The doctor said the clean, dry air of the Sandias would be good for his lungs. Roy hated the place. The weather was too hot, the food gave him heartburn, and heartburn was the least of his problems. He was about to throw the computer out the window when Dr. Reyes said, “I can’t hear you, Roy. I think you’re on mute.” Dr. Reyes was down the hill at a hospital in Albuquerque.
“Maybe your speakers are broken,” said Roy.
“No, but that’s better. We can hear each other now.”
Roy dragged the window displaying yesterday’s Golden Knights game in front of Dr. Reyes’ face. “Just give it to me, doc.” Roy had forgotten to put his whiskey in a coffee cup and wondered if the doctor would notice the rocks glass.
“Your cancer has metastasized.”
“That explains my feeling like shit all the time.”
On the screen, Roy watched the defenseman for the Knights let the puck slide by, along with two meatheads from the New York Rangers. The worthless goalie must be in love because next thing you know the puck is in the net without him even moving. Roy grabbed his eyes and hollered, “Jesus!”
“Roy? Is everything okay there?” asked Dr. Reyes.
“Yeah. Or no, right? I’m dying. So when?”
“Your cancer has advanced beyond the sight of the original tumor, and it seems likely that the pain you’re reporting indicates the presence of other cancer. Possibly in the stomach. I’d like to schedule some imaging and a few other—”
“We don’t need any more images.”
“It’s understandable. Your feelings. But there are resources for you, and we can manage the pain so that you’re more comfortable.”
“Dead in a month, a year?”
“Dying is a process, and it takes a different shape for everyone.”
“I’m working on my memoirs. I gotta know how long to make the chapters.”
“It’s not a year, I’m sorry to say. Some months are likely. With aggressive treatment—”
Roy dragged the hockey game to the corner of the screen. “Thanks for everything you’ve done, doctor. I appreciate it.” He gave Dr. Reyes the Zoom wave and clicked the “Leave” button.
Alone in the apartment, he said, “Some months.” Not exactly news. He had planned his exit on the day of his initial diagnosis: Cash in his rewards points at the Sandia Casino, bet it all on black, big steak dinner, and eat his .45 for dessert. The time for that plan was three months ago. Trouble is that when you feel good enough to go to a casino and eat a steak dinner, you don’t want to eat your gun. Today, the thought of going out to a casino seemed monumental. Roy hadn’t eaten anything more demanding than Styrofoam ramen noodles in a week. He had a headache, bad fatigue, felt like puking all the time but only ended up spitting blood.
Do it here, he thought. After 30 minutes, he said aloud, “Leave a note maybe.” He swapped the gun for a pen.
Dear Sylvia,
I am such a goddamned disappointment.
“This is pathetic.” He hoisted himself upright and packed a shoulder bag with 3 pairs of underwear, 3 golf shirts, a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush, and a giant bottle of Advil. Exhausted, he slumped back in the chair. He thought about leaving a new note for his landlord but decided instead to cross out “Sylvia” and write “Martin,” the douchebag landlord who raised his rent last month. He looked at the note again and then crossed out “I am” and put “You are.”
Dear Sylvia, Martin:
I am YOU ARE such a goddamned disappointment.
Roy
“I am a funny son of a bitch,” he said, then made his way into a beat-up Ford Focus and headed east on the I-40. Two thousand miles. He thought the drive would be hard, but he had been up and down that road so often, muscle memory took over. Two 12-hour shifts later, he pulled up to Sylvia’s house, or what used to be her house, and stopped without turning into the driveway. He could tell by the bright orange checkered curtains that she didn’t live there anymore. Sylvia hated the color orange. Didn’t even eat the fruit when she was a kid. He used to slice oranges and give them to her. She’d say, “Not orange, dad.” And then he’d eat a slice, grab his throat and pretend to die. She crawled on top of him and said, “Wake up.” And he did. Then she’d say, “More,” which really meant do it again, so he did. That year, he probably died of orange consumption four hundred times.
He thought about the last time they talked: Christmas, last Christmas, two Christmases ago. He buttoned himself up as best he could and knocked on the door.
A woman opened the door but kept the chain fastened. “Yes?”
“Hi, ma’am. I’m Sylvia Tillsworth’s dad. She doesn’t live here anymore, but you might remember her or her skinny little husband, Wesley. This is the last address I have.”
There was a long pause and then, “Did you try calling, sweetie?”
Roy pulled a flip phone from his pocket. “I don’t have a lot of phone numbers in here.”
“What about social media? You know. One of the apps?”
Roy took directions to a phone store and talked to a nice girl with a lot of tattoos and green highlights in her hair. She understood what he was getting at.
“You’re going to need a new phone. Then we’ll download Facebook and Insta. We’ll search for her name, and then you can send her a friend request. If your daughter accepts it, then you’re in business.”
