him more at ease. “I was just going to get a few from the shed for the nurses at the hospital. I took Momma over there yesterday, and you know . . .”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! Is she all right?”
“Andy, the queen is always all right. You wait here, and I’ll be right back.”
I hurried to the gardening shed where I kept the jars of honey lined up on shelves. It was also where I kept the equipment that I used to spin the honey from the combs and jar it, too. It could be a very messy and sticky situation if I tried to do it in the house, so a few years ago I just took our old potting shed, painted it in pastels to match the hives, and sort of converted it to suit my needs. It wasn’t like anyone else would set foot in there anyway. I grabbed a few, dropped them in a canvas tote bag, and returned to Andy, who stood waiting patiently on the concrete walkway to our front steps. I thought, Someday I might dig out all that awful cracked cement and put in a pretty path of bricks in a herringbone pattern. I’d seen that done in Southern Living magazine and just loved it. Maybe Andy would like to help? That made me giggle to myself.
I handed him some honey over pecans, which was just that. Pecans I shelled and covered in honey.
“Here you go! It’s good on everything,” I said. “Yogurt, ice cream, or a spoon.”
“Well, thank you so much! That’s so nice of you!” Smiling, he turned to go.
He had a very nice smile.
“Happy to share!” I said and went to the porch to put the packages inside and to get my purse.
I picked up two small boxes from the porch rocker. What had Momma bought now? More tunics? She had so many, she’d never live long enough to get her money’s worth out of them. That was for sure. Well, never mind economy. How she spent her money was none of my beeswax, either.
I locked the house, drove over to the hospital, parked in visitor parking, and made my way to Momma’s room. I was feeling pretty relaxed and happy until I got there. There stood several doctors with seriously chiseled expressions, like totem poles. I had obviously walked in on something critical.
“Oh, don’t pay her no never mind,” Momma said. “That’s just Holly, my daughter.”
“Hello,” each one said, and of course I said hello back.
“How are you, Momma?”
“Not so hot. It seems I have a tiny little thing on my liver and something else in my pancreas the size of an M&M. Neither one of these things is good news.”
She said it as though she was merely reporting the weather and without a trifling thought about how it might impact me, but then, sensitivity wasn’t her thing. But I was so startled that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.
“What?” I said. “Tell me this again?” Suddenly, I was dizzy, and I had to sit down.
“Relax yourself. I’m not dying tomorrow,” she said. “These nice doctors want to watch my tumors for a while to see if they change size or if anything pops up somewhere else.”
One of the doctors turned to me and explained that the location of the tumors made them inoperable, but they also appeared to be benign. For now.
“What if they’re not?” I asked.
“Then we will see changes in their composition pretty quickly. If that’s the case, we can radiate them. There’s a new protocol for targeted chemo, too. Much less invasive, less downtime.”
“My God,” I said.
The world changed in that moment. I looked at my mother, lying in her hospital bed, and realized she might be facing something nasty that was going to eventually take her life even if she treated it. It was like a conditional death sentence. She glanced over to me and bit her bottom lip, something she did when she tried to hold back tears. I felt terribly sorry for her then. She seemed as vulnerable as the day Daddy ran off with his physical therapist eleven years ago. Leslie and I didn’t blame him. After all, life with the QB was difficult. He had all but vanished from our lives.
I didn’t remember the doctors leaving, but I found myself alone with her. I should’ve asked them for their names and telephone numbers and for a copy of the reports, but I had been so shocked by the