He must have gotten her to open up, and if he has, maybe he'll be coming back with an idea, a plan, some hope. He comes back a few minutes later in tears. Panic engulfs Hugh and me. At first Mike refuses to talk, burying his face in his pillow, but our whimpering beseechings finally wear him down. Swearing us to silence, he spills the secret that spins us into despair.
Mother has cancer.
She has taken to drinking out of fear and hopelessness. She is going to die. Not T.C., not anybody, is to know. It's a comment on the dark emotional underworld in which the McCall family functioned that we were as good as our word. To bring it out into the open, to tell T.C. and beg him to seek medical or other help and at least try to fight it, never occurred to Mike or Hugh or me.