The first words out of Peggy’s mouth when I climb in the car that sputters up into the greasy mall parking lot are, “Didja hear about Chrissy Parsons? Found her this morning with an overdose, barely breathing. And guess where she was?”

I don’t have to guess.

“Front steps of your little boyfriend’s dope shack,” Peggy says, rubbing salt gossip into invisible wounds.

“He’s not my boyfriend.” I cocoon myself up in the faded floral of the cigarette-and-baloney scented comforter she brought.

“Good thing.” Peggy nods stoically. “Because Shirl heard that Chrissy Parsons is having a baby for him. Crack baby, by the sounds of it.

“So if he’s not your boyfriend, what is he then?” she needles into my silence.

“Nothing,” I say. And I mean it.

“The other old quiff finally croaked.” Mama beams as she soaks in her morning ritual of scanning the obits and sipping her G & Tea. “Good riddance, Rosalind Spenser.”

I pretend that I haven’t already known about Rosalind Spenser’s death for days, just like I pretend that I never went to see Sarah Spenser. I’m less adept at pretending that I’m not sicker and weaker, going downhill fast. I throw up fifteen times a day. I sleep ten hours at night and take three or four long naps in between barfing fits. Exhaustion is woven into every fibre of my being. My headache is dull and constant, and only abates when it is supplanted by full-fledged explosions of intense agony. The novelty and amusement of the pseudo-psychedelic vision has thoroughly worn off, too. So now I pretend I don’t see it.

Dr. Divyaratna calls it all “the expected trajectory of the illness.” A sign the tumours are probably growing, because there is no real hope of getting better. Every time I see her and tell her what’s happening, her pretty face stirs and crinkles with consternation as her black pen rips out a manic scrawl of notes. Due to the devious positioning of Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, and Fuzzy Wuzzy, she lists a whole host of new symptoms I can look forward to. More “sensory abnormalities”: mood swings, personality changes, distortions of memory, cognitive gaps, confabulations. She recommends giving some new meds a whirl and starting an aggressive treatment protocol as soon as possible, which would probably give me a few more months of living, during which I’d still look and feel like death. I ask her about quality of life versus quantity of life. I ask her what she would do if she were me. She says she doesn’t know. There are no easy answers. Just hard choices.

“Stop bein’ such a sook and help me get the tree off the roof,” Mama orders, letting the trailer door slam shut behind her as she tromps out into the crusty white wasteland of our yard.