had cancer, and claimed she was passed over for a promotion. Her employer had done everything he possibly could to help her. He even had set up a room for the employee at work, so she could rest as much as she needed to, and he had given her three days a week off while she was having chemo, and held her job for her. But she was still suing. She claimed she wasn't promoted because of her cancer. What the woman wanted was to make some money, sit at home, and be able to pay for all her treatments and then some with what she made on the lawsuit. The cancer appeared to have been cured, and she didn't even want to work anymore. But she still had a lot of leftover debts from her treatments. And there was no doubt, Alex had discovered herself, that most insurance plans paid only minimum amounts for cancer treatment. If you couldn't afford the very expensive treatments that saved lives, you were in big trouble. Alex's own insurance was picking up very little of her expenses. But still, the plaintiff in her case had no right to take that out on her ex-employer. He had even offered to help her, a fact that she had later denied, and that he had no proof of. As usual, Alex felt very sorry for the defendant. She hated the injustice of people who thought they ought to clean up just because someone else had money and they didn't. And it was also a good time for her to be taking the case, because she had a lot of very useful firsthand information about cancer.
“I'll see you tomorrow, Brock,” she said as she got ready to leave.
“Take care of yourself. Bundle up. And eat a good dinner.”
“Yes, Mom,” she teased, but they were all things Liz had told her too. She had to keep warm, and make sure she kept her strength up. She wasn't looking forward to the weight Dr. Webber said she might gain. She hated being overweight, although she seldom was, and she knew Sam hated heavy women.
“Thanks again.” She left, and went home, thinking of how nice they all were, and how relieved she was that her first treatment was over. It had been even more traumatic than she'd expected, and she'd been even more undone by it, and yet it had gone pretty smoothly. She wasn't looking forward to going back in a week, but maybe it would be better this time, and after that she had a three-week break before the next one. Liz had filled her prescription for the pills, and she had them in her handbag. It was like being on the pill again, which she hadn't been in years. You couldn't allow yourself to forget them.
Annabelle was in the bathtub when she got home, and she and Carmen were singing. It was a song from Sesame Street, and Alex joined them as she put her briefcase down and walked into the bathroom.
“And how was your day?” Alex asked as she bent down to kiss her after the song was over.
“Okay. How did you hurt your hand?”
“I didn't … oh, that.” It was her Band-Aid from the chemo. “At the office.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Nope.”
“I got a Snoopy Band-Aid at school,” Annabelle said proudly, and Carmen told Alex that Sam had called and said he wouldn't be home for dinner. Alex hadn't heard from him all day and she assumed that he was still furious about the night before. But now she couldn't even tell him that the chemo had gone smoothly. She thought of calling him at work, but after all the ugliness they'd exchanged the night before, she thought it was better to wait until she saw him. She noticed too that he was going out a lot more with clients at night than he used to. Maybe it was another one of his ways of avoiding dealing with her, and it was certainly working. She felt as though she never saw him.
She had dinner with Annabelle, and decided to try and wait up for him. But she was so exhausted that she fell asleep at nine o'clock, in bed, with the light on. It had been the hardest day of her life, harder even than the surgery, and she was totally exhausted.
And as she slept, Sam was having a quiet dinner with Daphne, in a small restaurant in the East Sixties.
He looked agonized and she was sympathetic