COSMOS magazine

Tuesday, May 20

Jill sat across the massive walnut desk from Les Collins, dreading what she was about to hear. Ever since his nurse called and asked her to come to the office, she'd known it would be bad news. Good news could have been shared over the phone.

"I'm afraid it doesn't look encouraging," the doctor said gently. "Alex appears to have a tumour."

Even though she was prepared for it, the words still hit her like a blow to the head. She was too stunned to breathe. Dr. Collins went on as though he did not expect her to say anything.

"Because of the location of the tumour, I cannot recommend radical surgery, even if the tumour is malignant. If we were able to get out all the affected cells-which is doubtful-too much of the brain would be damaged."

"You mean..." Jill's voice seemed to be coming from far away. "... Alex is going to be... a... he'll be...?"

The doctor shook his head. "That will not happen to Alex, because we will not do radical surgery."

"And there's nothing else we can try?"

"If the tumour is malignant, we could go a couple of ways. Let's cross that bridge only if we come to it. At this stage, the tumour might not be malignant. Alex could live out a normal life."

"But you said-"

Dr. Collins held up a hand, palm out. "True, the tumour appears to have caused Alex's seizure. We could see subsequent seizures. Alex will have to be more careful than most people when he engages in such activities as swimming and, eventually, driving. But with medication he could live a fairly normal life, as long as the tumour doesn't grow significantly larger."

"You think it's cancer, don't you?"

He searched her face for a moment. Finally he said, "Yes, Jill. I do. But I can't be sure yet. With very little stress to Alex we can do what's known as a needle biopsy. That'll tell us what sort of tumour we're dealing with here. I've already spoken with Dr. Rachel Arecchi, one of the best oncologists in the country. She can schedule Alex for a biopsy tomorrow."

Jill left Collins's office in a numb daze. She found herself obsessively recalling the afternoon she and Alex had spent together in the park shortly before the seizure. Even then he had been carrying the tumour around in his head, but they were both happy in their ignorance. She'd sat on a bench trying to get some work done, she couldn't remember what it was-something that seemed terribly important at the time.

"Hey Mom, watch this!" Alex had called. She looked up to see him climbing a knotted rope someone had hung from a tree branch.

"Wow! Look at you way up there. Be careful, sweetie!" She'd watched him for a few seconds more, then went back to her work.

"Hey Mom, look at me now!" He had climbed almost all the way down the rope and was using it as a swing.

"I can't watch you anymore right now, Alex." She barely registered the grin fading from his face as she bent over her book again. But it haunted her now. Maybe that had been one of the last times she and Alex would ever spend a carefree day together, and she'd blown it by making work more important than her son.

Wednesday, May 21

From the highway, George Milton's place looked like a barely profitable sheep ranch that had been taken over in the middle of some now busted boom by a badly misinformed factory owner. An old stone house was dwarfed by cisterns and outbuildings, surrounded by fifteen square miles of sparse pasture. The appearance was deceiving.

What looked like a group of linked factory sheds or outbuildings was a $1,900,000 house designed by a California architect, windows and veranda artfully facing away from the highway. The stone house had been built by George's estranged father, reputed in the area to be a reformed bootlegger, and George Milton had spent his childhood there, nursing a driving ambition to get the hell out. The moment he finished high school he had joined the navy and after serving four years driving trucks across the United States had headed north, homesteading 160 acres in the Alaskan wilderness. By 1984 the wilderness had retreated, and the City of Fairbanks bloated outward to surround George's homestead. He refused to touch his father's ill-gotten gains, and twelve years of tax assessments forced him to sell out or forfeit his northern land.

George had always thought he would enjoy being a self-made millionaire, and perhaps he might have done had righteous riches come to him earlier in life. But city life soon bored him. He was disturbed by a new tendency to break down and weep whenever he passed by the construction project that had been his Alaskan home for more than a decade. So he took his $5 million and moved back south to the vacant family place near Sonora in west Texas.

No woman he'd met had been willing to spend her time holed up in a log house in the Alaskan wilderness, so George had never married. To his astonishment, when he returned to Texas he learned that he had a grown daughter, the result of a romp with Peggy Treadwell in the back seat of George's father's 1932 Dodge. Peggy had married James Johnson four months after the baby was born. While James had treated the girl as one of his own, it was clear for all the town gossips to see that Roberta Johnson was actually a Milton.

Because none of the remaining Miltons liked to talk about Roberta, George first heard the story when he was sitting around at Pelman's Café playing dominos and Shorty Moss got drunk enough to forget his manners. He looked George straight in the face and brought the subject up out of the blue.

"Say, Milton, I've always wanted to know why you knocked up old Peggy Treadwell and then run off and left her that way."

The other boys waited for George to haul off and bash Shorty in the face, but instead he just looked shocked.

"What'd you say, Shorty?"

"Hey, take it easy, Moss. Can't you see George don't know nothing about it?"

"What'd you say?" George asked Shorty again.

"She had a little gal." Shorty guffawed, and the others held their breath, but George was suddenly grinning as though he'd won the lottery.

"I've got a kid? I've got a little gal?"

"Well, she ain't so little no more. Took after your side of the family. Anyway, it's been more'n thirty years, George, nearer forty. She's all growed up."

"I've got a daughter!" He whooped. "Hey, Katy!" George gestured to the waitress. "Go up to the front, would you, and bring back cigars for all my friends. I've got a daughter!"

