“I’m not coming home,” Dad said. His sky-blue eyes, rimmed pink, showed spidery blood vessels in the surrounding white.

“Noooo,” I protested. We sat at the gray and white speckled linoleum table in the kitchen. The chair legs scraped the floor as he pushed back and I climbed onto his lap, putting my arms around his neck. At thirteen, I felt awkward for this comfort; my body lanky, my mind on bell-bottoms and boys. Still, I pressed my face against his; the tang of his Aqua Velva tickled my nose. His cheek, soft and freshly shaven, rested on my forehead. My palms and armpits were sweaty as if I’d run up the thirty steps from the street to our Baltimore row house, situated at the top of an old quarry.

“Listen to me,” he tried again, “I am not coming home.” His voice lilted with an accent, a remnant of the Pennsylvania Slavic community where he grew up.

“Did you tell Mom?” I asked.

“No, not yet,” he said and gently turned my face to his. “You have to be strong for Mom. Take care of her.”

The Frigidaire handle held my attention. Yellow lace curtains danced into the room through the cracked windowpane next to the back yard.

“Over here,” a voice in the alley called. It sounded like my friend, Dennis, close enough that he just might be talking to me.

“Coming,” another kid said. They were rounding up a team for kickball, our daily after-school activity. I wanted to run outside and play.

The clock on the counter ticked loudly. Our German sheperd pup whined behind the closed cellar door. Scratch, scratch, scratch––he clawed at the wood, demanding to go out romping with the boys. He yipped, a rapid series of high-pitched sounds alternating with a lower, prolonged cry. I felt like joining him in a Tarzan yell and beating my chest.

My father and I were alone in the house, except for the dog. My mother was at work. My parents alternated job shifts so that I would never be unchaperoned. It was their routine; they had been doing this day/evening do-si-do since I was born. I had no siblings, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles to babysit me. In the eighth grade, I could have stayed by myself after school.

My mother had hoped for a dozen kids. After ten years of marriage, she and my dad were blessed with one child, me. Our world was the three of us.

“Huckleberry,” Dad said, hugging me tightly, thick arms wrapped around my waist. Of all the nicknames he had for me, I loved this endearment the most. It rhymed with my given name––Huckleberry Mary. My father enjoyed making up sobriquets for the neighborhood kids too. As the streetlights came on, parents would call out “Benny” and “Penelope” and “Samantha” for the real Kevin, Renee, and Dana. Old-fashioned monikers that came from a grandparent’s generation and suited him at the age of sixty-nine.

My father was much older than my mom. He had married in his mid-forties, saving my mother, eighteen years his junior, from servitude to her adoptive family. I only learned of this history much later in life, after they both had died, as I researched my parents’ genealogy. I knew nothing of this at the time; they were simply my mommy and daddy.

A car horn honked three times, yet my father remained seated. He seemed tired, even more than the usual weariness from long hours going up and down ladders painting houses. The heart attack he had six weeks earlier at Christmas made him look different—a thinner, paler version of himself. Staying at home since then on medical orders hadn’t resolved his fatigue.

“How’s your leg?” I asked and got off his lap to look at the calf, the site of his most recent problem. It felt cold to the touch, like a pack of bologna from the refrigerator and as colorless as my school uniform blouse.

“Come on, walk me down to the cab,” he said.

“The hospital will fix you, Daddy. They’ll take that blood clot out of your leg.”

“Stop it, Mary, I told you, I’m not coming home.” There was an uncharacteristic sharpness in his tone. “I’m going to die.”

The words slapped me. They bounced around like balls in the bingo roller on Friday nights at St. Michael’s. I managed to walk down the front stairs to the street supporting my dad as he leaned heavily on my arm. He took one step at a time, leading with his left leg, sparing the right one with the blocked blood vessel. My body felt as frigid and stiff as that leg. We slowly descended, stopping at every third riser for him to take a wheezy breath. Not only was his limb diseased but his insides too.

At the sidewalk, I breathed rapidly; the air felt thin and without enough oxygen like at the top of Mount Everest. In my homeroom there was a picture of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay after their summit in 1953, three years before I was born. My dad and I had climbed down our hill having conquered nothing at all.

My father slid into the backseat of the waiting taxi, while I stood rigid watching him pull away, both of us waving until each was out of sight.

I went back in the house, no longer wanting to play kickball with my friends. I let the dog out in the yard. Waiting for my mom, I convinced myself that my father was being dramatic. He had a flare for the imaginary. This was just one of his many tall tales—hopping trains to travel like a hobo and narrowly escaping the law, climbing out a bathroom window after a girlfriend proposed marriage, running through the woods after a bear had stolen his basket of berries.

Once he told me a story about how he got the tan lump on his forehead. The skin mole was the size of a dime, raised about one-eighth of an inch from the surface near his left eyebrow.

“Ran into a nasty nest of bees, trying to get me some honey,” he had laughed. I had pictured him stealing it, Winnie-the-Pooh style, and an angry swarm attacking him. That particular tale I had believed for years.

