Read The Removers: A Memoir for Free Online Page B

windows and door and the noise from the machine would prevent them hearing the street and the house. They were always monitoring. Always looking out for us.
    Theresa came into the kitchen and said, “What do you think’s wrong with Dad?”
    “Someone died,” I said. “Or Dad has cancer.”
    She nodded. I hadn’t formulated some great insight. Our neighbor, Mrs. Hollins, was our parents’ age, and the mother of a girl, Katie, and boy, Richie, whose ages matched my sister’s and mine. Katie was my sister’s best friend. Richie and I were different—I played sports as a little kid, he played G.I. Joe—but we were close, like family. We didn’t have to hang out every day; we had shared bathwater. Mrs. Hollins had what looked like a summer buzz cut, and in the last weeks before she died of cancer her cheeks sunk in. That was 1986. My mother’s mother had been sick in the late seventies with colon cancer and had spent June 1990 in the hospital having her bladder removed. Cancer wasn’t new to us. It was something that happened.
    Our parents stayed in their bedroom for a long time. Mom came down a while after our regular dinnertime and asked me to heat up leftovers for Theresa and me. She went back to their room. We didn’t see Dad again that night. He was in bed Tuesday when we went to school. When we got home, he wasin the cellar again. He ate dinner with us Tuesday. His eyes were still red. Wednesday was the same. Neither Theresa nor I asked any questions. I was afraid of what the answers would be. He was in bed again when we left for school Thursday. When we got home, he was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked sick. He was pale. I think I would rather have gone on having whatever was wrong be kept secret than have to sit at the kitchen table and talk to our suffering father. No member or element of the family’s dynamic was equipped for communicating emotion. Dad put his in poems we rarely saw. Mom put hers into moods that rose and fell like the barometer. She was our atmosphere. She regulated pressure. A thunderstorm was a surly housecleaning with our unhung coats hurled down the cellar steps. A sunny day was brownies. Theresa and I weren’t yet required to process emotions of much weight. For physical pain, we were both still young enough for tears to be okay. We had gone through the death of both of Dad’s parents, of Mrs. Hollins, and of our next-door neighbor Miss Hippel. We had cried. But we were young enough to run around and play with cousins and friends at the funeral luncheons. Neither of us had ever felt anything that lingered, never felt anything strong enough to survive an ice cream cone or a night’s sleep.
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    Mrs. Browning was sitting up in bed, like she’d been reading. She wore a wig that re-created the sandy brown bob I’d known her to favor. Her face was drawn. She weighed lessthan a hundred pounds, which was maybe forty lighter than she had in the eighties, but she was perfectly recognizable. Every week of first, second, and third grade, our class would visit Mrs. Browning for an hour in the school library. We’d sit at her feet on a sand-colored utility carpet, and she’d read to us from books like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Babar Saves the Day . When she finished we were allowed to spend the remaining time reading anything we liked. I would always pull out old sports encyclopedias, their spines held together by electrical tape. Over and over I read the entries for people like Jim Thorpe, Bronko Nagurski, Gertrude Ederle. I remember a black-and-white photo of Ederle standing on a beach, smeared in Vaseline, ready to cross the English Channel. One of my favorite entries belonged to the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange. When he was playing college ball at Illinois, before he was the Ghost, he was called the Wheaton Ice Man for his summer job hauling blocks of ice. I gravitated to athletes with day jobs. I grew up knowing that Johnny Callison, a star Phillies right fielder of