Sure, the daughter thinks. She can do that. As she puts it:

“I want to please him, though I don’t remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: ‘There was a woman ...’ followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

What she says is wonderfully contradictory. “Why not?”, she thinks—but, at the same time, she says she despises the very idea of such a story.

The narrator makes up a story about a woman who becomes a heroin addict in solidarity with her son, who is a heroin addict. He gets clean, and she does not, and she loses him. The father is upset with the story—and he’s right, the first version is just bare bones. So she expands it and tells the story again, explains what it is that attracts the son about drugs, what it’s like for him as an addict, how a woman convinces him to get off drugs and eat healthy, organic food. It’s all very interesting. There are more details in the second version, but the outcome is the same.

The father doesn’t like the second story either, except for one part: its final words, “The End.”

“The end. You were right to put that down. The end.” I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say, “Well, it is not necessarily the end, Pa.” “Yes,” he said, “what a tragedy. The end of a person.” “No, Pa,” I begged him. “It doesn’t have to be. She’s only about forty. She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social worker. An ex-junkie! Sometimes it’s better than having a master’s in education.” “Jokes,” he said. “As a writer that’s your main trouble. You don’t want to recognize it, Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end.”

And we’re reminded of what’s really going on. Their argument becomes about more than storytelling. The narrator still believes in “the open destiny of life.” The father can’t. And he’s dying. The father and daughter will be separated forever, like the mother and son in the story. The reader, at this point, may have forgotten that fact—the oxygen machine—but then the father puts the tubes back into his nostrils and it hits us: she’s going to lose him.

In this story I think neither character changes. The father is stuck in his perspective, and the daughter remains faithful to hers. This “conversation” is less a dialogue than two characters talking past each other. But there is a shift, and that’s what makes the story—it’s just that it happens in the reader, not in one of the characters. We don’t expect to agree with the father: he thinks the story that his daughter tells is tragic because the woman in it won’t change. We—agreeing with the daughter—feel that life has more possibility than that. But then Paley ends the story with the dying father’s accusation that her daughter won’t look tragedy in the face. We feel the tragedy of the father and daughter’s separation, the inevitability of his death. Our perspective shifts toward his: we change.