around until Clarice’s detailed schedule became meaningless. I blanketed the healthy foods Clarice chose for me with butter and bacon crumbles. And the personal trainer, well, he yelled at me one time too many. The last I saw of Sergeant Pete, he was running from my family room with tears in his eyes. Of course, I outright refused to go to Calvary Baptist for the laying on of hands. I tried explaining to Clarice that I always felt worse leaving her church than I did when I walked in and I didn’t think that boded well for the healing process. Thoroughly exasperated, Clarice looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Feeling bad about yourself is the entire point of going to church, Odette. Don’t you know that?”
I stopped by Barbara Jean’s house and told her about my diagnosis over a cup of tea in her library. She was silent for so long that I asked, “Are you all right?”
She started to say “How long have you got?” or “How long do they give you?” But she thought better of it after the first two words came out and she turned it into “How long … have you known?”
We talked for an hour, and I think, by the time I left, she had come around to believing I had at least a small chance of surviving.
My brother, Rudy, said that he would come to take care of me as soon as he could get away. I told him it wasn’t necessary, that I was fine and had plenty of people looking after me. And I joked with him, as I did each year, that Southern California had thinned his blood too much for him to handle Indiana in the fall or winter. But my brother, who is old-fashioned to the point of annoyance, kept insisting that he would come. He only relented after I handed the phone over to James and let my husband convince Rudy that a levelheaded man was in charge of me.
Denise cried for just a minute or two, but she soon calmed herself and accepted my word that things weren’t too bad. Then she took my cue and settled in to talking about the grandchildren. I heard Jimmy’s fingers tapping at the keyboard of his computer as I told him. Facts had always comforted him, and he was on his way to becoming a lymphoma expert by the time we said goodbye. Eric hardly said a word to me over the phone, but he was in Plainview for a surprise visit a few days later. Eric was at my side every second for a week and, even as I snapped at him to quit breathing down my neck, I loved having him at home again.
Everything considered, they all took the news of my illness as well as possible. Even as I grew sicker, proving to everyone, and ultimately to myself, that I wasn’t going to be that rare patient who sailed through chemotherapy without so much as a tummy ache, my people propped me up. I think it made everybody feel more optimistic about my chances for recovery to see that I was determined to charge through my disease just like I charged through everything else in life. My friends and family found few things more comforting than the sight of me with my fists up and ready for battle.
Chapter 15
A month before Little Earl’s eighteenth birthday, a cute girl at school told him that he looked like Martin Luther King. Then she let him put his hand under her blouse in the name of Negro solidarity. That led Little Earl to celebrate his birthday that November with a costume party so he could dress up as Dr. King in hopes of encountering more young women who were passionately devoted to the civil rights movement.
Clarice, Odette, and Barbara Jean made plans to dress up as the Supremes since their friends, families, and even some of the teachers at school were now calling them by that name. They spent weeks working on their costumes. Odette did most of the sewing, stitching together glossy, gold, sleeveless gowns. They used hot glue to attach glitter to old shoes. And Barbara Jean’s boss at the salon loaned them three acrylic wigs with identical bouffants for the occasion.
On the night of the party, the plan was that they would each get dressed at home. Clarice had been given a used Buick after a third piano lesson with Mrs. Olavsky was