Sis calls one morning to tell me dad's dying. She says I better get to the hospital as soon as I can. The doctors found something in his liver. Cancer maybe. The biopsy's inconclusive, but dad's sure he's terminal. I better get my ass down there, pronto. There might not be much time left.

I have this god-awful hangover, and her voice clatters around in my skull like a horde of flying castanets. It's not the kind of sound you want to wake up to after a hard night of binge drinking.

"When can you get here?" the phone clacks.

I hold the receiver out a few inches to prevent a punctured eardrum. "I don't know," I say, "I'm not feeling so good today."

"Well, I'll bet you're feeling better than he is," she says, haughty like her usual self.

"So did they find cancer, or didn't they?" I'm still a bit unclear o that point.

"They're not sure, but dad says he's dying."

I'll bet, I think. Wasn't it just last year when he thought he'd had that series of strokes? He was so dizzy he could barely stand up half the time. But after the MRI's and CT scans, turns out he just had a bad sinus infection. And before that he was sure he had lupus, but it was only the flu.

Dad's been dying of one thing or another for as long as I can remember.

He's had his bags packed that long, and he's been sitting around since like he doesn't want to get distracted and miss the train. When he finally does go, I'm sure he'll have his headstone engraved: I told you so.

"Well, why don't you call me when they find out for sure," I say.

"Asshole," she says back.

"Nice talking to you, too, Sis."

I hang up and slog into the kitchen for some Tylenol when I remember why I haven't talked to my sister in so many years. She's a royal brown-noser and always has been. She's always falling for dad's histrionics. At least I've got half a brain. I figured out a long time ago that his never-ending death scenes are just some weird way of getting attention. That doesn't make me an asshole. You can only cry wolf so many times before I catch on. But every time he claims to be dying of something, she's right there fawning all over him. I blame her for encouraging him.

Dad never worked a real job on account of he was too busy dying half the time. He tried to sell stuff, instead. Like Shakely, for instance. He tried to peddle that crap until he developed an allergic reaction to all the vitamins he started popping himself when he couldn't sell them to anyone else. He tried to sell Amway after that. He even took a stab at Avon for a while, but he was the wrong gender for the women in our neighborhood. Who's going to buy makeup from some dumpy, unemployed guy, anyway? It's a good thing mom held down a steady job.

Mom was a lunch lady at the local jr. high school. She was a constant blur of white frocks and black hairnets with a permanent expression of longsuffering pasted on her face. She loved baking, though, and everywhere she went the aroma of cinnamon and cloves followed her. Baking was her connection to the sane world. It was the way she dealt with dad's histrionics. Whenever he got the idea to crawl into bed and start dying, mom would scramble out to the kitchen and start baking up a storm. Eventually dad would have to realize his immanent death was only another false alarm, and he'd climb back out of bed like Lazarus from the tomb, but by then we'd have enough pastry in the house to feed the entire neighborhood.

* * *

So mom calls a week later to say they did find cancer. It's in his liver. Spread to his pancreas, too. Inoperable. They've sent him home where he'll be comfortable and given him three to six months. She says I should visit before it's too late. I say I'll stop by on the weekend and see how he's doing. I'm convinced the doctors are wrong, but I play along anyway.

The next weekend comes and goes. I get busy doing something or another.I don't visit, but I call. He sounds fine on the phone. He's camping out in bed, dinking around on his laptop. He's selling off all his worldly possessions on EBay now. He claims he doesn't need them any more because he's really dying this time. He also says he doesn't know what he'd do without my sister: she's nursing him like she's been doing it all her life. She's doing all the work around the house, too. Figures. he's unem-ployed. She's got all the time in the world for that kind of brown-nosing. Besides, she'll never change; she's got some kind of genetic disposition for deathbed scenes.

I remember the time dad was convinced his teeth were killing him. I was away at college. He was certain the roots had become cancerous. He'd seen almost every doctor in town and none of them could find anything wrong with him. Finally, he persuaded his dentist to just yank out all his teeth and fit him with dentures. The dentist made a fortune, but jerking dad's teeth out hadn't helped anything. He was still sure he was a goner. Now his head hurt, and he was certain the cancer had spread to his frontal lobes. Sis called and convinced me to make a mad dash home from school. I told her it was finals week, but she made it sound like some dire emergency.

This time it was for real, she said.

When I got there, dad was doing his best impression of a dying man again. He was lying around in bed, the nightstand cluttered with the usual medications. Over-the-counter stuff like Tylenol and Nyquil, mostly. The whole place reeked because mom couldn't convince him to get up and take a shower. Sis was busy hovering over his bed taking his temperature like Florence Nightingale or something. Mom was out in the kitchen baking dinner rolls like a madwoman. I hung around for all of fifteen minutes before I realized it was just one of his drama shows.

