Will Joiner was making gold-rimmed goblets. His tenth day home from the hospital. He sat at the kitchen table cutting a clear plastic straw into thumbnail lengths, then dipping one end of each section into a puddle of Elmer’s. The glue formed a membrane across the opening that would dry clear and so form the bottom of the glass. Next, he dipped each open end into a puddle of gold paint. The paint, less viscous, would not form a seal but only deposit a gold ring around the lip.The goblets were for a wedding. Specifically, the scene of his and Bronwyn’s wedding supper. Thus the photo album splayed on the kitchen table along with the glue and paint: he had gotten it out for reference.

None of his other dioramas represented a scene from his own life. Ordinarily he would have been sheepish about what might seem like self-regard. But it wasn’t for himself, this box, and that made the difference.

His eyeglasses had slipped low on his nose.They and the nasal cannula that led to the portable oxygen concentrator made his face front-heavy; he had to tilt his head somewhat back to compensate. The sustained effort was giving him a crick in the neck, and the bright light he’d trained on his workspace was making him very warm, but he took note of these discomforts without strongly minding them; he had begun to notice himself relishing even unpleasant sensations.

He’d had a lobe removed a year ago, followed by chemo and radiation. Then this recurrence, and another tumor removed, and more chemo scheduled. They’d wait and see how he responded. They were loath to offer any prognosis. He had no illusions about what this meant.

Bronwyn, who would not appear in the scene—it would be entirely unpeopled, a table set in anticipation of guests—had been dead nineteen years, so many more than the four he’d known her. Her youth, more than anything, is what he remembered of her. Her skin had been smooth and firm as a bar of soap. She’d had a tiny mole at the corner of her mouth that did not mar but rather enhanced her polished elegance; it looked endearingly like a toast crumb.

They’d had a civil ceremony followed by a restaurant supper, a private room rented out for them and a dozen relatives and friends. Bron, in the photos, which lay under protective film, was lovely in her knee-length ivory A-line dress, her dark hair flipped up at the ends. Will admired her handsomeness and did not grieve at the sight of her. It was the images of himself that stabbed. Bron, after all, had been relatively unchanged at the time of her death from the bride in the photos, whereas the man he was now bore little resemblance to the pictured groom. In the pictures he was lean and lanky and wore his happiness, along with his shaggy hair and skinny tie, quite unabashedly. At fiftyfive he was thickened and wheezing, tethered to tubes and metal canister: such a far cry from that other person—whom he yet distinctly remembered being—that he felt a flash of the old bitterness, the sense of helpless, stunned betrayal that had knocked him flat upon her death.

In the months after Bron’s funeral Will had worked hard to counter with an outwardly mild manner what he knew to be his envenomed core. He did this in the interest of others, not only his infant son but also his colleagues, relatives, and neighbors, and the well-meaning outreach workers who would call or come by with bereavement brochures, donated diapers, tins of formula. To his surprise, discipline became habit: his sweet ways built up, over the years, around the old mordant kernel, like peach flesh around its stone of cyanide. So that Gordie not only grew up with a dad who displayed no sign of having been damaged from that early loss, but might in turn believe in the possibility of recovering from future losses; might see that sweetness could follow upon suffering.

Will sighed as deeply as his body would let him, until the queer, frightening pull in his chest stopped him abruptly—the rude sensation of climbing into a short-sheeted bed—but this was only adhesions, the nurses had reassured him, a normal result of the surgeries he’d had. He found it strange but not dishonorable the way they offered reassurance on this matter without pretending he was not dying. He hadn’t talked about the fact of his dying with Gordie.

The ersatz gold-rimmed glasses done, set upside down on yesterday’s weather to let their Elmer’s bottoms dry, Will took inventory of what other pieces he’d assembled: an antimacassar for the lace tablecloth, a thrift shop earring for the chandelier. A small batch of homemade white play dough, which Will would mold into a three-tiered cake. (He’d had an inspiration for the bride and groom figurines: rice, he thought he’d try, two raw grains of it, painted with a pin dipped in ink.) The dinner plates were the white tops of pill bottles.

At his feet, Ebie’s tail thumped and she gathered herself to rise, navigating backward out from under the table, her toenails scrabbling on the linoleum. She was one, still a pup, or now a teenager,Will supposed. On the cusp of adulthood. Like his son, just nineteen and a freshman at Fordham. Or, officially, on leave from Fordham. Gordie had insisted on taking leave, against his dad’s vigorous protests, as soon as the diagnosis had been made.

“You’re staying in school,” Will had growled. “Won’t have you quitting.” Neither he nor Bronwyn had attended college. “I’ve got all the company I need,” he’d said, stroking the top of the dog’s head.

“Ebie’s great, Dad, but she’s as much burden as companion.”

What Will could not bear was Gordie’s air of overripe consternation, the rawness of his helplessness. But he had a method, a means of delivering them both from these scary slicks. “What do you know about burdens?” he snorted.

“I’m saying. She’s a dog.”

“You think you’re that much better?” And Will made a mincing expression, tilting his head from side to side. It worked: Gordie shook his head and rolled his eyes. The pretense of irascibility never failed to bring them back to more familiar, less starkly terrifying ground.

It was Gordie the dog had risen to greet just now, her ears having distinguished his particular footfall in the hallway outside their unit even before his key turned in the lock. She’d always been more Gordie’s than Will’s, never mind that they’d adopted her expressly to provide company for the elder Joiner when the younger went off to school. Oh, she was affectionate enough with Will, but anyone could see she considered herself Gordie’s dog, almost as though she knew what lay ahead: that Gordie would be the one, in the end, in need of company.

He came in bearing a gallon of carrot and spirulina juice and several pharmacy bags containing Will’s prescription refills.

“I’m not drinking that,” offered Will in the rote manner of an oft-repeated refrain.

Gordie ignored this, setting his bags on the counter and crouching to greet the dog effusively. “Hel-lo, Ebie. That’s right, that’s right.” She bucked her head forward and licked her chops at him drippingly. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”

Will scoffed ostentatiously, on cue.

This was how it had been ever since the diagnosis: a pretense of animosity had grown between them, a kind of ongoing, low-level dyspepsia. As surely as the disease itself, this new pattern of behavior divided present from past. Will didn’t regret it. The enormity of Gordie’s having given up school to be his caregiver—the enormity, for that matter, of his own imminent mortality—seemed to require such a charade.Will understood it not as an avoidance of true feeling, but as the most tenable means of expressing it. It translated, in a way he couldn’t begin to explain, into a high order of intimacy.

“I’m going to you-know-what the pooch,” Gordie said.

“Right.”Will picked up a bit of play dough and began to roll it between his palms.

But Gordie, despite his declaration, remained where he was, palpably miserable, it seemed to Will. Ebie whined once, twice, then gave up and lay back down. Gordie said, “What are you working on?” and wandered over to the table.

Will felt his son standing behind him, breathing, taking in the elements of the scene, piecing together what they must mean. Beneath the clumsy freight of his eyeglasses and oxygen tubes, Will felt his face grow hotter. He was blushing. Never before had he intended any of his dioramas to convey a message. Never before had he made one expressly for someone else. But that’s what this was: a little box of meaning, a memorandum, a wish. Another minute passed before Gordie next spoke, during which time Will continued, as nonchalantly as he was able, to shape the small cake. His fingers, however, were trembling.

Gordie’s question came out shy, thimble-sized. “Can I help?”