One True Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

rise and rise and rise from the side of my bed at night until from below, his head, with its carefullybrushed black hair, would blot out the light and make it nighttime as surely as if he had his finger on the switch to the moon and sun.
    He had always been able to read me; if I had good news I had never been able to hide it past the moment when he saw my face, and if I had bad news his own face would settle, even before I spoke, into vertical planes of disappointed expectation.
    “I’ll be back Tuesday morning,” I said, and he nodded.
    “To stay,” he said, a declarative sentence.
    “I don’t know about that,” I said. “There are other options. Maybe you could take a sabbatical. It’s been four years since you took one for the book.”
    He pressed his lips together, and the lines grew long down either side of his face. “It seems to me another woman is what’s wanted here,” he said. I’ve never forgotten the way he said that sentence. My father’s syntax was often peculiar, as though he’d absorbed the Victorians whole when he made them his area of expertise, taken them in as you do an oyster. But for once it seemed to me he could have said “I want” or “I need.” He could have paid me the compliment of necessity, or indispensability. But no: “It seems to me another woman is what’s wanted here.”
    We looked at each other and I thought I saw something relax in him, in his eyes and shoulders, and I knew that he knew I would do what he wanted. “We’ll see how it goes,” I said.
    “Ellen,” he said, “this is not something that can be decided piecemeal. It’s important that we settle this for the duration. Your mother will need someone to take her to the hospital for chemotherapy. I have no idea how debilitating that will be or how many other things she will no longer be able to manage. The doctor says she will need someone with her during the day. And a sabbatical is out of the question for me right now.”
    “A sabbatical is out of the question for me right now, too.”
    “Ellen, will you do this or will you not?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll be back on Tuesday.” And I turned to go.
    “Ellen,” he called when I was at the door. I watched as he passed his hand over his jaw. “This is a difficult time,” my father said, and the effort of that sentence, within it the shadow of an apology, seemed to shake him. We were not in the habit of apologizing to one another. There had never been the need; neither of us ever disappointed. He sat down in a chair and let his head fall back, his hands slack along the upholstered arms. He looked old.
    “I need to get the broom,” I said. “I broke something.” And I went to the kitchen and stood for a time, my head against the broom-closet door, a dustpan in my hand, and then went outside to clean up.

 
     
    A nd so it was that I came back to Langhorne on a Tuesday morning, drove back in a rented car with a burgeoning sense of claustrophobia worse than if I’d been caught in an elevator between floors. I turned off the highway and drove through the more modest parts of town, the parts where the small houses were only an arm’s length apart and the bigger ones had been chopped up into apartments for students and staff.
    The green in front of the Town Hall was planted thick with asters in an early autumnal rusty orange. I always thought the town green looked best in spring, glorious with daffodils, hundreds of them. When a breeze moved across them they bowed, together, like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical.
    It seemed a long time until April, that day I drove back into town.
    My few New York belongings were in the car—the futon, an old trunk, and a portable electric typewriter. As I pulled into the empty driveway, our house looked as though it was abandoned. Next door I saw a curtain rise, then fall.
    I had quit my job at the magazine and sublet my apartment. The people I worked with had tried to be sympathetic, but they were