“Don’t you challenge me in public, Amir. Ever. Who do you think you are?”
THE RAIN General Taheri had spoken about at the flea market was a few weeks late, but when we stepped out of Dr. Amani’s office, passing cars sprayed grimy water onto the sidewalks. Baba lit a cigarette. He smoked all the way to the car and all the way home.
As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, “I wish you’d give the chemo a chance, Baba.”
Baba pocketed the keys, pulled me out of the rain and under the building’s striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with the hand holding the cigarette. “Bas! I’ve made my decision.”
“What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?” I said, my eyes welling up.
A look of disgust swept across his rain-soaked face. It was the same look he’d give me when, as a kid, I’d fall, scrape my knees, and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that brought it on now. “You’re twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown man! You...” he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the canvas awning. “What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”
He opened the door. Turned back to me. “And one more thing. No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one. I don’t want anybody’s sympathy.” Then he disappeared into the dim lobby. He chain-smoked the rest of that day in front of the TV. I didn’t know what or whom he was defying. Me? Dr. Amani? Or maybe the God he had never believed in.
FOR A WHILE, even cancer couldn’t keep Baba from the flea market. We made our garage sale treks on Saturdays, Baba the driver and me the navigator, and set up our display on Sundays. Brass lamps. Baseball gloves. Ski jackets with broken zippers. Baba greeted acquaintances from the old country and I haggled with buyers over a dollar or two. Like any of it mattered. Like the day I would become an orphan wasn’t inching closer with each closing of shop.
Sometimes, General Taheri and his wife strolled by. The general, ever the diplomat, greeted me with a smile and his two-handed shake. But there was a new reticence to Khanum Taheri’s demeanor. A reticence broken only by her secret, droopy smiles and the furtive, apologetic looks she cast my way when the general’s attention was engaged elsewhere.
I remember that period as a time of many “firsts”: The first time I heard Baba moan in the bathroom. The first time I found blood on his pillow. In over three years running the gas station, Baba had never called in sick. Another first.
By Halloween of that year, Baba was getting so tired by mid-Saturday afternoon that he’d wait behind the wheel while I got out and bargained for junk. By Thanksgiving, he wore out before noon. When sleighs appeared on front lawns and fake snow on Douglas firs, Baba stayed home and I drove the VW bus alone up and down the peninsula.
Sometimes at the flea market, Afghan acquaintances made remarks about Baba’s weight loss. At first, they were complimentary. They even asked the secret to his diet. But the queries and compliments stopped when the weight loss didn’t. When the pounds kept shedding. And shedding. When his cheeks hollowed. And his temples melted. And his eyes receded in their sockets.
Then, one cool Sunday shortly after New Year’s Day, Baba was selling a lampshade to a stocky Filipino man while I rummaged in the VW for a blanket to cover his legs with.