“Now talk,” Becky says, as we seat ourselves at our usual table in the back room.
“What?” I ask, knowing full well my coy act isn’t going to work on her.
“Something is clearly going on with you. Is it your parents? It can’t be you and Tommy—that man is crazy about you, all those love notes . . .”
I reach into my pocket for the note I found tucked inside the visor of my car this morning. I unfold it and hand it over to Becky.
“I love you more today than yesterday, and I’ll love you more tomorrow than today,” Becky reads out loud. “Where does he come up with this stuff?”
“Google.” I smile before I can stop myself.
“You’re kidding?”
“It started as a joke. He said it was too hard to compete with a copywriter, so he started to Google love notes and quotes and song lyrics.”
“All these years, you had me thinking he was a closet poet.”
Adina, one of our usual waitresses, comes over with two beers—a Guinness for Becky and an Allagash White for me. “On the house,” she says. “Moe’s treat.”
Becky thanks her, then lifts her beer toward mine. We clink glasses, but I set mine down without taking a sip.
“Shit, you’re not pregnant, are you?”
“What? No, it’s not that.” I take a big sip to prove I’m not lying.
“And CeCe’s not pregnant?”
“Oh god, no.”
“Then what’s got you so down, lovey?” Becky says. She reaches across the table and puts her hand on top of mine. “I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“You can’t help,” I tell her. “No one can.”
“I can try?”
I pull my hand from under hers and take a long sip of my beer. It feels good going down, so I take another. “Tommy’s sick.” I briefly make eye contact before looking back down at my glass. “Sick-sick.”
“But he’s going to be okay?”
I lift the glass to take another sip, but my hand is shaking so hard the beer spills down my chin. Suddenly, Becky is on my side of the table, folding me into a hug. As much as I want to find comfort in her arms and let her tell me everything is going to be okay, I know it isn’t and it won’t be. I stiffen like a statue, turned to stone in her awkward embrace.
“You guys ready for another?” Adina asks, rounding the corner. She retreats without waiting for an answer.
“So, what is it?” Becky asks, her arms still around me.
“Lung cancer.” She pulls back, studying my face. “It’s bad. We got a second opinion that confirms it.”
Monday morning we sat in a waiting room for almost two hours to get less than ten minutes with the oncologist. I shivered as soon as we walked into his office, and not just because the AC was blasting. There was something about the stark white walls and the hard vinyl chairs that made it all feel hopeless. I sat there, afraid to move as the doctor shuffled the thick stack of papers in Tommy’s file, barely making eye contact. As if our grief were contagious.
“Shit. Is he going to do chemo?”
I shake my head.
“Radiation?”
When I don’t respond, Becky asks, “Then what? Something experimental?”
I shake my head again, remembering how angry Tommy got on the way home when I brought up a clinical trial I’d found online. He shut me down before the words were out of my mouth, and I lost it, screaming at him for giving up so easily, for not telling me sooner, for making me live in a world without him for even a minute longer than I had to. I yelled until my throat was raw, but Tommy just kept driving, looking straight ahead until he pulled into the driveway.
He turned the car off and looked at me with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. He looked so hurt and alone that I wanted to take it all back even though I still meant every word.
“Babe?” Becky asks, bringing me back to the moment.
“He’s not fighting it.”
“What do you mean, he isn’t going to fight?”
I look up to see her eyes shimmering with tears. “He says he’s choosing quality of life over quantity. They gave him a bunch of prescriptions for comfort care—things that will make him feel better, but nothing that’ll cure him.”
“He isn’t even going to try?” Becky’s voice wavers and the heavy stone is back in the pit of my stomach. I take a deep breath, and when that doesn’t help me feel