With his new phone in his pocket, the clerk said, “Mr. Tillsworth? Can I say something?” She could and so she said, “I haven’t talked to my dad in three years. I would accept a friend request, if he sent one, but you should know that as long as it took to get into this situation is as long as it’s going to take to get out. Longer.”
Until Sylvia accepted his request, there wasn’t much to do but wait in a rundown motel opposite a truck stop. Days went by. He spent a lot of time at the Denny’s counter, reading the paper, popping Advil like it was Pez, and chasing it with bad coffee and spark plugs of whiskey.
***
Roy cut the radio. He’d heard the emergency broadcast three times already. He was driving through tornado country, and the weather was right for one, but the worst of the storm would hit well west of him. The windshield washers on his Peterbilt rig pushed whole puddles of water with each pass. He pulled off the I-70 and headed south, one side road into another until he was surrounded by cornfields that led into a town of doublewides and grain silos. If you grew up here, you got out one way or the other — military, state college, state prison. Some folks just wandered off, but Rose moved back with her mother when Sylvia was born. Roy figured the kid must be six months old by now. He had exchanged two text messages in those six months. In the first, Rose told him she was pregnant, and Roy responded, “How do I know it’s mine?”
“You don’t need to know shit then,” she replied. About 100,000 miles later, he got a picture of a little baby wrapped up tight in a pink blanket.
In the rest stops, after gassing up the rig and eating a muffin wrapped in plastic, he’d study the picture. He had no idea what to think. Roy knew that people would look at baby pictures and say things like “Oh, she has your eyes.” He didn’t see it. Or maybe he just wasn’t seeing it. One day, he pulled off the 90 just west of La Crosse at a stop that he usually skipped. He wanted to talk to a waitress who wouldn’t recognize him. Over the course of this encounter and several more across the northwest, he refined the routine. He’d pull out the picture as the eggs were being put down and say, “I’ll be,” and did anyone want to see the picture of his baby girl.
From these encounters he learned that the kid in the picture was about 6 months old, was very smart, had his eyes, and was the most beautiful baby in the world. What to do with this information was a mystery, especially since Rose wouldn’t even respond to a text message.
With the rain falling and the tornadoes rumbling around somewhere to the west, he pulled up to Rose’s mother’s house and knocked on the door. Rose answered with the kid on her hip, bottle in hand.
“Roy,” she said.
Rose was no angel, it was true, but Roy was prone to his own variety of missteps. Never with the truck. He could drive that thing with a blown tire through a blizzard over a 14,000-foot pass. But in conversation, he would have to admit that he was accident prone to a degree that probably made him uninsurable.
“Aren’t you supposed to be breastfeeding a baby?” he asked.
“Holy shit, you are an asshole.” Rose slammed the door in his face, and the baby started screaming bloody murder right after that. Roy banged on the door and kept banging, and Rose called the police, and they came down and even though Rose didn’t want to press charges, they said they got to arrest somebody. It was two days before he got arraigned, and by the time he got out of jail, his boss had reported the truck stolen, so he got arrested all over again.
It was another six months before all this crap was sorted out, and by that time, Rose was failing at rehab — again — and the kid was somewhere in the foster system.
“We should get the kid out of foster care,” said Roy.
“We?” asked Rose.
“You’re the one who told me you were pregnant in the first place and sent me the picture. And from that picture, it’s clear she has my eyes.”
“She does.”
“So then, we.”
Birthday parties, kindergarten graduation, first report card, first crush, sweet sixteen party at the VFW. Roy missed all of these. He did send money and from time to time, he stopped by, particularly around the holidays. Rose let him in, fed him, and even let him sleep in her bed, except during the years starting when Sylvia was seven and ending when she was thirteen. Rose said she was dating a man named Glen. Roy never met Glen, never asked about him, and slept in the cab of the truck during those years.
One day, when Sylvia was about twenty-three and getting married, Rose said, “Don’t give her a hard time about this.”
Rose wasn’t drinking or doing drugs anymore, but somehow she managed to look worse with each passing day. She was all kinds of swollen. Roy waved a half-eaten corn dog between them. “How am I not supposed to take it personally?” he asked.
“You can take it personally. Just don’t give her a hard time about it.”
“You know I’m probably paying for this thing I’m not invited to.”
“You paid for a lot of things you never showed up for. What’s one more? Anyway, her and Wesley got jobs and they’re doing the whole thing at the restaurant where they work.”
“Fake minister. No judge around. Probably not even a legal wedding.”
“Like you’ve been to church. And the only judge you’ve seen put you away.”
“Cause of you.”
“They have a minister from one of the Internet churches, which is what all the kids do today.”
“You’re liking this,” said Roy.
“I am. Divine justice from the Church of the Internet.”