Truth to tell, George had been fretting quite a bit lately about having no offspring to pass his millions down to. The existence of Roberta Johnson was the best news he'd had in a long time, and his heart overflowed with paternal pride when he heard she was a big shot university professor. She did research, so George was told, on ways in which real people differed from the Rational Man assumed by most economists.

Like her father before her, Roberta had grown up chafing, living for the day she could break away from Sonora. She studied hard, kept her grades up, and moved west, first to Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas, then to Stanford University in Stanford, California where she earned a Ph.D. in economics.

Roberta's academic career, it turned out, had never really gotten off the ground, as her theories were ahead of their time, and few journals wanted to publish her work. Once her colleagues had caught up with where she'd been five years earlier, she'd gone ahead into the theoretical undergrowth, hacking another new path no-one wished to follow-at least, not just yet, until fashion chanced to sweep that way. And by then, Roberta had moved off again into the unknown. When George went to visit her with the good news that she was now a rich heiress, he found her teaching a course on The Economics of Law at the University of West Los Angeles, living in a ticky tacky house, and driving a twelve year old Volkswagen Golf. Roberta was ready for a change of pace. She and George went back to Texas with a U-Haul trailer full of books and an architect.

George did not want to be bothered with managing his money, and since Roberta was an economist with an interest in the gritty and obstinate real world it seemed perfectly reasonable to turn that responsibility over to her. She did well. Within four years George's money had increased from the $3 million left over after building and furnishing the new house to $55 million. In 1989 Roberta started the G. Milton Foundation, which later became MTJ. George was then 60 years old, and Roberta was 41, unmarried and childless; both of them, in their different ways, felt the cool breath of time passing across the backs of their necks like a threatening knife blade.

Inevitably, perhaps, if eccentrically, her goal was to support research that would lead to an increase in the human life span.

Roberta had learned the value of hard work and perseverance from her mother and stepfather, the Johnsons. From her biological father she learned the virtue of taking time off to rest. Of a mid-week afternoon she felt her mind and her gaze wandering too often to the hills beyond the windows of her office, and at last had to admit to herself that it was time to stop work.

Her spirits rose when she heard Masie's musical Spanish accent on the phone. "Mister Milton's residence."

"Masie, tell Daddy I'm coming home this afternoon."

"Oh, Miss Roberta! We've missed you. I'll fix something special for supper."

---

More often than not Masie served the dishes Roberta had taught her to cook, fresh vegetables and lean meats, flavoured with herbs rather than fats. But for occasions Masie considered special they had the country-style food George favoured. Roberta herself had grown up eating that way in Sonora, and it pleased her to drape one of Mama's flower print table cloths over one end of the fourteen foot dining table and chow down like old times.

This evening it was Southern fried chicken, buttered yellow squash, green beans with salt pork, and mounds of mashed potatoes. They sat down looking out at the courtyard, its vibrant colours exaggerated by the late afternoon sunlight. Sitka, the old Golden Labrador, padded in to sit at George's knee. "How was your day, Daddy?"

"Could've been worse, I guess. Don't look like yours was all that good. Pass the gravy, please."

She passed the gravy boat across the table, wondering how much to tell him, how much to worry him. His hand shook as he took it; he looked ill. "Oh, I'm just a little concerned about MTJ is all. Our research will be set back by this stupid, wicked legislation. No question about that. Here, Daddy, you want a biscuit?" He's really getting old, she thought, as he reached for the bread basket and almost knocked it out of her hand. She put a biscuit on his plate.

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Luckily, the Foundation's done well this year, but the stock market's down today." Roberta frowned. The downturn could easily spread to the healthcare securities she had invested in so heavily.

"Yeah, I heard cattle was down, but I don't know about nothing else." Grease from the beans dribbled down his chin.

"Did you go to Jody's shop today?" She urgently wanted to take her napkin and wipe his face but could think of no way to do it without damaging his dignity.

"Yep."

"How's he doing? Here, Daddy, let me help you with that." She poured iced tea from a large pitcher into George's tumbler.

"'Bout the same. Ever since Nadine died he's just been marking time till he can go too."

"Does he still take flowers to her grave every day?" Roberta looked lovingly at the yellow and blue flowers on the tablecloth. She could remember gazing at those same flowers when she was ten years old, when Mama and Dad Johnson were talking about how business was down at the hardware store or how the garden was coming along. Now Dad was dead and buried and Mama in a nursing home, and poor George looked as if the twilight were closing down on his life. She'd rushed to get away, but sometimes Roberta wished she could go back to those Norman Rockwell days of her past.

George washed down a mouthful of chicken with a swig of tea. "Uh huh," he told her, eyes distant. He had his own memories, seemed increasingly to live more deeply within them. "Takes flowers every day. And he talks to her too. Thinks she talks back."

"Oh, that's so sad." She put down her fork and shook her head. Life seemed so pathetically short. What if Drew were right? Suppose a way was at hand-a scientific, technological, realistic way-to cure death? Drew Chang was one of the brightest, most sensible scientists she'd ever met, ever hired.

"Way I figure it," George said, crunching on a bite of chicken skin, "anything helps ease his pain is good. They were together fifty-four years. Must be hard for him to know what to do with himself with her gone. Anyhow, for all we know maybe she does talk back." He dropped a treat from the table to Sitka, who accepted it neatly.

For a few minutes the only sounds were biting and chewing and the ticking of the grandfather clock. A sheep baa'd in the pasture.