Surprise

So for all intents and purposes, I didn't have a father. I didn't talk about it. He didn't exist. Or maybe he existed in another universe. I didn't really think about it. My hand has gangrene? Cut it off. Suck it up. Move on.

Then he got cancer.

My mother took him in.

The woman with whom he had taken up in Switzerland apparently had killed herself a ways back. The rest of his family had passed away.

And so began another colorful chapter in a novel that I had put down twenty years before and had never planned to pick up again.