Yolk(26)

By the time I’m at her building, I feel stupid for sprinting back. Recalling that she wanted space. I press my ear to her door, nervous. I hear nothing. It’s cold, inert, and mute. Six inches of titanium or something crazy. It strikes me how even rich-people keys feel different, the way they glide in without catching or requiring any tricks of wriggling to turn.

June’s flipping through a Vermont Country Store catalog in the kitchen. Back in pajamas. I knock belatedly, feeling stupid.

“Hey.” I pointedly return the keys to her drawer.

“Hey,” she says, not looking up from the gift guide.

I study her for any news. I can’t even tell if she’s had blood drawn; her sleeves are pulled over her knuckles. It’s maddening how withholding she is. And she’s barely looking at the Corn Chowder set or the Summer Sausage basket as she’s turning pages.

Hanging up my coat, I make sure that my suitcase and bags are stacked behind the couch at an angle you can’t see from the front door.

“School was good,” I offer. “I, like, went.”

I shuffle into a spare pair of her house slippers. “So, how was your thing?”

“You know what’s weird?” she asks me, shutting the catalog.

“What?”

I reach across the counter to grab her forearm, partly as a joke, and when she doesn’t withdraw, I really begin to freak out.

“They talked to me for, like, an hour,” she says. Her eyes are glassy, and that groove between her eyebrows bites in deep.

“Okay,” I say. “Did they do more tests?”

She shakes her head. “No, it was just… I met my doctor. My special cancer gyno. She seems fine. Her engagement ring seemed a little excessive but whatever. I guess we’re going to run more tests. They want an MRI. Or I guess I want an MRI. I think I’m not supposed to eat beforehand, but they scheduled it for two p.m., so I’m going to be fucking starving….”

“What happens after the MRI?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll schedule the surgery.”

“Is that what they said?”

“Pretty much.” I can tell she’s barely listening. She grabs the catalog again and rolls it up tight.

“Okay, but what’s weird?”

“What?”

“Is the two p.m. MRI the weird part?”

“Huh?”

“You said, ‘You know what’s weird?’?”

“What’s weird?” she asks me, scowling impatiently, as if I’m the one being distracted and annoying.

I slowly exhale the breath I’ve been holding. “That’s how you started this conversation, June. You said, ‘You know what’s weird?’?”

“Oh,” she says, waving my attention away. “It’s not even that weird. I just can’t believe I was in there for an hour, because I don’t remember anything she said. I feel like I just watched her mouth move for sixty minutes.”

I tug on my lip. My nose fills in anticipation of tears. I don’t know what to do. Or what to say. I feel like leaving immediately, calling Ivy and getting drunk. But I also know that people who “do the work” would stick around. I wish I wanted to.

She shuffles over to the couch. I make myself follow her.

“I feel so dumb that I didn’t bring a notepad.” She gives her head a slight shake. “Once the doctor left, the nurse told me everything over again, but I don’t know if I retained much of that, either.” Her eyes track back and forth as if she’s scanning her memory. “I should have voice memo’d it.”

This doesn’t sound anything like my sister. My coding math-brain sister. I hate it.

“Jesus, June.” My voice cracks on her name. “I told you I’d come.”

She kisses her teeth. “Whatever, I’ll record it next time.”

“When’s the MRI?”

“Next week.”

“I’m coming.”

She shakes her head. “It’s an MRI. I just lie there.”

“Well, I’ll sit there.”

“That’s the other weird part,” she says with a faraway expression. “There was this pregnant woman in the waiting area. She was huge. And she was Asian. But with bangs. It felt like some kind of fucked-up psychology experiment.”

I glance down at her coffee table. The rug underneath needs vacuuming. I hear her sniff. We’re not big criers in our house. Once, a long time ago, Dad burst into tears, and June and I just backed away from him as if he were plutonium. We couldn’t even make eye contact with each other for the rest of the day.

The silence hangs horribly between us.

“Do you want to watch Gilmore Girls?” I ask.

“Yeah, okay,” she says. June always wants to watch Gilmore Girls.

I make her start on season two, when Jess appears. June likes Dean, which is all you really need to know about her even though I’m a Logan apologist, which makes me emotionally unwell. It’s weird—we’ve only ever watched from season two to six.

When we were kids, we’d watch Gilmore Girls and Friends on a loop. Dad bought a TV/DVD combo player on sale from Costco, and we’d made him buy the box sets because we didn’t have cable. Everything we owned was from Costco. It’s where June’s movie soundtrack obsession started. Mom bought her the Cruel Intentions soundtrack, and we listened to that on a loop for a year.