The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(6)
In the kitchen cabinet where she keeps her daily vitamins and the medications prescribed to keep cancer at bay for as long as possible, she finds a bottle of drugstore brand painkillers.
Having left her glasses upstairs on the nightstand, she can’t quite make out the label. It looks to her like they expired last year, but they’re probably fine. Fine, as in safe to swallow, if not as effective as they might have been.
She takes three, just in case they’re less potent. Washing them down with tap water, she wonders how long it will take before the pills ease the tension in her muscles.
It really is too bad she can’t take something stronger.
Not medicine. Just a nip of something that will warm her from the inside out, and let her sleep.
She glances longingly at the high cupboard above the fridge where they’ve kept the booze since their firstborn, Teddy, reached high school.
Ha. As if keeping the stash out of arm’s reach would deter him and his friends from getting into it. It didn’t work, they discovered belatedly, when Hank realized that one of their offspring—by then, all three were in college—had replaced the contents of a bottle of Woodford Reserve with iced tea.
Still, they were good kids, Meredith remembers as she sets the empty water glass into the sink. Spirited, but good. She’s blessed to have watched them grow up and give her grandchildren—three grandsons so far between Teddy and Neal and their wives, with another little stinkerdoodle on the way this fall.
That’s what Meredith calls her grandchildren, just as she always called her own children: a nice batch of stinkerdoodles.
Everyone is hoping for a girl this time.
Everyone but her. Secretly, she worries about passing the cancer gene to a new generation.
Men get breast cancer, too, one of her blogger friends pointed out when she wrote about that concern.
True. But it’s not nearly as common.
She can’t help but worry about the health of her daughter and future granddaughters. She’s been warning Rebecca that she needs to do self-exams and start her yearly mammogram screening in another couple of years.
Beck, of course, waves her mother off. She’s too young and full of life to worry about illness.
So was I at her age. I never thought something like this could happen. No family history . . .
You just never know.
It’s been over a year now since Beck married Keith. They’ll probably be starting a family, too, soon.
Meredith has so much to live for. If only . . .
Shaking her head, she turns off the light and leaves the kitchen, never noticing the cut screen on the window facing the newly planted garden out back, or the shadow of a human figure lurking in the far corner.
Tragic News
This is Meredith’s daughter, Rebecca, writing. I don’t know how to say this. There’s no easy way. I’m still in shock. But you all meant a lot to my mom, and she would want our family to let you all know that she passed away this weekend.
—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks
Chapter 2
The news reaches Landry Wells on the sort of picture-perfect summer morning when it feels as though nothing can possibly go wrong.
It’s warm—southern Alabama in June is always warm—but not yet too steamy for sipping hot coffee on the second-story porch swing. A gentle breeze stirs Spanish moss draped in the live oaks framing her view of Mobile Bay, and the world is hushed but for chirping birds and the staccato spritzing of the lawn sprinklers below.
Still unshowered, wearing the shorts and T-shirt she threw on to walk the dog after rolling out of bed, Landry sits with her bare feet propped on the rail, laptop open to the Web page that bears the shocking news.
News that struck out of nowhere on what promised to be another precious, precious ordinary day.
Years ago—after a routine mammogram gave way to the sonogram that led to the biopsy that resulted in a cancer diagnosis—she couldn’t imagine ever living another ordinary day. But the women to whom she turned for support—an online group of breast cancer patients and survivors she now counts among her closest friends—assured her that normality would return, sooner or later. They were right.
Every night, when she climbs into bed, she thanks God for the gift of a day in which she carted her teenagers around and did loads of laundry and sat sipping coffee with her husband; a day filled with reading and writing, weeding the garden, feeding a family, watching good television and decadently bad television, grumbling about crumbs and clutter and mosquito bites but never really minding any of it.
She watches a monarch butterfly alight on a pink rose blossom in her sunlit flower bed below and thinks of Meredith.
She had been doing so well. Yes, Meredith had reported a recurrence well over a year ago. Her oncologist found some suspicious cells in her breast, and after a radical mastectomy and radiation, pronounced her clear again.
That’s what she wrote, anyway, in one of her typically cheerful blog entries.
Was it a lie? Was she shielding them all from the grim fact that her cancer had spread; that she was dying? Was she trying to avoid the familiar shift in interaction they had all witnessed on other cancer blogs?
Landry considers the inevitable scenario that commences whenever a fellow blogger reports, in a post laced with incredulity, bravado, false cheer—or all of the above—that her doctors have run out of treatment options.