didn’t see that coming.”
He started to stand, but I grabbed his hand.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t go. Just sit with me. Don’t kiss me or anything, just sit here with me.”
He took a deep breath and sat back, crossed his legs, standoffish. He was such a child. An angry little boy not getting what he wants.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, and he perked up a bit and faced me. “You’re thinking: If I give a girl fifty million bucks the least I expect is to get in her pants.”
That got him.
Suddenly he was laughing harder than I was, and wheezing that smoker’s wheeze, and turning a bit red, but it was funny and it was genuine and we were very comfortable sitting together. We laughed for a while, and then I took his hand and put it in my lap and held it with both hands, and we stayed that way quietly until he broke the silence by telling me the second thing he had come to say.
And this one, I really hadn’t seen coming.
BROOKE
I WISH I WERE the sort of person who underlined things in books. You know how people do that? They underline, or they dog-ear pages, or the really organized ones have computer files with quotes and paragraphs that touched them, moved them. I have encountered so many of those passages, all my life, but I never write them down. What a mistake that is. I so envy people who can quote great leaders and writers at the drop of a hat. It happens all the time. At a dinner party someone will say, “You know, it was General Patton who said blah blah blah . . .” I wish I could quote General Patton; that would be so great. Instead, I’m always the one saying: “I can’t remember where I read this, but blah blah blah . . .” Let me tell you, the blah blah blahs are always much more interesting when they have a name attached to them.
Like right now, for instance, I am thinking about how no two flakes of snow are identical. Isn’t that written in a poem somewhere? Didn’t someone attach some deeper meaning to it? If they didn’t they should have, because it is the most telling and important little fact about science I have ever heard.
No two things are exactly the same. No two people are, either. My twins are a perfect example. They are fraternal, not identical, but if they were identical they would have the same blood, the same DNA, the same fingerprints, but they still wouldn’t be the same. My children are different from each other in ways that go well beyond their genetic material, because no two people, no matter how identical, are exactly the same. Just like snowflakes.
That’s the part I think Samantha doesn’t understand.
She views her life in one way, I view mine in another. She has her values, her concerns, her beliefs, and I respect those. For whatever reason, she cannot seem to do the same for me. She behaves as though I am committing suicide, when I am doing nothing of the kind. As of this moment, I am cancer-free. And I am no fool, nor am I nearly as out of touch with reality as she has made up her mind I am. I talked at great length, enormous length, with my doctor about my decision and arrived at a conclusion I am comfortable with. And, not that it matters, but he tells me I am by no means the only patient he has known to make this decision. I could go through all the treatment options available to me, put everything and everyone I know and love on hold, and for what? In the best case, it would alter my chances of the cancer recurring by 10 percent. My chances of recurrence now are what they are. If I sacrifice my entire lifestyle, plus my husband’s, plus my children’s, they become 10 percent more favorable. Some people will do anything for that 10 percent. I will not.
When I was a girl, I had a friend named Amanda. She got caught up with the wrong crowd as we got a bit older and one night she got in a car with some older boys and there was drinking involved and then they ran into a large truck on the highway at two in the morning. The rumor that went around school was that Amanda was decapitated in the accident.