Writers & Lovers(45)

‘Let Ann try it on,’ he says.

I shake my head.

‘Let your stepmother try on my mother’s ring.’

‘I haven’t taken it off since she died.’ I didn’t know that was true before I said it. I’m standing just far enough away so neither of them can reach me without a wild lunge.

‘How did you get it?’

‘She left it to me.’

‘Probably all she had in the world to give you, the way she lived. Casey,’ he says, trying to sound tender. ‘She left us.’

‘I know, Dad.’

‘Ann came and saved us. She took us in. And when I lost my job—’ His voice cracks. ‘I’ve never had much to offer her.’

Ann lifts her purse up on her lap. I look at her hands, big stones on nearly every finger from her ex. She pulls out her checkbook. ‘How much?’ Her first husband was a Du Pont.

‘No.’

‘C’mon,’ my father says. ‘Just tell us your price.’

I tap their bill on the tray. ‘Twenty-nine seventy-five. Have a good drive home.’

Instead of just leaving cash on the table they give it to Fabiana on their way out. There’s a brief exchange, I can’t tell about what, and they’re gone.

Fabiana brings me the tip on a tray. Less than 10 percent. She stabs a piece of the duck with my fork. ‘How do you know those people anyway?’





I thought once the book was out of my hands the bees would fly off and I could relax. But they are worse. All night I lie in the dark on my futon while they writhe beneath my skin. I try to soothe myself with thoughts of agents reading my manuscript, but my feelings about the novel start to shift. Soon any thought of it scalds me with shame. Six years and this is what I have to show for myself? I try to hold the whole thing in my head again and I can’t. I think about the first few pages and panic blooms in my chest and spreads like fire to my extremities. I watch the clock run through its numbers until it is light.

During the day I miss working on it. I’ve lost access to a world where my mother is a little girl reading in a window or twirling in fast circles on the street, her braids raised high off her back. Outside of those pages she is dead. There seems no end to the procession of things that make my mother feel more dead.

The gynecologist has ordered a mammogram. He said my breasts were difficult to examine manually because they were fibrous. It makes me feel like a cereal.

The technician is rough. She shoves and tugs my right boob into place on the glass plate and brings the other plate down with the touch of a button and just when it is as tight and squished as I can bear, she lowers it more. Sometimes she has to lift it back up a bit and cram my flesh in deeper. She should be a potter or a chef. Her hands are strong and certain. She reminds me of the line cooks stuffing potatoes.

When she’s doing the final position, she asks me to draw my shoulder back, and when I can’t seem to do it to her liking she draws it back herself. ‘Good,’ she says but keeps her fingers under my armpit. She wiggles them a bit. ‘Huh,’ she says.

‘What?’

She wiggles some more. ‘You had this checked?’

‘What?’

She takes her fingers out, and I put mine in. ‘I don’t feel anything.’ I wonder if she’s one of those people who convinces other people they’re sick—Munchausen by proxy. It makes sense that she would be attracted to a medical career.

‘Here.’ She places my fingers right in the socket and moves them over a hard—there’s no other word for it—lump. My fingers spring away from it, denial at the muscular level. I feel the other armpit. I feel and feel. You just want to be symmetrical. A pair of lumps seems far more desirable. Nothing. She feels there, too.

‘Mention it to your doctor.’

‘Could we take a few images of it right now, just to save time.’

She laughs as if this is a preposterous idea. ‘No.’

I call my primary care office about the lump and they ask me when that afternoon I can come in.

I get a different doctor. A woman. She wears gray felt clogs and a barrette on each side of her head. She makes me feel like we’re in sixth grade and pretending she’s a doctor and I’m a patient with a lump under my arm. She has no quick explanation. She asks if I’ve switched deodorants, soaps, or perfumes recently. I haven’t. She suggests I stop using all products, just in case. And come back in a week.

‘I will be very smelly by then,’ I say. She says I can wash my hair but only with shampoo I’ve used before and only leaning way back in the shower, careful not to let the suds get under my arm. And no conditioner. ‘Smelly and frizzy,’ I say.

After a week, the lump is the same size and sore from how much I’ve been fingering it. The doctor says that I should continue with the anti-hygiene program. And, she adds, as if it’s an afterthought, I should see an oncologist. She puts this on my chart, and when I check out I’m told Donna will call me within forty-eight hours with the date and time of the oncology appointment. She does. My appointment with Dr. Oncologist is seven weeks away. I call his office and beg for something sooner but the receptionist snaps and tells me I’m a lucky young lady to have gotten that date. Someone canceled. They’re booking into late spring now.

‘Because cancer can wait,’ I say. ‘Cancer doesn’t grow and spread and kill people.’