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might come of it. But this was a fervent, eyes-closed-tightly wish that things wouldturn out to be okay with my dad, that everything that was happening was just a mistake, a false alarm, and I was imbuing this wish with as much hope in the outcome as the ones I’d made when I was little, when all I’d wanted from the universe was a pony.
    The sitcom laugh track blasted through the room, and I looked at the clock on the DVD player. “What time were they supposed to be home?” I asked.
    “Mom wasn’t sure if they were making it back tonight,” Warren said. He met my eye for a moment, then looked back at the television. “She said she’d call.”
    I nodded, and focused on the antics onscreen, though I could hardly follow them. My parents were at Sloan-Kettering, a cancer hospital in Manhattan, where my father was getting tests done. They’d been there for the last three days because it turned out that the back problem that had been bothering him for the last few months wasn’t actually a back problem at all. The three of us had been left to fend for ourselves, and we had been doing our own chores without complaint and getting along much better than usual, none of us talking about we were all afraid of, as though by naming it, we would make it real.
    My mother had called me that morning, apologizing that they were missing my birthday, and while I assured her that it was okay, I had felt a hard knot start to form in my stomach. Because it felt like, on some level, this was what I deserved. I had always been close to my dad—Iwas the one who went along with him on errands, the one who helped him pick out birthday and Christmas gifts for my mother, the only one who shared his sense of humor. So I should have been the one to realize something was actually wrong. I could see the signs, after all—my dad wincing as he eased himself down into the low driver’s seat of his sports car, working harder than usual to lift things, moving a little more carefully. But I hadn’t wanted it to be real, had wanted it to be something that would just quietly go away, so I hadn’t said anything. My father hated doctors, and even though my mother could presumably see all the same things that I did, she didn’t insist that he go to one. And I had been focused on my own drama at school—convinced that my breakup and its fallout was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
    I was thinking just how stupid I’d been when headlights cut through the darkness outside the window, cresting up the hill of our driveway, and a second later, I heard the hum of the garage door. Gelsey sat up, and Warren turned off the volume. For a moment, we all just looked at one another in the sudden silence.
    “They’re back, so that’s a good sign, right?” Gelsey asked. For some reason she looked at me for an answer, and I just looked at the television, where the hijinks were winding down and everything was getting happily resolved.
    I heard the door open and close, and then my mother appeared in the doorway of the TV room, looking exhausted.
    “Could we talk to all of you in the dining room?” she asked. She didn’t wait for us to answer, but left the room again.
    As I stood up from the couch, I could felt the knot in my stomach get bigger. This did not seem to be the good sign Gelsey was talking about, and the one that I had wished for. Because if it was good news, I figured that my mother just would have told us. She wouldn’t have needed to tell us in the dining room, which in itself seemed ominous. In addition to the few times it was used each year for eating fancier dinners on nicer plates than usual, the dining room was the place where things were Discussed.
    I followed Warren and Gelsey through the kitchen toward the dining room, where I saw my father was sitting at his usual spot, at the head of the table, looking somehow smaller than I remembered him being only a few days ago. My mother stood at the kitchen island with a square white