It was three years of dead silence after Sylvia’s wedding. Then one day Roy got a text from a number he didn’t recognize. Mom is dying. Said to tell you. Roy responded with questions, but Sylvia just sent the hospital name and address. Rose had gone diabetic a long time ago, never treated it. Then it was like a damn broke: foot swelled up, kidneys went, foot got amputated, then the rest of the leg. By the time Roy made it the two thousand miles to the hospital, all he could say was “Damn, Rosie. I’m sorry.”
Sylvia was there and stunningly beautiful. She did indeed have his eyes. When she touched his shoulder, he jumped like he’d been hit with a cattle prod.
“She can probably hear you. Doctor said that part’s the last to go.”
After the funeral, Roy figured he should go to the doctor and that’s how he learned about his cancer, which was probably from smoking but also a by-product of doing something stupid like going to the doctor when you’re sixty-two. Roy didn’t tell anyone. Who would he tell anyway? He settled on a bartender at a roadside place outside of Omaha, a barrel-shaped fellow with a tattoo that said “Death Before Dishonor” on his forearm. The bartender said, “That sucks,” and flipped a shot glass upside down on the bar next to Roy’s beer mug. Driving was getting hard and with so many doctors’ appointments to manage, he quit and settled into a job stocking groceries at the Safeway in Albuquerque.
***
He was dreaming about stocking the apple display in that same Safeway when he woke in a mostly clean but still dilapidated motel room. It was dark, except for the TV running Fox News on mute. The sheets were damp with sweat and thrashed about so that the zippered bed bug cover was exposed. Roy filled a paper cup with water from the bathroom sink. Everything hurt. It hurt to sip water. The .45 sat on the nightstand, its barrel pointed in his direction.
“Better do it in the car.” No point freaking out housekeeping. He put the gun in the pocket of his sweatpants. He had imagined the moment many times, and in these fantasies he was calm, composed. He knew the best place to put the barrel. Even if he missed, the .45 caliber slug would give him ample room for error. But he hadn’t anticipated being so weak. The gun felt heavy, more like a big dumbbell than a firearm. He removed the magazine and dumped out all but one cartridge. He’d only need one after all. He noticed he was crying, or at least that there were tears in his eyes.
His new phone lit up. He expected a cruel joke, a wrong number, a recording asking him to save dolphins. But the light was not for a phone call. It was a notification that his friend request had been accepted. The message said, “Hi Dad.”
Best to keep it simple. He wrote, Hi there. Was passing through the area and thought you might want to meet for coffee. Exhausted, he collapsed on the bed, the phone on his chest.
Sometime later, he woke to the message: “You’re in New York?”
“Just about.” New York was over 400 miles north and the thought of walking to the bathroom, never mind driving 400 miles, was enough to make him want to curl into a ball on the floor. It had to be New York. How he hated that city. He popped a fistful of Advil and dragged himself into the Ford Focus. While sitting in the hundred-mile-long traffic jam that feeds the Lincoln Tunnel, Roy wrote to Sylvia: “A nice diner, maybe? My treat.” But she refused, said she was busy with work and that the hospital had a cafeteria. Of course she had to work in a hospital.
Roy figured on going to hell when he died. Too late to qualify for the alternative. Today, standing in the lobby of a New York City hospital, he realized that he had arrived. He must have looked even worse than he felt. Sylvia’s face dropped the moment she saw him.
“I knew it,” said Sylvia. She took him by the elbow and with a wave of her hand someone appeared with a wheelchair.
“I don’t need that thing,” he said.
“I knew you came here to die. I just knew it. But you’re not going to die on the lobby floor, so sit down.”
Roy sat down in the wheelchair. He felt dizzy and realized that he hadn’t eaten in a day or two, not that he could hold down food anyway.
“You’re some kind of doctor now?” said Roy.
“No.”
“For a nurse, you don’t have much of a bedside manner. Anyone tell you that?”
“I’m a respiratory therapist, and by the way, you’re not breathing well.”
She pushed him toward the Emergency Department and after a whirlwind hour of interrogation and needles and wires and tubes they had him set up on a bed in the hallway.
“Is all this crap really necessary? It’s been hours now.”
“Do you have somewhere to go? You were dehydrated so the IV helps. Are you in pain?”
“No. Yes. Just give me my Advil. And what about all this other crap?” He gestured to the pulse oximeter clipped to his finger, the nasal cannula and vital signs monitor.
“You’ll feel better with oxygen and fluids. But we have to figure out where you can go first. There are no beds right now, so you have to stay here until we can figure things out.”
“I shouldn’t have come. Just get me to my car. I’m going home.”
Sylvia took his hand in hers. “Is that what you want? You drive, you’re going to get into an accident and hurt someone. You and the people you hurt will end up right back here.”
“You get divorced?” he asked, moving his finger along the place where her wedding band would be. She pulled her hand away.
“Let’s focus on the here and now,” she said.
