Page 3
The woman in it looks calm. Honey hair pulled back, sleeves pushed up, remote clicker in her right hand. My job tonight is to keep her that calm for forty straight minutes.
“Good morning,” I tell her. “Thank you for having me. When a child finishes the intensive phases of leukemia treatment, the hospital celebrates, the family exhales, and then something harder starts. Two more years of pills at the kitchen table. Two more years of counting. Of bloodwork. Of scans. Of waiting for the other shoe to drop…”
The opening lands. It always lands in here. I click through the first section, and the numbers come to me before the slides do, response rates and relapse windows and the long, flat mercy of the maintenance years. I know this material better than my own address. Knowing has never been the problem.
The problem arrives on schedule, at the minute-nineteen mark, when I make the mistake of picturing the room. A ballroom holds its audience in rows, and rows have no charts, and four hundred faces watching me is four hundred conversations I can’t read. My throat tightens on the word remission, of all words. The clicker hand drops.
I put the wine down on the sink, untouched since the piano.
During my undergrad, I was nominated to do the verbal presentation on a group project. I’d done plenty of speeches in high school, so I wasn’t worried about it. Which was the problem.
I under-prepared. The night before, I went to a party and woke up hungover. I ran out the door the morning of the presentation, note cards in hand. I figured I had time to skim them, but the professor called on me first.
When I got in front of the class, I knew I had screwed up. The panic took over from there. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see straight, not until I looked at the audience. Staring at me. Judging me.
Waiting for me.
I forced a breath, and nothing came out. But I hadn’t really taken the breath—my lungs locked tight. Then sweat broke out down my back. I cleared my throat and tried again, only to choke on nothing. My head swam. Tongue dry.
And then I passed out. When I came to, I was concussed from falling straight backward and knocking my head on the floor. Every speech since then has been my personal nightmare.
At a bedside, fear has a job. It sharpens me toward the one person in front of me. At a podium, it just circles, looking for somewhere to land, and tomorrow I cannot afford to be its runway.
So I do what I tell my patients to do. I name the steps out loud, in order, because a procedure with an order is survivable. “Walk to the podium. Set the water down. Find the clock at the back of the room. First sentence.”
Milo runs his own countdown, and nothing happens before his three. Seven years old, and he figured out the secret in his first month of treatment. Control what can be controlled. Hand the rest to someone you trust.
Tomorrow, the person I have to trust is the one in the mirror.
“From the top,” I tell her, and I begin again.
2
LUPO
My daughter is six years old, and she has held her position at this breakfast table for four minutes without giving an inch. I have watched grown men fold faster with more to lose. In fairness to the grown men, none of them were defending baby chickens.
“Eggs come from chickens,” Sarah says as she scrunches her tiny face. “Chickens are animals.”
“The egg is not a chicken yet.”
“It’s the chicken’s baby.” She folds her hands on the table, patient with me. “You don’t eat babies, Papa.”
Across the table, Nick raises his coffee in salute. He grew up with me, took bullets with me, and sides against me every morning at seven, in my own kitchen, over eggs. The bastard.
“Uncle Nick doesn’t make me eat animals—”
“Uncle Nick is eating bacon in front of you right now.”
“The pig would want to be enjoyed,” Nick says. “I’m honoring its wishes.”
Sarah gives him a look that would cost a man his kneecaps in any other room, and Nick withstands it because he has practice. I slide the plate of eggs to the side and open the counteroffer. “Peanut butter toast?”
She grins. “Yeah!”
“And also, the chocolate protein shake you pretend not to love.”
Her scowl should be painted for posterity. “Papa—”
