A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison Page B

telling him everything, and it was as if the burdens of the story were absorbed into him, and lifted from me, at least while we sat together that way.
    My mother and father were often in the kitchen together, deliberating over the question of dinner. My father did the grocery shopping, always bringing back something extra, Life Savers or licorice or, most often, a double package of Oreo cookies he opened in the store and shared with the girls as soon as he returned home, even if it was right before dinner. He was not so different sober from how he’d been drunk, which is to say the best of him survived both conditions. He told me the addiction to drink had simply lifted a year earlier, the day he’d found out he had hepatitis and a barely functioning liver, and that if he continued to drink, he was going to die. Just like that, he knew he wanted to live, and that want canceled out the wanting of alcohol he’d been trying to fight his entire adult life.
    On weekends, when the girls were home from school, my fatherinvolved them in elaborate projects like those from my childhood. When your father was home, he helped them. They built model rockets and shot them off at Crissy Field. They installed a zip line in the backyard. They sketched plans for a tree house and purchased supplies, then the rain came and the project was set aside. When my father left in January, he promised to finish it next time he came to visit. The wood is still stacked against the fence. I keep forgetting to put a tarp over it to protect it from the weather.
    A FTER A NIGHT at the Mermaid Inn and a long day at the hospital, it was a relief to come home, but in a little while, I wanted to be back at your bedside, speaking with Mitch or another doctor, or wandering the halls of the hospital or sitting in the waiting room reading. I fought off panic by immersing myself in research. I reread
The Art of Kidney Transplant
, the second book your father acquired when he started a publishing house focused on specialized medical topics. He had changed careers after his mother, your Grandmother Catherine, died of heart disease; he had become disillusioned with the practice of modern medicine. He believed he could make more of an impact publishing health books that were accessible to the general population than trying to treat that population one by one.
    I had read your father’s books over the years, but other than that, I had left the unseemly insides of things mostly to him. He was the one who had cleaned the dogs’ ears and pulled ticks and foxtails from their skin. He was the one who had poked at your belly when as an infant you had colic. He was the one to apply antiseptic and Band-Aids to your cuts and scrapes and to wrap your wrists and ankles when they were sprained. He nursed you and the girls while I nursed my squeamishness—until last fall, when the insides of you became a landscape it was necessary to investigate and master.
    The first book Jonathan ever published was Mitch’s book on Huntington’s disease. The book sold well enough to enable your father to move from practicing medicine to publishing full-time. Mitch had been one of Jonathan’s instructors at Chapel Hill. He moved to the West Coast to accept an appointment at the University of California, San Francisco, not long after you were born. A friendship developed. Mitch took a shine to you right away, and as you grew, he mentored you in your study of science.
    When we’d known him just a little while, he got married quite suddenly to a twenty-six-year-old medical student named Jessica. We invited them to dinner, and I bought a glossy cooking magazine. I made pork kebabs and corn custard, and for dessert, a lemon tart. At dinner, I remember, Jessica nibbled at the pineapple and peppers on her kebabs, but the bits of pork I’d marinated overnight were left in a forlorn little pile at the side of her plate.
    I have to admit to disliking her right away. I suppose I thought she was exactly