaculate: spotless cream carpeting, shiny sliding glass door, dust-free coffee table. Julia noticed that even the space on the floor around her sister’s many plants was without dead leaves or clumps of dirt. Iris’s boyfriend Ethan had left early that morning to buy a gasless grill.
    “There’s some new department store opening up today and they’re on sale. A good deal supposedly. He said we needed one,” Iris said with a smile, draping her arm over the back of the couch.
    Julia laughed nervously then blurted out, “Iris, I’m moving in with Dad. I’m going to take care of him. I’ll do it.” She said it as though it were a line memorized for a play, but then delivered too quickly. Her sister’s face twisted into a look of confusion and then she began to laugh.
    “Julia, you can’t do that.”
    “Well, somebody has to.”
    “Julia, no. I talked to some people in his area. His disability pay and half-salary, and even his insurance will cover a caregiver. We’d only need them every couple days and once a week if there’s chemo. It won’t cost as much as you think.” But Julia was shaking her head and her face no longer looked as though it were asking.
    “Not a nurse, not some stranger.”
    “Julia, I can’t afford to take days off. Ethan and I aren’t going to stay in this apartment forever—”
    “No, you don’t have to. I don’t expect you to do anything,” Julia said.
    “No, c’mon. What happened to you going back to school? I thought you really wanted to do something.”
    “I do. I’m going to do something,” she said with an exasperated sigh. Then again, carefully, as though Iris hadn’t heard her the first time, “I’m going to do something.”
    Iris began shaking her head and sat up. “I don’t want you to use this as an excuse to not do something with your life.”
    Julia clenched her teeth, cocking her head to the side. “You mean nine to five. You mean play house!” She said it with malice, as though it disgusted her to even form the words in her mouth. “You think yours is the only way to live. Well, what’s wrong with helping Dad? What’s wrong with that?” She threw her arms out as though she were pleading with her.
    “It’s not a real life, Julia! What do you think you’re gonna do down there? Get another waitressing job while you take care of him? You’re stagnating. You’re just wasting time until you have to make any real decisions, and by that time it’ll be too late!” She put her hand to her forehead, taking a deep breath, and then she said more quietly, “I just don’t want to see you get lost down there.”
    “I won’t. I’ll be fine. I just need to do this. I don’t know why, but I have to do something…something that’s not just for me.” She put her hand on her chest as she said it, looking into her sister’s eyes.
    Iris lowered her head to the side and furled her eyebrows. “Julia, but you don’t have to do this.”
    “I know I don’t, Iris. I won’t…I—I just…I’ll be fine.”

    Lying down in bed, nothing near sleeping, the pace of the day still asserted itself in her long, heavy breaths. Although she was motionless, save for the rise and fall of her chest, she felt as if she were still moving, still being pulled in many directions at once, packing boxes, loading her car. She thought that maybe she’d feel better if she could lose herself in something as purely sensual and close as her own body. If she could feel that release in herself and feel what came from inside her, she could start to feel good. But no matter how hard she tried not to think about the real things that were keeping her up, no matter how hard she tried to envision a man she’d passed on the street weeks ago—the way she always remembered strangers—every time her fingers found their way down to the softness of herself, she kept seeing her father’s scribbled print of “Erection” and she felt she’d never known anything so heavy. She jerked her hand out of her underwear, crying.

    Julia washed the dishes in the sink. An old skillet she’d found the day before to cook their eggs in. Mason jars with a chocolate film around the edges. He’d had a shake that morning after his coffee, then another one for dinner with his pills. She’d filled the prescription that afternoon as he dozed on the couch. After the dishes were done, drying in the sink, she took a blanket from the pile of laundry she’d folded earlier, and curled up on the floor, her father sitting in the same spot on the couch. He’d been watching tennis all day and when a good play had been made, he’d “Oooo” and turn to his daughter, asking, “Did you see that? Did you? Whew.” And even if her eyes had become unfocused from the action on the television, her mind no longer seeing men with rackets, she would say, “Yes, Dad. I did.”