This evening, probably after seeing me waver on the subject, Andrew offered to trim my hair. Who could be better? He knows how much a head of hair can say for you. Several years ago, when he came back to us from a life on the streets, and long before either of us felt ready to talk to each other heart to heart, he let the angry buzz cut he'd worn for years grow back into the soft head of hair he was born with. I knew then he had come home.

He carried up a comfortable chair from the living room downstairs for me and set it outside the bedroom where I've been spending most of my time. Then he sat me down, draped a towel over my shoulders and folded the ends into a collar to cover my neck. The second his fingers touched my head, I felt myself relax. From the time he was a little child, I have felt his heart in his hands.

One summer day, when he was around six, I remember, he found me peeling onions at the kitchen sink of our place on Cape Cod, my eyes dripping with tears. He asked me if I was crying; when I told him it was from the onion vapor, he looked at me for a moment, left the kitchen for his bedroom, and came back with his swimming mask.

"Try this, Daddy," he said, gently fitting the mask to my face.

My mustache left a break in the rubber seal at the bottom, so he removed the mask and went back to his room. This time I heard him rummaging in the big blue box where he kept his toys. A few minutes later, he came back holding a toy he'd purchased for a quarter from a vending machine the day before, still packaged in its see-through plastic eggshell. Carefully pulling them apart, he scotch-taped the two halves of the shell over my eyes, creating an air-tight fit. You should have seen him smile.

Though we raised him thousands of miles from where he was born, there is something very Mexican in Andrew's touch. Almost every day of my stay as a kid in that sun-baked country, where everything had value and nothing went to waste, I'd seen the most amazing handiwork. Generations of poverty had taught Mexicans to make what they needed from the fly-blown scraps at their feet—toys out of string and flattened Coca-Cola bottle caps, shelter out of tar paper and caked mud, simple tools out of discarded strips of wood and tin. Even kids my age, too poor to own a soccer ball or a pair of shoes, could conjure something out of nothing, carving a piece of chalk into a model of a railroad engine, or arming rubber bands with little twists of orange peel that could fly through the air and sting like a wasp. Before skills like that, in spite of all my good fortune as a gringo, I felt like a beggar.

Tonight, after Andrew's haircut, I went to bed feeling at peace. For days now I'd been free of the pain that had stolen my thoughts and sense of time. Now that I could relax and catch up with myself, what had changed?

The biggest change, I realized, was that a story I had always told to comfort myself wasn't true—that, no matter what happened to me, I would never get cancer. Until my diagnosis of lymphoma, even during the weeks of symptoms that came before—the swelling of my lymph nodes, the night sweats, the growing exhaustion and malaise without a fever—I hadn't felt alarmed. I had been sure that when my time came, I would die from heart trouble, diabetes, or stroke, the illnesses that had taken the closest members of my family.

Since childhood, when I had heard that cancer could come from something as innocent as a mole or a bruise, I had practiced a secret ritual I thought would ward it off forever. The second I was physically hurt in any way, I would clench all my muscles as if to crush any seeds of cancer that might have been planted inside me. Anyone passing by (and I always checked first to make sure no one was) might have thought I was having a small fit or freezing to death in the sun.

I must have performed that ritual a hundred times, yet cancer had come: the story I'd told myself had been led me astray. How many of the other stories I'd been telling myself needed to be re-told? How much of my sense of safety had come from shutting down or clenching out my fears? How might my memories change if I could go back to them and keep my eyes open a little longer?

I knew a good place to begin—back to an open air market during my first days in Mexico, before I could speak a word of Spanish.

I can stay pinned to that moment of horror for the rest of my life or I can take a deep breath, step closer, and look for Andrew's eyes in the crowd.

Photo of Mexican toys by Genghiskanhg,

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