“I was never a good—”
“You don’t need to be. You can just let me help you. That would be enough.”
***
He was never going to get out of this place in a hospital gown. He knew that much, so he asked for his clothes, which were in a bag under the bed. It took some debating, but they disconnected the IV line. He wanted the needle out too, but they wanted to keep it in. He asked to go to the bathroom, and his escort, some kid who looked all of 20 years old, didn’t ask Roy about the bag of clothes under his arm. Once in the stall, Roy pulled the needle from his wrist. Blood ran down his hands, onto the floor. He pushed some toilet paper over the wound and kept his arm bent to hold the impromptu bandage in place.
Roy opened the door fully dressed and said, “Okay. Thanks for everything.”
The poor kid must have been new because he just said, “Yeah?” Roy didn’t answer. He just kept going, following the exit signs until he arrived at the double doors that opened to the lobby where he collapsed in a disorganized bundle in front of security. By the time everything was sorted out, he had been moved to a room across from the nurses’ station. There were yellow signs everywhere that said, “Fall Risk” with an airborne stick figure in mid-crash. If you missed the signs, a yellow band around Roy’s wrist reminded everyone of the same information. They had taken his clothes. They even took his socks and replaced them with yellow ones with rubber grips on the bottom.
“This is embarrassing,” said Roy, waving his yellow wrist band.
“No,” said Sylvia. “Managing fall risk is standard in hospitals. What’s embarrassing is that your performance is probably going to get Riley fired.”
Roy looked puzzled.
“The ER tech who brought you to the bathroom? He’s new and still on probation. What’s embarrassing is that I didn’t warn anyone that you are just the kind of inconsiderate asshole who is likely to pull reckless stunts. If I had done that, they wouldn’t have assigned the new guy to you. When he gets fired, it will be my fault. I’m embarrassed, but that’s not going to pay Riley’s rent or get him a new job. Embarrassment isn’t anything at all.”
“In my pants, wherever they are, there’s a valet ticket.”
“Dad.”
“The car is yours. Title is in the glove box. It’s not much to look at, but it runs good. My .45 is under the seat. Keep that handy. People are nuts in this city.”
“Dad.”
“I am such a goddamned disappointment, Sylvia.”
In the moment, she did not suspect these words to be his last. At first, she thought he was pouting. Then she thought he had dementia. But his eyes were focused. Now and again, he’d indicate yes or no with a nod or shake of his head. He ate salty broth and lime Jello, then nothing at all. She showed him pictures of Rose. He looked at them as if they were someone else’s photos, which they were. Sylvia didn’t have any pictures of Roy, nor any with everyone together.
When a hospice bed opened, they moved him. Sylvia visited, three times a week at first, then less. When her phone rang, she knew before answering.
“Was he alone?” she asked.
“No,” said the voice. “There were people by his side the whole the time.”
Roy had no belongings to collect except his phone, which a counselor returned to her in a white plastic bag. A man named Martin had left many messages. He was mad about back rent for Roy’s apartment in Albuquerque. Sylvia had vacation time coming, and after two days of unwinding road, parked his old Ford Focus beside a one-window studio apartment. The place looked like an interactive museum of illness and despair. She made piles of his unsorted life: pill bottles, liquor bottles, take-out containers, drawers of unmatched socks, a moldy coffee cup. At the Home Depot, she bought work gloves, thick black garbage bags, a broom and mop, some Mr. Clean magic erasers, and spray bottles for a bleach solution she made in the sink.
He must have spent a lot of time at his desk. The chair was well worn and partly collapsed. The old computer must have doubled as his television. The desk drawers held stacks of medical bills. She traced the history of his illness through the invoices for imaging, treatments, blood tests, a thirty-two-thousand-dollar ER visit. Somewhere under the bills and pens without caps, she uncovered a weathered Polaroid photo and recognized her mother’s house, their living room. Recognized herself as a toddler, sitting on the floor, delighted, clapping her hands. Roy is sitting in a recliner, goofing for the camera. He has a half-peeled orange in one hand, the other hand on his throat. One eye wide open, the other squinted shut in mock contortion. She did not remember their game, and there were no family stories to lend dimension to the photo. Given that Roy was now literally dead, it seemed macabre to keep a picture that showed him pretending to be so. Sylvia held the picture over the garbage for seconds, then minutes until she saw his note in a shaky ballpoint script:
Dear Sylvia, Martin:
I amYOU ARE such a goddamned disappointment.
Roy
Only a nagging desire to visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch kept her from repainting the place, but she left it immaculately clean. Even the air was fresh, delicious with the smell of green chili from a nearby restaurant. She clipped the photo of her dad to his cryptic note and put these items in her purse. She left the key on the kitchen counter and closed the door behind her. The afternoon was getting on now and the high clouds cast long dark shadows on the Sandias.
Image by Markus Spiske on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Friend Request - June 16, 2026