"So you're dying again," I said, dryly.

"Appears so," he muttered around the thermometer, putting on his best expression of martyrdom.

"Sure you want to go on dying like this? One of these times you might really do it."
That comment sure raised Sis' hackles. I thought she might foam at the mouth any minute. "Why don't you just crawl back in the hole you came from?" she snarled. "I wouldn't have called if I'd known you'd show up so high and mighty."

"That's exactly what I intend to do," I said. "At least there's no one pretending to die there."
From the moment I walked in the place I could see right through the whole charade, and it was beyond me why no one else saw it. Every time dad got a bug up his ass to start dying, everyone acted like it was a big surprised. Like I said, I stayed all of fifteen minutes. Then I crawled back in my hole.

* * *

So when mom calls me up at five in the morning now, I'm certain it's just one of dad's silly games again. But the voice on the other end is all wrong. It doesn't sound like mom. It sounds too much like someone in real trouble.

"I need your help," she cries through the phone. "He's going. He's going soon."

My sister's sleeping, apparently. She'd been up with dad all night. I agree to come over -- again -- I'm not that big an asshole.

Mom meets me at the side door, and I follow her through the kitchen and into the sitting room. I can't help but notice the oxygen tank parked next to the sofa, two clear plastic tubes snaked over the cart handle. Just outside his bedroom door rests a box of adult diapers. It's half empty. He's sure pulled out all the stops this time, I think.

There's a distinct smell of something rotting in his room. Then I see the little bag hanging at his side. It's full of a brown liquid and appears to be connected to his side by a fat tube.

"Bile," mom says. She must have noticed me staring at it, I guess.

His laptop computer lays open on the floor, as though its owner has recently been banished from EBay. His nightstand is cluttered with medication, as usual, but this time the bottles read morphine and Haldol instead of Tylenol and Nyquil. I can't help but snicker to myself. He's really outdone himself this time.

At first I think the man in bed is not my dad. He looks like some escaped zombie from a late-night B-grade movie. His false teeth float in a water glass on the nightstand, and without them his cheeks hollow inward giving him the expression of that Van Gogh painting "The Scream." His eyes are smaller than usual. He seems to be staring at some spot on the wall. He's dyed himself a grey-yellow, the color of Grey Poupon. I don't know how he's accomplished it, but I can tell he's going for bust this time around. He's almost convincing.

I sit at the foot of his bed and listen to him breath, listen to him suck in air like it's a scarce commodity all of a sudden.

"His lungs are filling up with fluid," mom informs me. "They don't think he'll last the day."

Who are they? I think. Who else does he have in on it this time?

"The Hospice people," mom says, as though she's read my mind.

She nods in the direction of the corner. For the first time I notice there's someone else in the room. She's wearing pink scrubs with a little nametag above her shirt pocket that says L.P.N. She's hovering in the corner like some pink cloud and has this look on her face like she wants to evaporate into nothing. No wonder I didn't notice her.

"Hi," she says, timidly, as though she's under orders not to interfere with the environment like in those time-travel shows.

"Hi," I say back. Then I let her get back to her attempts at evaporation.

That's when dad's breathing takes on this god-awful rasp. It's obvious he got that idea from the movies, though.

The pink vapor quickly assumes the form of a Hospice nurse and dashes to his side. She clamps a stethoscope to her ears and jabs the other end around dad's chest. Then she frowns, shakes her head and slowly billows back to her corner. I almost want to laugh.

Mom's pacing back and forth by the bedroom door. She looks like she's not sure what to do with herself. After a while she perks up and announces, "I'm going out to the kitchen to make some cinnamon rolls." Then she disappears.

I sit with him for more than an hour and listen to him do that gasping-for-air thing. He doesn't stir, but I'm sure he'll wake up any minute and pick up his laptop to check on his auctions. Mom pops in and out of the room every few minutes, and the aroma of cinnamon blends with the stench of bile.

After a while, dad starts moaning. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. He pretends not to notice anyone's in the room. The nurse whisks by and leans over his nightstand. She sucks a dose of morphine into a tiny eyedropper and then slips it under his tongue. Dad moans again. Then his eyes close and he goes back to playing like he's asleep.

I sit there for a few hours, his breathing now a rhythm in my head. Occasionally he stops altogether, and that throws off the music I'm mentally composing for accompaniment. When he stops breathing like that, I jolt forward and think he'll spring up in bed any second and say he's feeling much better all of a sudden. But then that damned gasping starts up again, and I sit back in the chair and wait some more.

It's not too long before Sis comes over. I know she's in the house before I actually see her. I can hear her and mom whispering like vipers from the kitchen. She says hello rather curtly when she comes into dad's room. Then she sits at the foot of his bed, arches her back and raises her chin like she's the Queen of Sheba or something. I don't have anything to say to her. I know it's partially her fault dad's putting us all on like this again.

