For years my mother lived in a three-bedroom house, a bougainvillea bleeding blossoms in the yard. It was a house with a number—225—and a street with a name, in a town that fit snugly within the triangle formed by three intersecting interstates. This town had a hospital, and the doctors there said that cancer was blooming like a field of wildflowers in her chest. Three bedrooms and a bathtub became mere theory before long: the staircase, now precipitous, became insuperable. In theory there was a street, and in theory there was a town; in theory there was light and color beyond the incessant hospital rounds. When her breathing became shallow and her legs turned ornamental, my father began to carry her up the staircase in his arms, and if she seemed surprised at the sheer size of the place, it was only because of the endless corners against which tender and tumorous limbs and digits might be bumped.