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“Good girl.” Placing the back of her hand theatrically on her forehead, she said, “Take some of those casseroles home to Evelyn’s, why don’t you. I’m going to bed.”

I’d hoped Mother’s headaches would ease once she didn’t have Daddy to worry about, but they kept getting worse. I finally convinced her to see a specialist in the city, who sent her for a new kind of X-ray called a CT scan. The scan revealed a hemangioblastoma growing in the blood vessels of her brain. Such tumors grew so slowly, the specialist told her, they were often left alone. Given her symptoms, though, he recommended surgery to remove it. I encouraged her to get the operation. Mother was having none of it.

“I’d rather live with this thing in my head until it kills me than let some doctor drill a hole through my skull,” she said, shutting down the conversation. Though he couldn’t force her to have a surgery she didn’t want, the specialist insisted it wasn’t safe for her to drive a car or even light the stove anymore. When he suggested moving to a nursing home, Mother dramatically swore she’d kill herself if she couldn’t stay in her own house.

“If you intend to continue living independently, Mrs. McIntyre,” the frustrated doctor concluded, “you’re going to need help.”

“My daughter will take care of me,” Mother said. The specialist shrugged and wished me luck.

It wasn’t too onerous at first. I was still in my forties and strong as I’d ever been when Mother was diagnosed. Her friends pitched in with rides to church and the grocery store. I hired a girl from the village to come by once a week to clean and cook. Eventually, though, Mother got too wobbly to be left on her own for more than a few hours at a time. You checked up on her during the day. I came by after the library closed. Toward the end, I was spending more nights in my childhood bedroom than I was sleeping beside you at home. Walks through the woods were my solace during those years. I tramped between our house and Mother’s so often you strung a wire through the trees to make sure I’d never get lost again.

On New Year’s Day in 1990, I woke up to find Mother had died in her sleep. I made sure you sat beside me at her service, and I wasn’t looking over my shoulder that time. My brother had left me on my own to nurse our mother through her dying decade. I wasn’t about to invite him to her funeral. My self-righteousness lasted until Easter, when Billy was killed in a car crash and the rift in my family became set in stone.

In writing you these letters, Evelyn, I find myself searching for an ending that will endow our small existence with some greater meaning. What meaning can be gleaned from my family’s sad story I have no idea, but perhaps these scenes will lay the foundation for a future reckoning I can’t yet see.

With all my love, as always, Hazel

Chapter 32

How I manage to smile for the camera while teaching my online classes, I have no idea. In the days after Joe murdered my bees, I often wish I’d died alongside them. I read Evelyn’s column about the Schuywich boy who shot himself and break down crying. If I had a gun in the house, I might be tempted to press its muzzle to my temple just to feel the cold circle of steel against my skin. As it is, the madness of those self-inflicted stings sends me spiraling back to my teenage days of razor blades and blood. Then, my father was there to make me promise not to hurt myself anymore. Now all I have of him are the memories of our last year together.

After finishing my MFA, I planned to spend the summer in Kenosha before heading out to California for my fellowship. I could have taken a bus like I did during the holidays, but Dad insisted on driving to Iowa City to pick me up. I was so preoccupied telling him about an essay I’d placed for publication that we’d crossed into Illinois before I noticed how exhausted he looked. He’d been tired at Christmas, too, but now his pallor was tinged with jaundice.

“Seriously, Dad, is something wrong with you?”

He patted my knee with a weirdly withered hand. “I didn’t want to be a distraction while you finished your thesis, kiddo, but I haven’t been feeling too good for a while now. I finally went to the doctor last month, and, well, I got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”

“Wait, what? You didn’t tell me you have cancer?”

“I figured you deserved to enjoy your last semester without worrying about me.”

“You’re an idiot, you know that?” I turned my palm up to interlace our fingers.

“If you say so.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “I’m glad you’re coming home for the summer, though. I’m going to need your help.”

Dad drove with one hand on the wheel the rest of the way. The other I held in both of mine as he related what his doctors had said about chemotherapy and expectations. I took it all in, dry-eyed with denial. When it became clear he’d need my help well past August, I implored the university in California to defer my fellowship to the following year. The circumstances were exceptional enough that they agreed. I envisioned months of medical appointments interspersed with long, lonely hours of reading books and drafting essays—the saddest writing retreat ever. Turned out, my dad had other ideas.

For as long as I could remember, Larry Beacon had been renovating other people’s houses. Now, in the time he had left, he wanted to focus on the projects he’d planned for our own home. We started in the upstairs bathroom, which he’d already gutted down to the studs. My dad’s demeanor changed from defeated to dreamy as he showed me the plumbing fixtures he’d chosen, the tiles he’d ordered, the vanity he’d built from a repurposed sideboard.

“I’ll need your help to get this finished. That okay with you, kiddo?”

“It’ll be like old times, Dad,” I said.

The weekly chemo treatments weren’t so bad, just a few hours in the cancer ward of St. Catherine’s Hospital hooked up to an IV. It was the days afterward when Dad felt like shit that slowed us down. The upstairs bath, which we should have finished in June, took until the end of July. Refreshing the downstairs powder room with new flooring, fresh paint, and updated fixtures—the kind of job Dad used to knock out in a long weekend—consumed a fortnight. It was September by the time we moved on to the kitchen, and though the cancer’s growth had been slowed by the chemo, Dad was fast losing both weight and energy. I made the case for scaling back our plans. He wouldn’t hear of it.

“Kitchens are the biggest return on investment in any renovation,” he said, sucking on a cherry ice pop while the meatloaf I’d made for supper congealed on his plate. “This house is your inheritance. It’s important to maximize its value.”

“I don’t care about an inheritance, Dad,” I said, choking up. “I just want us to make the most of our time together.”

He looked at me like I wasn’t making sense. “What do you think we’re doing?”

We dove into demolition while Dad could still enjoy the heft of a hammer in his hand. Over the next four months, my father went from energetic contractor to bossy foreman to patient shop teacher as it fell to me to man the tools of his trade. I transitioned, too, from eager apprentice to reluctant caregiver to matter-of-fact nursemaid as cancer reversed the roles of parent and child.

Crisp autumn yielded to bitter Wisconsin winter. The days blended into one another, each sweaty and hard and equally precious. We finished the kitchen by Christmas. To celebrate, I heated up a spiral ham and biscuits in the new stainless-steel range. Dad perched precariously on a stool at the granite-topped breakfast bar and picked at his plate. After dinner, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life, both of us bawling along with Jimmy Stewart at the end. Dad apologized weepily for not being a better father. I insisted tearfully he was the best dad on the planet.

“I miss your mother,” he said, his cracked lips smeared red from a nosebleed.

I wiped his face with a wet towel. “Me too.”