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“Same. I thought you said I just pulled something working with my hand weights.”
“You pulled a bad card, Jane, is what you did,” she says. “I can’t lie to you.”
“Go ahead and lie a little. I won’t stop you.”
My next words sound monumentally dumb the moment they are out of my mouth.
“This can’t happen today.”
“There’s never a good time, or a good way, to give someone news like this. Especially to someone you love.”
She asks if I want to see the pictures. I tell her I’ll save them for the scrapbook.
I try to smile. Put up a false front. Be a tough guy.
Be Jane.
Beme.
She’s now talking about squamous cells that have spread into the lymph nodes.
“When I was a kid, I thought they were limp nodes,” I say. I flop my wrist in a limp way. “I think I’d rather have some of them.”
No reaction.
“Come on. That’s funny.”
“None of this is funny,” Sam Wylie says. “And we both know it.”
“What am I supposed to do? Cry?”
“If you want to.”
“I don’t,” I say. “Cry, I mean.”
“I do,” Sam Wylie says.
She’s talking slowly, patiently, but all I hear are the words running together, about chemo and targeted radiation and immunotherapy and the advances they’ve made with that, that there are ways to slow the disease for as long as possible.
“Am I hearing the word ‘cure’ in there anywhere?” I ask.
“In some cases,” she says after a pause I don’t like even a little bit.
Then she circles back to how we’ll probably start with chemo when the time comes. I’m already shaking my head.
No, no,no.
“You can’t have my hair. You’ve talked about what great hair I have even when it was as big as it was back in high school. No kidding—you’re not getting it without a fight, Sam.”
My hair is brown, shoulder-length, with streaks I was talked into by the woman who cuts my hair when I’m not trimming the bangs myself.
Now Sam is the one acting as if she hasn’t heard a word I just said.
“Jane, you can’t put this off, at least not for very long.”
“Watch me.”
“I know this is a shock.”
