Read Online Like Family by Paolo Giordano - Free Book Online

start washing the dishes earlier than necessary, changing her role every five minutes: from waitress to guest, then back to waitress. In retrospect it must have beennerve-racking for her. When it came time for dessert, I took the situation in hand and forced her to stay put. “Now, keep your behind glued to that chair,” and she liked the fact that I spoke to her so firmly. She clasped her hands in her lap and enjoyed the evening’s epilogue.
    She had no gifts for anyone, but there were always a couple for her, from us and from Nora’s mother. In truth the one from Nora’s mother was pretty paltry—I suspect that it had been recycled more than once. Their relationship had never been entirely accepting. After all, Nora often indelicately revealed her deep fondness for Babette.
    There always came a time at the Christmas dinner during which a merciless comparison was made between the roasts, the one prepared by my mother-in-law versus the one made by Mrs. A. The two pans were placed on the table, side by side. The dueling women exchanged a long look, like in a female western. Already stuffed, we all obediently took a bite from each slice in turn, then went on with our praises, more emphatic and more clamorous than before.Despite the fact that we tried to weigh them equally, in the end Mrs. A.’s scored more points, as always.
    _____
    â€œWe’ll escape. That’s what we’ll do,” Nora suggests. We take advantage of an offer on a Beirut flight departing on December 24. We counter her mother’s protests by saying that the flights were cheaper, much cheaper, knowing that economic considerations have the power to silence her (the vicissitudes of the divorce have compellingly elevated money to the top of her scale of values). As for Emanuele, we assure him that he will receive his gifts just the same—earlier, in fact—and he seems pacified as well.
    It’s odd the way certain customs are established: Mrs. A.’s cancer and her untimely demise led Nora and me to make a secret, forbidden pact. Never again would we celebrate Christmas with our parents. From one December to the next, we would always save up enough money to take us far away during those days, away from family tempests and conventions whose value we now doubted.
    On the plane I read a book by Siddhartha Mukherjee,
The Emperor of All Maladies.
After years of exploring the murky territory at the intersection between hematology and oncology, Mukherjee, an Indian American, wrote a fictionalized “biography” of cancer in six hundred pages, dense with references, and soon won a Pulitzer Prize. Each paragraph holds Mrs. A. up to the light and denies me one more milligram of hope for her. Mukherjee describes an all-out war, one marked by a few prominently featured successes but, in the end, a failed venture.
    I pause over the analogy that the Greek physician Galen had drawn between cancer and melancholy, both brought on by an excess of black humor. As I read, it’s as though I can feel the viscous liquid, a stream of tar, clogging my lymphatic system. My dear Mrs. A., according to ancient medicine, we are cut from the same cloth; we are paladins of the black.
    I’d like to call my therapist to stem the anxiety that is rapidly taking hold of me, but it’s impossible from here—use one of the pay phones in the plane’s cabin? Do they really work? in any case it’s Christmas Eve, and he wouldn’t answer—so I ask the stewardessfor another miniature bottle of French wine. She serves it scornfully after letting me wait for quite a while. She must be a Muslim, or possibly she just finds the spectacle of a father getting drunk while sitting beside his son disgraceful.
    I suspect that the stewardess knows nothing about black humor, and for that matter neither does Nora, sweetly asleep against my shoulder. I watch her, not sure whether I’m moved or envious. Her lymph flows freely,