True to my word, I have been posting stories from my father’s memoirs entitled “Decades with the Squad.” My sisters and I agree that, for two of the stories I have published so far, there is a little more to each.

First, “The Wig.” This story concerned a woman who died of breast cancer. My father helped take her to the hospital for the last time, and at her request he made sure that she got to wear her wig for the trip. What I did not know was that he wrote and added this story to his collection shortly before my sister Mary got her own diagnosis of breast cancer. The poor man was mortified at what he thought he had done, hastily removed the story from the folder, hid it somewhere, and apologized profusely. Mary did her best to reassure him, and eventually persuaded him to put the story back.

At some point in this exchange Daddy said something like, “Oh, Mary, you are so brave! You are such an inspiration to us all!” Mary responded by gritting her teeth and resisting the urge to bean him with the nearest non-lethal object. To this day, when one of us is starved for cheap entertainment, we will say something like, “Oh, Mary! You are such a ray of sunshine! I am humbled by your stoicism and steadfast manner!” and then watch in high glee as she tries to figure out how to glare and roll her eyes at the same time.

Second, “The Board.” This was a story of a dreadful accident, in which a teenaged boy ran off the road, through a fence, and died when a fence board pierced his chest. In the written version, the boy was dead when my father reached the car. But some years before he had told us the story with a different ending: when he approached the car, he saw that the boy was alive, in shock and thus not in pain, and was conscious enough to speak to my father.

“Am I going to die?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” my father replied. “You’ll be just fine. You will probably pass out, though.”

Thus comforted, the boy leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and died.

None of us knows which version of the story is the more accurate. But either way, our Pa showed his kindness, whether it was to reassure a dying boy, or to attempt to make the story a little less harrowing for his readers.

And now, you know the rest of the story!