This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition. It was selected as the 2021 nonfiction winner by guest judge Johanna Hedva.
Illustration by Rawan Hayat
It was the second week of summer classes. It was around 2 in the afternoon on Tuesday, and, on
my way out of the library my brother called me. This was strange. He runs two speakeasies in DC,
which means we never talk before midnight. We usually greet each other on the phone with British
accents or a deep southern twang for the first thirty seconds. We pretend to be other people who
have the wrong number. We keep it light. This is what we do. On this day, his voice was sharp,
irritated it had to make sound. It’s about Dad. They found a cluster of cells. On Monday, it was
pain in his side. On Tuesday, it was cancer.
I walked down the West End over to the river. I watched the tops of trees on both sides of the street
bow up and down, as if they were nodding and confirming the bad to me. Bad news hurts more
when it’s pretty outside. I didn’t know I’d have tears for this. I looked up at the sun. I know what
the sky looked like before it tried to swallow me whole. I looked down at the ground, another
feather at my feet.
***
Griff looked like all men do in western Pennsylvania. His salt and pepper hair was flattened by a
black and yellow Pittsburgh Steelers cap decorated with lint and splashes of beige paint. All of his
body fat had assembled to his belly. His goatee and hair on his neckline were trimmed uneven. He
glared back only once after I packed into his cherry red Jeep Patriot. He was driving me on my
$96 Uber ride from Pittsburgh International Airport to the city of Greensburg just outside the city,
west of the Allegheny Mountains. Griff looked like my father.
I make my own jerky. My brother makes jerky too but that’s a whole nother thing. Do jano how to
make jerky? Griff was not going to have our hour together be a quiet one. This would be the first
time I’d be seeing my father since his diagnosis with Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. It had been a week
and a half since the phone call, and my brother and I were separately trekking to see him. Though
I intended to meditate in the car to quell anxiety, I instead chose to engage with Griff. Be a big
girl, I told myself. Nice should come easy. I told him I left Pittsburgh when I was nine and hardly
came back to visit. I remembered orange construction barrels lining the highways and my feet
pressed against the glass of the backseat of my father’s car, framing the overcast skies of
Appalachia. Griff told me he’d rerouted on a slightly longer although more scenic route because,
Maybe, it would be nice for you to see some of yer old home. He was breaking down the minutiae
of the jerky making process while my eyes drifted toward the peaking sun wavering between the
passing trees. This was my old home. This is the home of my father.
***
When I can’t sleep, I drive down roads from my childhood in my head. I pass the long empty
parking lot of Lowry’s western boot shop, drive up the hill on the left toward the train track, past
the outdoor pavilion and row of houses across from it. I skip roads I can’t remember but I always
arrive at the shrill and rattle of cicadas. Cicadas remind me of my father. After my parents
divorced when I was six years old, he’d found a place no more than twenty minutes from my
mother’s home. It was a middle-income apartment complex, cushioned between trees in an alcove
of an elegant historic neighborhood. His apartment sat at the bottom of a slanted asphalt parking
lot. My little legs barreled out of the car down the hill, toward the door every time he’d put us in
park as if I was running late to my own birthday party. Going to my father’s house felt like a fever,
a great work of fiction— an adventure only I had the map to.
We didn’t have our own rooms. My father would sleep on the floor while I slept on the couch and
my brother in the bed; sometimes we’d alternate. In my memory, it’s always June: the pizza is
always on its way, my brother and father are always yelling at the Pirates game on television and
I’m always in his bedroom lining up socks and dress shoes playing pretend.
Sometimes he’d crack the door open to see what I was getting into. He’d hunch, look down and
smile before apologizing. He bought me pencils and notepads for my short stories and crayons for
my comic strips I’d begun drawing. He’d collected every hair tie or clip gone rogue to an area in
the bathroom, waiting for my return. I begged him to sign me up for slow-pitch softball after
watching of A League of Their Own. We’d take turns feeding the ticket eater at the arcade of the
Franklin Mall during my brother’s drum lessons. We sang Motown in our car rides back and forth
between homes, laughing as he’d attempt to sing the high notes to “Get Ready” by The
Temptations.
Little girls have good memories of their fathers, and their memories multiply but mine live at the
bottom of the slanted parking lot, drowned by the sound of cicadas. We stalled our memories when
I was nine. My mother moved my brother and me to Virginia where she got a better job and put
us in better schools. I remember the car rides. My father would pick us up in Virginia and drive us
back and forth. I’d lie horizontal in the backseat daydreaming for 7 hours. I was always dreaming
up a new life to live for a different day. I’d smell the oil drip from another gasoline pump in another
city and fantasize about getting out and going to play. I wanted to play flash-light tag with the boys
I wrote about in my journals, paint my nails silver and choreograph dances to ‘NSYNC at slumber
parties. The back and forth, my father assured us, wasn’t always going to be this way. Eventually
he moved to be near us but this lasted for a few months. He got engaged to a woman who cut hair
for a living and moved back to western Pennsylvania. He couldn’t stay.
