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kitchen table. His mother, her hands bolts of fabric. What one loves can often be the most frightening. Sometimes it bears him aloft, this life, bears him higher and lighter than ever before. Then he and Walter are in a balloon, skimming the land, careering toward a cliff, waiting for that moment when suddenly the world will sink beneath them, and they will look down at the tiny details of the earth, and either they will keep flying or the balloon will fall, everything will fall. If Danny wrote a song, it’s the weather he would write about: the stretches of calm, the hurricanes, how once it rained for years.
    But of course he doesn’t—he never will—write songs.

Chapter 4
    F or almost twenty years now Louise had had cancer. The disease seemed to be following a haphazard progress of its own devising; it disappeared for years at a time, then emerged just when everyone seemed finally to have forgotten it. Louise mostly found the lumps when she was in the shower. Then she’d come into the kitchen, her hair wrapped in a towel, and Nat could tell from her face, could tell from how she held on to the coffeepot and breathed small breaths that in a few minutes she would be calling Dr. Sonnenberg’s office. But first, a cup of coffee, slowly taken in. A deep breath. The familiar flipping of the address book, the rapid punch of telephone buttons. “Hello, Dorothy, it’s Louise Cooper. Yes. Okay. I’m afraid I need to make an appointment.”
    Dorothy, Dr. Sonnenberg’s nurse, always said something soothing then, something Nat—sitting at the kitchen table, pretending to read a cereal box—couldn’t make out. “I know, I know,” Louise said. “It had to happen sooner or later. I guess I was just hoping, that’s all. Well, this afternoon will be fine. Yes. Just fine.” She put the phone down, and Nat stood.
    The waiting room was what bothered her the most, the waiting room with its fishtank and piles of old
House & Gardens
. The hours she spent there, thumbing through the magazines, watching to see if the albino catfish would ever emerge from the plastic shipwreck into which it hadswum, were purgatory, she told April on the phone. It was the bubbles she concentrated on to keep sane, the bubbles rising steadily, one after the other, from the plastic diver standing amid the black glass gravel on the fishtank’s floor.
    Dr. Sonnenberg always smiled and embraced her in the examining room. “Well, Louise,” he said, “I can’t exactly say I’m happy to see you here.” And then she smiled too, and they both almost laughed, Louise looking away at the window, blushing a little, like a girl whose date to the prom has just told her how beautiful she is.
    But she always came out all right; she was lucky over and over again. A kind of cheerful hysteria took over then. “I just want to let you know,” she’d call to tell Danny, “I’m having a little radiation, and it’s working like a charm. Shrinking everything back down to size.”
    â€œGood,” Danny would say, standing befuddled in the kitchen in his dress shirt and boxer shorts. “I’m glad, Mom.”
    â€œJust wanted to let you know,” she’d say again.
    ___________
    She was not alone in her illness. Doris Buxbaum’s husband, Fred, for instance, just fine one day, spry as a daisy, then the next hooked up to a respirator, a tumor as large as a fist closing in on his kidneys. Nat’s colleague Dale Wilson, getting along, getting by with occasional radiation: thin as a rail, but still alive. Leona from the hairdresser’s, having just received the bad news, trying to open her eyes wide enough to absorb the dreadful panorama before her. Even Dr. Schoenberger, the wonderful surgeon who had saved her that first time; she never in a million years would have imagined that she would outlive Dr. Schoenberger.
    It seemed to her the final twist