These fictional accounts centered on the town in which he grew up in the heart of coal-mining country. We visited his childhood home every Memorial Day trekking to the highest point in the cemetery to put flowers on the graves of his parents and brothers. The family house could be seen from this vantage point nestled among identical two-story wooden buildings adjacent to a train track. There was a stone outhouse and a large coal bin in the back yard and a playground across the tracks.

“Faster, faster,” I would yell to my dad as I gripped the handle of the roundabout and the world blurred to green and brown. His face became indistinguishable from the trees and hills.

I wanted the death words to cloud over. Squeezing my eyes shut, I convinced myself this “going to die” narrative was a yarn and buried it in anthracite dust in my mind. I didn’t tell my mother of his prediction.

A week of winter days dragged by. Mom and I visited Dad every day at the hospital. There was an age requirement of sixteen years for visitors to the surgical unit where he was housed. This necessitated costuming on my part—donning my mother’s clothes and blush and lipstick to make me look older. Pretending to be more adult gave these sojourns an air of theater. I also found comfort in the uniformed nurses, strict rules, reassuring doctors, and chemical aromas. Everyone there would take good care of Daddy.

At home, I missed our daily viewing of What’s My Line? where Daddy and I competed to guess the contestants’ occupation faster than the celebrity panelists.

“Teacher, teacher,” I would shout.

“No, she’s a secretary,” Daddy would counter.

You Bet Your Life was another favorite as we tried to answer the quiz questions before the featured couple. We laughed at the duck dressed like Groucho Marx that popped into the scene whenever someone said the secret word.

He and I loved puzzles and competing. We kept a running tally of wins. On the day he went to the hospital I was up two to one that week.

My father’s forewarning faded. Even when the surgery to remove the blood clot from his leg was canceled, the worry didn’t return to me. Another surgery was scheduled in its place, this time to excise a mass discovered on a routine chest X-ray. My veté kept mortal concerns at bay. The lung cancer became the priority. It had developed from years working in the coal mines, inhaling paint fumes, and cigarette smoking. But I didn’t know all that then. I only learned the details about how cancer develops a decade later when I went to medical school.

The night before the lung operation, we traveled to the hospital as usual. My parents talked quietly as I stared out of the window at the February drizzle hitting the pavement. The Towson neighborhood was lit with streetlamps amid a moonless sky. My legs swung back and forth on the visitor’s chair showing my impatience to get home. I had a lot of homework in this last semester before high school.

“Let’s go,” my mom said. “We have to catch the 7:15 bus.” She bent down to kiss my dad on the lips and then smoothed his thick, black hair. It was one of his best features. Years later I would wonder how it had remained so ebony without a hint of gray at his age.

I hurried over to the bed and gave him a quick hug. He returned the embrace, pulling me into him. The moment stretched out. I squirmed to be free.

The next day, my mother planned to pick me up from a friend’s house, just down the street from where we lived. She had taken the day off and waited at the hospital as my father underwent surgery. I had gone to school and then walked to my friend’s.

The front door opened. We girls looked up from where we were sprawled on the floor next to a Mattel Thingmaker. The toy heated and hardened our flower and creepy-crawly plastic creations. I was making a pink and green floral pin and had decided I would give it to my mom.

My mother stood in the doorway, her winter coat misbuttoned, one glove on, no hat; the cold air seeped into the room. A hiss sounded in the radiator.

“Your father died,” she announced. She reached to brush hair out of her eyes with a shaky hand. “He didn’t feel any pain. Never even woke up from the anesthesia. The doctor said his heart couldn’t take it.” She shook her head as if to reckon with this insufficient explanation.

My mom’s eyes were dry but puffy and red as I had sometimes seen them after an argument with my dad. Her body slid down onto the sofa. I sat down next to her. My friend closed the front door and then left the room. I don’t know how long we stayed there with our sides touching, the shock like a weight holding us down.

Your father died––nonsensical, just like my dad’s declaration a week earlier. Surreal words that changed prophecy to reality. Daddy had known he wouldn’t survive the operation. He had tried to tell me; I hadn’t understood.

Four days later, I sat in the front pew at the funeral dressed in a black shift and chapel veil, bought just for this occasion. I felt separated from everyone else in the church as if in a glass display case at Hutzler’s Department Store. I held my book, My Little Heart Prays, tightly. The Virgin Mother on the cover had been looking kindly at me since I made my First Communion. Nowhere in its pages could I find a prayer for losing a father.

The incense hung in a thick cloud in front of the acolyte. This smell along with the aroma of gladiolas on the altar nauseated me. The Eucharist formed a paste in my throat. When Father Smith read the eulogy, he spoke familiarly about my dad. He did not know the man.

Near the end of the service he intoned, “Before man are life and death, good and evil, whichever he chooses shall be given him.” Had my father chosen?

I had so many questions––What exactly caused him to die? Did the doctors do something wrong? Should they have known he was so sick? Would the lung tumor have killed him anyway? How bad was his heart? Did they do anything for the terrible pain in his leg? Was Daddy scared? Was he angry? What had happened?

I would spend the next four decades of my life searching for answers as a forensic pathologist, delving into the cause and manner of death of thousands of strangers and explaining what happened to loved ones left behind. Yet how my father had foreshadowed his own death and why he chose to tell me remain unresolved.

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