That engagement soon ended. My father was good at making new families. He cared for his
girlfriend’s children, financially supported and raised them. He once sold an engagement ring he’d
bought for one woman to help her buy Christmas presents for her kids. Later, he went into credit
card debt to help her buy a couch. She broke up with him. There’d be the occasional invitation into
these lives. The Thanksgiving Dinner with the one woman and her two daughters whom he’d
helped do their homework. The other woman who demanded I leave a thank-you note. After my
brother went off to college, it got harder for me to go and see him alone.
At fifteen, I asked him why he left us behind. Why he plummeted our family into such
exorbitant debt. Didn’t he care that my mother was sick with multiple sclerosis, and she’d had to
leave him and dig us out of it on her own? We oscillated between small homes with colored
carpeting and big homes with Victorian furniture. In Pennsylvania, I never knew what kind of life
we were supposed to be living. Virginia was the first time I felt safe, I wasn’t going anywhere.
Maybe I knew my father was a liability who could snatch it all away.
Little girls engage fathers who leave them because they still want him to be in charge. He’d yell
at me for not calling him more often when I’d been on the other line waiting. I wanted him back
in when he pushed out and I pushed him out when he pushed back in. This is what we did. By
sixteen, I’d stopped grieving and started getting even. I shrank my father in conversation. I’d ask
questions I knew he couldn’t answer. By seventeen, I’d started to look at life through winning or
losing; with my father, I’d won. I’d decided I was never going to feel understood by my father so
I just stopped calling. We could never get that time back. In pictures, he may have shown up to the
occasional dance recital or play. Today, he talks about these moments as if they lasted every day.
But he wasn’t there teaching me I was capable of keeping a man to stay.
A few years later on my birthday, I opened a card from my father that read, “I can’t believe you’re
finally twenty-one.” It was my twenty-second birthday. I laughed because it hurt because the
reminder of his absence was worse than his absence. He made a trip up to see me in New York
City around this time. We went to a diner outside of Penn Station. He didn’t like the idea of
traveling far from the train and I knew it was all he could afford. Over eggs and OJ, he laughed off
the mistake but teared up doing the math, considering all the time we’d lost together— the day to
day. Be a big girl, I told myself. You don’t have to engage. I’d learn to tune out other people’s
tears, even if they belonged to my father. We didn’t see each other for a few years. Then, it became
once a year after that. My brother had found a way to continue a relationship with him. To me, he
was a visitor in my life. He’s just this nice guy I know, I’d tell those who’d ask. Days go by and I
never think about him, really.
***
“I abaht died whenever I ate beets. Turned my pee pink. Freaked me aht.” Griff started to list to
me all the vegetables he’d begun eating since going ketogenic. Should I have told him beets are
high in carbohydrates? He’d just been diagnosed with diabetes and needed to lose weight fast. I
told him my father had recently been diagnosed as well and lost thirty pounds in three months.
Good fer him. Yeah, I've lost abaht fifty this year. We sat in silence for all of a minute before Griff
had moved on to something else. I wanted to tell him what I was really there for.
Pancreatic cancer is insidious. It comes from damage to the DNA. It shows no signs until it has
progressed and is rarely caught in early stages. After his diagnosis, my father told me that had
been experiencing pain in his upper abdomen for months but had never mentioned it to his doctor.
This was not a surprise to me. Two years prior to the cancer, my father had congestive heart failure
and experienced shortness of breath and extreme fatigue, but, again, never mentioned it to his
doctor. Rapid weight loss, jaundice, and newly diagnosed diabetes. How did no one see the signs?
You can’t decide when grief begins. In that moment of silence with Griff, I thought about how in
that week and a half between finding out my father’s condition and getting into the Jeep Patriot,
I’d felt more isolated and alone than I’d ever been in my life. When I told my closest friends, half
of them responded with a, Sorry to hear that, hope he feels better. Or, Sorry I know it must be hard
because you aren’t that close. Maybe I wasn’t allowed to feel this grief which whatsyourgrief.com
calls “disenfranchised grief”— when the loss or griever is not recognized. People are so desperate
to contain and to name their grief that they feel comfortable settling on a term from a drop-down list
curated by somebody sad. A friend came over the day after the phone call to sit with me while he
ate a burrito. This was all I’d really wanted: a warm body, a soft place to land. I wanted someone
to respect that despite the complexity of my relationship with my father, he was still my father and
that this impending death — the waiting — is confusing.
