Alice Munro depicts the portrayal of illness being a terminally inevitable

event within their lives as a family. Munro places her crisis within the
context of the ill mother- ‘well enough as yet to handle most of that
work’, emphasizing that although she would have fallen into sickness, it is
treated as a normal occurrence, and that life in both terms domestically
and socially continues. Having set up the family situation as isolated and
in poverty she refers to a conversation with her mother about her
operation. It is revealed that a growth ‘the size of an egg’ was removed
at the same time as the appendix. Munro uses anadiplosis to highlight the
importance of this news to a teenage girl: ‘the main thing that concerned
him was growth. A growth, my mother said…’ and here starts the events
which propel the narrative. Munro is clear that she and her mother do
not share a close relationship in the modern sense – the information was
given and received without further comment. Reflecting on this she
offers the idea that there must have been a cloud around that word’
suggesting a reason both for the mother’s illness and the unwillingness to
discuss further such a troubling idea.

The theme of family relationships is also presented within the text as

Munro questions her father’s parenting skills.His response is calm and
engenders calm in her – this powerful figure in her life has listened to ‘the
worst’ and explained it, not blamed her. He has ‘set [her] down without
either mockery or alarm, in the world [they]were living in – the real world
and not the world of ‘thoughts’ such as those which trouble her so. Life
goes on.
As the passage closes she reflects on her childhood and this figure who
made such an impact. Hers was not an upbringing wholly without pain – it
is clear from the ‘razor strap and belt’ that she was beaten – not for
malice but because it was the right thing to do. The same lack of drama
which pervades this story is shown in her perception of her father’s
straightforward response to her ‘sass’ when growing up. She is able to
equate this impersonal punishing with the lack of melodrama attached to
his response that morning.