Page 81 of Born to be Wilder

Everyone laughed, but I didn’t. Instead, an intrusive thought pounded its way through my defenses: When this movie comes out, will we all be there to see it? Or will there be an empty seat beside us, and I’ll be watching a ghost on the screen?

I gripped the table beside me, my legs wobbling as I tried to fight off the vision of life without her.

No. She won’t die. I won’t let her die.

“And this wig? What do you think? If I need chemo and lose my hair, is this the style for me?” Alice joked, poking at the coiled curls and bouffant she'd never be caught dead wearing in the real world.

“Honestly?” Sylvie laughed, giving Alice a little shrug. “I don’t think Alejandro would complain one bit if you waltzed in the door wearing that wig.”

“Or this dress.” She gave a little shimmy, making her breasts wiggle.

“Stop!” Doris turned pink, wafting a hand at them.

Alice just shimmied more, her bosom moving closer to Doris as she squealed.

But I couldn’t laugh. All I could see was Alice, bald and pale in a hospital bed, a far cry from the velvet-clad madam. The image was so vivid, so terrifyingly close, that my vision blurred.

Suddenly, Sylvie stopped laughing, her brow furrowing as she looked at me. “Marge? Are you alright?”

“What?” I asked, the word sticking on a lump in my throat I hadn’t noticed.

Alice and Doris stopped too, both of their faces changing from joy to concern in an instant.

“Marge, are you… crying?” Doris whispered.

I reached up and touched my cheeks, my fingers wet as I looked down at them. At… tears?

I didn’t even realize they’d come—unwelcome, uninvited, startling.

“I... I think the dust is getting to me,” I choked out, pushing past them. “Allergies. I need air.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I turned and bolted out of the saloon, my spurs jangling a frantic, messy rhythm against the floorboards. I didn’t stop until I found the dim, hay-scented quiet of the livery stable. I ducked into an empty stall, slid down the wall, leaned my head against the rough wood, and let out a sob that felt like it had been clawing at my throat since that day in Sylvie’s living room.

The thing I’d been holding back since the word cancer, since every road mile and every laugh and every moment I’d spent doing the furious, noisy, busy work of not feeling this⁠—

It came up anyway.

My eyes burned. My jaw tightened against it. My whole body resisted it with everything I had.

And then the tears came, and they were so foreign on my face, so wrong, so completely at odds with everything I was made of.

I wiped them with the back of my hand with a viciousness that hurt me the way I wanted to hurt them. To punish them for arriving uninvited. For displaying what I was feeling on the inside on the outside for the world to see.

To see my weakness.

My pain.

My private, personal emotions that were ripping apart my insides.

I heard the stable door open.

I straightened up immediately, one final swipe at my soaked cheeks.

Alice came around the corner of the stall and looked down at me.

“I have allergies,” I said quickly.

She didn’t say anything, just stepped into the straw and moved toward me.