“How bad?”
“Bad,” Dr. Stamos says, then hastens to add, “but not hopeless.”
“Don’t skate around it, just tell me.”
“It’s pancreatic cancer, and I’m afraid we caught it . . . well . . . rather late in the game. Your liver is involved.”
Hodges finds himself fighting a strong and dismaying urge to laugh. No, more than laugh, to just throw back his head and yodel like Heidi’s fucking grandfather. He thinks it was Stamos saying bad but not hopeless. It makes him remember an old joke. Doctor tells his patient there’s good news and bad news; which does the patient want first? Hit me with the bad news, says the patient. Well, says the doctor, you have an inoperable brain tumor. The patient starts to blubber and asks what the good news can possibly be after learning a thing like that. The doctor leans forward, smiling confidentially, and says, I’m fucking my receptionist, and she’s gorgeous.
“I’ll want you to see a gastroenterologist immediately. I’m talking today. The best one in this part of the country is Henry Yip, at Kiner. He’ll refer you to a good oncologist. I’m thinking that guy will want to start you on chemo and radiation. These can be difficult for the patient, debilitating, but are far less arduous than even five years ago—”
“Stop,” Hodges says. The urge to laugh has thankfully passed.
Stamos stops, looking at him in a brilliant shaft of January sun. Hodges thinks, Barring a miracle, this is the last January I’m ever going to see. Wow.
“What are the chances? Don’t sugarcoat it. There’s something hanging fire in my life right now, might be something big, so I need to know.”
Stamos sighs. “Very slim, I’m afraid. Pancreatic cancer is just so goddamned stealthy.”
“How long?”
“With treatment? Possibly a year. Even two. And a remission is not entirely out of the ques—”
“I need to think about this,” Hodges says.
“I’ve heard that many times after I’ve had the unpleasant task of giving this kind of diagnosis, and I always tell my patients what I’m now going to tell you, Bill. If you were standing on top of a burning building and a helicopter appeared and dropped a rope ladder, would you say you needed to think about it before climbing up?”
Hodges mulls that over, and the urge to laugh returns. He’s able to restrain it, but not a smile. It’s broad and charming. “I might,” he says, “if the helicopter in question only had two gallons of gas left in the tank.”
22
When Ruth Scapelli was twenty-three, before she began to grow the hard shell that encased her in later years, she had a short and bumpy affair with a not-exactly-honest man who owned a bowling alley. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter she named Cynthia. This was in Davenport, Iowa, her hometown, where she was working toward her RN at Kaplan University. She was amazed to find herself a mother, more amazed still to realize that Cynthia’s father was a slack-bellied forty-year-old with a tattoo reading LOVE TO LIVE AND LIVE TO LOVE on one hairy arm. If he had offered to marry her (he didn’t), she would have declined with an inward shudder. Her aunt Wanda helped her raise the child.