Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It - Plot & Excerpts
His father had died of pancreatic cancer two years earlier, and Steven had quit a construction job to move home and take care of his mother. She had relied on her husband so absolutely, all her adult life, that she had never filled a gas tank on her own, or looked at a tax form. In her grief, after his death, she shifted her dependence to Steven. She told him it was lucky she’d had a son, as if no daughter of hers would be able to master a gas pump, either. When she died of the same cancer as his father—one of the doctors described it as mercifully quick, but there was nothing merciful about it—Steven felt like a boxer losing a fight, not knocked out but dizzy from the blows.His mother showed him pictures when she was sure she was dying, of herself as a grave little girl in a white First Communion dress, with hollow-eyed Italian relatives in suits. She told him stories: her father had tried to start an ice cream business as a young man, but the unsold, unrefrigerated ice cream would melt by the end of the day, and he would end up eating it himself, dejected.
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