I’m actually here because my Dad has cancer. Griff gave long nods to the road. Do you know
anyone with cancer? I asked. Griff chuckled and changed lanes. Yeah, my two older sisters, my
brother and his wife who actually had it two times and one of my younger brothers. Three of my
cousins. Practically everyone but Griff had cancer; in fact, it seemed like everyone in Pennsylvania
had cancer. It was almost comical how blasé he was about life and death, spilling out every detail
of every diagnosis. Here I was having spent the last week and a half feeling bad for myself and
wanting someone to relate to. I had begun feeling bad that I had a father with an acute illness now
paired with my mother’s chronic illness. But Griff had more cancer in his life than any of my
friends back home. Griff had death knocking on his door for decades. I lost one of my sisters from
it and my brother, he lost his wife. Suddenly, I felt as alien to him as my friends felt to me. I looked
out to the trees again. Is your whole family from Pennsylvania? Griff nodded. I nodded, too.
The rust belt has turned into cancer valley. In western Pennsylvania, where rivers and valleys trap
pollutants, half of the state’s residents will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. 1 in 5 will
die from it. In the United States, Pittsburgh has the third highest cancer incidence rate with
carcinogens like chromium-6 from fracking wastewater contaminating every water system in all
of western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh received an F on its report card from the American Lung
Association because of degraded air quality. Much of the pollution is linked to coke oven emissions
in the Monongahela River Valley, which is now commonly referred to as the newest “cancer hot
spot”. Like Griff, my father has lived most of his sixty-four years along the Allegheny and had
been vulnerable to the lethal cancer-causing chemicals in the air that he breathes and water he
drinks. But Griff wasn’t ill with cancer. I wondered if Griff had gone out of state to live for some
time just like my father tried to for me. In my daydream Griff went to New Hampshire and breathed
in clean air while he fished on a lake. Unlike my father, maybe Griff tried to stay before coming
back. Maybe that’s what kept him healthy. Or, maybe, unlike my father, Griff just got lucky.
When Griff dropped me off, my father was standing outside waiting for me. He was wearing his
yellow Steelers t-shirt with Adidas slide sandals and white knee socks. He was living at the bottom
of another slanted asphalt driveway but my legs didn’t barrel out to get to him. There I was standing
between two men I barely knew except with one I shared the same DNA. My father hugged me
and it felt unfamiliar. He smelled metallic but I told him he smelled like mint. Maybe he knew
this, too. His eyes brightened at my compliment, and I think maybe he’ll pull me in tighter but he
turns around and leads me in.
At the Arnold Palmer Cancer Center for my Dad’s third round of chemo treatment, sick men and
women filled nearly every seat, waiting to be seen. That morning we watched Trump on television
blame mental health for guns killing over 80 people that weekend in El Paso and Dayton. I tried
to stymie my horrified facial response. I watch their grey faces nod in consensus with the nation’s
president, and I remembered I was now in Trump country. I want to shake every one of their sick
bodies and ask them: Do you know you are being poisoned? Your air, your water, your choosing
to be here?
My father’s platelets were too low so we left and went back home. His fiancée was working from
home on her computer in the side room, tapping her feet to her 90’s light rock radio. I went down
to my father’s basement. A year ago it was nothing but hard concrete covered with boxes of
Christmas wreaths, Steelers jerseys and baseball cleats. He told me they were going to renovate
the basement while I wandered around checking the boxes as if our memories were somewhere in
there stored away. Now, it’s filled with a fireplace and dining room and outside patio. This was a
place for his visitors to stay. This was what it felt like, he’d done to me what I did to him. My
father had made me a visitor.
Upstairs, I walked out on the deck and decided to act like one. If I was a visitor, then I could try to
see him as somebody different than the let-down, the disappointment, the antagonist in my life’s
story. My father is more than just someone who ended up becoming my father. He has thoughts,
opinions, a childhood pain he deals with in his own way, family dynamics he still tries to navigate.
Finally, he’s found someone who loves him the way he’s meant to be loved in his fiancée. I’m
learning how he stands up from chairs and slices his food and how he moves through
conversations. I don’t know this man but I now need to.
He’s lost his hair. He walks at an angle. He’s in pain. His fingers tingle. He shifts his eyes back
and forth when we talk. He doesn’t know much about me but then again I don’t much about him
either. This is what we do. We sit in silence before we begin again where we attempt to reimagine
who we are to each other. I want to tell him about Lago Maggiore. I want to tell him about the boat
ride to Isola dei Pescatori where the captain played Pavarotti’s “Nessun Dorma” and I cried
because I thought about my future wedding, about a life we’ve both missed out on and the
memories that may never get made. I want to tell him I’m sorry that this has happened to him, that
life worked out this way. We’re inching closer but we’re not there yet. My father turns to the birds
pecking at his new bird feeder. I’m really into birds now, he tells me. A feather lies at my feet.
Maria Prudente (she/her/hers) has written about feminist ethics for The Manifest-Station, and her poetry & nonfiction have appeared in Litro Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Prometheus Dreaming. She graduated from Columbia this spring with a BA in Creative Writing and is attending graduate school this fall.