Sis just clams up too and stares at dad. We don't have anything left to say to each other, obviously.

The pastor comes in around four o'clock. He administers the Last Rites, and I swear I see dad open one eye and wink. But the pastor simply shakes my hand and leaves when he's done, and dad just goes on pretending to be asleep.

I don't know why I hang around there for so long. Toward evening, I really need a drink, but I can't tear myself away from the sound of his breathing. It's become hypnotic. All evening mom, Sis, me, and the pink vapor in the corner sit in silence, listening, but nothing much happens.

Then around midnight dad opens his eyes and looks right through me.

"Hi, son," he mumbles. I nearly jump out of my skin. For a second I think he's gotten tired of the whole charade and might want to sit up and eat something. But he just closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.

I fall asleep sometime during the night, his awful breathing lulling me off to a dreamless world. When I wake, it seems like I've only dozed a few minutes, but the clock says it's four in the morning. I realize where I am after some puzzling because the room still smells awful, and dad's breathing still fills the silence. Mom's lying in bed next to him. Sis, it appears, has gone home for the night.

Then I realize something's happening. Dad's breathing is suddenly different. It's slower and shallower.

Mom bolts up then. She's noticed it too. She leans over dad, listening, and I start to think he's finally getting tired of the whole deathbed thing.

Suddenly his breathing stops altogether. I'm not fooled though, he's been pulling this one all night. But when he doesn't start up again, I begin to count. When I'm tired of counting, I start watching the second hand on the clock. After three minutes I begin to wonder if dad had ever practiced underwater diving. Mom loses it then. She stiffens upright in the bed. Her hands flutter every which way like they don't know what to do.

"Hand me his teeth. Hurry and hand me his teeth!" she shrieks.

I have no clue what this is about, but I go over to the nightstand and yank his false teeth from the water glass. I hand them to mom, who then frantically attempts to fit them into dad's mouth, still dripping wet. She tries to slip them in gently at first. Then she tugs down on his chin and attempts to jam them in. He won't cooperate, though. He's too far into his role-play. Finally, mom gives up and just drapes herself over his chest and begins wailing. I can't believe dad's still putting her through all this. Enough's enough, I think, but dad's bound and determined to carry this out. After a while, mom pulls herself together and phones Sis. Then she dials some number she claims is the mortuary.

When they arrive, two men in black suits carry a gurney into the bedroom. One of them reaches under the stretcher and gives some knob a little tug and suddenly a carriage and wheels appear. They drape a white shroud over him and then wrap and lift him all in one motion, as though they had practiced this beforehand. Dad's head flops to one side, peeking out from under the sheet. The look on his face is one of surprise, as though this hadn't been part of the rehearsal.

The suits wheel the white bundle to the front door. I follow behind, still half expecting dad to sit up anytime now and say he's feeling better. But they whisk him out the front door and down the steps leading to the driveway. Outside its early morning and the neighborhood's quiet, except for a dog barking somewhere down the street. The sky's clear and just beginning to turn blue. It's almost time for me to be going to work.

They slide the stretcher into the back of a brown Suburban, and I think there's something pretty fishy about that. They slam the back hatch, and one of the suits waves to me, solemnly. I wave back, but I think I'm on to them. When they drive away, I stand there in the doorway wondering where they're really taking him. Not to a hospital or they would have come in an ambulance; not to a mortuary, obviously, because they would have brought a hearse. That ridiculous Suburban is the only flaw in dad's otherwise impeccable performance.

I go back to his room after a minute and find mom and Sis wrapped in each other's arms, still comforting each other. The Hospice nurse billows in her corner, filling out some paperwork. I just stare at dad's empty bed. He'd soiled the sheets, I discover, and I think Sis should stop bawling and clean it up before he gets back and wants to lie down again.
* * *
By the time I get home, I'm so exhausted I just want to sleep. I tumble out of my clothes and crawl into bed. I can't get warm enough, though, and after a while I hear my own breathing, slow and shallow, and I think: keep breathing, keep breathing. I bury my face in my pillow, but all I can smell is his room. I start to doze, finally, but then I get this crazy feeling that my heart stops. That startles me enough to get my pulse thumping and I realize everything's still ok, but I can't sleep. That's obvious. So after a whileI get up, pull on my pants, and wander out to the kitchen. I grab a beer from the fridge and sit down at thecounter. Even though it's morning, I want to get drunk. I want to get good and drunk. Then I'll crawl back in bed and sleep. I can get a couple days off from work out of this, I realize. Plenty of time to sober up. I already know I won't be going to any funeral. That's just what he'd want me to do, but I'm certainly not going to fall for that one.

---

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