I found myself, as always, reading through this one too quickly because it is the last story in the anthology.
Reading Munro is always a pleasure, always a learning process. In this story, a woman is helping her elderly father prepare for possible heart surgery–or death. Their relationship changes as she sees him through different eyes in their conversations, just as she sees herself in a different way.
There is an attempt on her part to understand both her father and her daughters. There is this unraveling of the past to in some way establish the present so that both her father and her understand how they've come to the point where they are. There is that often built-up resentment, distance between parent and child that comes from reluctance to reveal–something that Munro shows us starkly:
There is a tendency to concentrate on something that will take us away from what could be that conflict of emotions that results instead, in a conflict of emotions itself.
In the end, the daughter reaches out to her father, using his knowledge of astronomy and her own recent visit to the local planetarium where she sought to escape.
There is always something new to learn from Munro's indepth unrolling of character. She uses self-reflection–though the narrator or protagonist need not always be trusted–as well as dialogue and much intereaction of characters. She also employs imagery as a show of character. What someone is wearing, how their house is kept, the color of the walls, all these are not mere grounding of setting, but used skillfully to show one more facet of her characters, which to Munro, are the real point of story.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology