One True Thing by Anna Quindlen Page A

the pet name she had invented years before, shorthand for Gentleman George. Often my mother was already in bed when he got home. Sometimes, when I heard him quietly close the kitchen door long after night had fallen, I felt as though I was losing both my parents at the same moment, although I did not feel in the slightest like a child. I saw them with the cold eye of the adult now.
    One night shortly after my mother and I had had our picnic and formed our book club, my father and I found ourselves together in the dark and sweet-smelling living room, with its bowls of homemade potpourri. Looking up from
Pride and Prejudice
and the circle of golden light cast by the reading lamp, I finally said, “Why am I doing this alone?”
    “Doing what alone, may I ask?”
    “Tending to your wife.”
    His mouth got very thin, and his voice very English, a prelude to meanness. “My wife? My wife? That woman is your mother. I have sat here hundreds of times watching her do for you, care for you, cook for you—”
    “And for you,” I said, refusing to be shamed.
    “Ellen,” he said, “I have to earn a living. To pay the mortgage. To pay the medical bills. Your mother understands.”
    “Is reconciled, you mean.”
    “You know nothing about it.” He picked up my book and raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you read this a hundred times?”
    “Apparently this is the book your wife gave up to marry you,” I said.
    “You’ve lost me.”
    “We’ve formed a book club. Mama wanted to read
Pride and Prejudice
. She started it at Columbia and stopped reading it the day you two got married.”
    “I don’t recall that she liked Austen very much.”
    “That’s not really accurate. She thinks Austen is condescending to women. Especially women with more conventional characters and expectations than those of Elizabeth Bennet.”
    My father shrugged. “Jane Bennet is as satisfied with her lot as any young woman in nineteenth-century fiction, as you well know.”
    “I’m not sure I remember,” I said. “Now that I’m a housewife I’ve got other things to think about. Floor wax. Ironing. Which brings us back to our original discussion.”
    “Which seemed to me particularly futile. You and I have different roles to play here.”
    “I don’t like mine.”
    “It won’t last forever.”
    “That is a low blow,” I said.
    “Ellen, there is no reason for the two of us to be at cross-purposes. Your mother needs help. You love her. So do I.”
    “Show it,” I said.
    “Pardon me?”
    “Show it. Show up. Do you grieve? Do you care? Do you ever cry? And how did you let her get to this point in the first place? When she first felt sick, why didn’t you force her to go to the doctor?”
    “Your mother is a grown woman,” he said.
    “Sure she is. But wasn’t it really that you didn’t want your little world disrupted, that you needed her around to keep everything running smoothly? Just like now you need me around because shecan’t. You bring me here and drop me down in the middle of this mess and expect me to turn into one kind of person when I’m a completely different kind and to be a nurse and a friend and a confidante and a housewife all rolled up in one.”
    “Don’t forget being a daughter. You could always be a daughter.”
    “Oh, Papa, don’t try to make me feel guilty. What about being a husband?”
    “That is none of your business. That is between your mother and me.” He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hands. “These days at the beginning of term are very tiring. And I don’t have the energy for anger.” And he disappeared into the dark of the hallway and up the stairs. His voice came out of the black, disembodied, a kind of Cheshire Cat without the smile. “Don’t forget,” he added, “I take the night shift.”
    As I stood up to turn out the lights and go to bed I glanced at the picture of the three of us on the piano. I saw my mother’s glowing face, and thought of how she had made it possible for