How had she done it, raised these two exotic wild-haired daughters? They were back in Iowa City temporarily, crowding their personalities into her little house, blearily eating bowls of cereal each morning before raking the leaves into bright piles or spading the flower beds. The rest of the time they lounged on the front porch where they kept their packs of cigarettes, smoking and having long murmured squabbles, going from flannel shirts to tank tops and back to flannel shirts again as the fall afternoons waxed and waned. Every evening one of them would ease out of the house and clunk away in motorcycle boots and vivid lipstick, down the street and into the neighborhood tavern. They mostly took turns, one of them swigging beers, shooting pool, and punching up embarrassing, elderly jukebox songs, the other at home sprawled in front of the television, pale as a widow, drinking cups of fragrant tea and eating malted milk balls by the handful.

Tonight it’s Sarah standing silent against the door frame, staring intently at the floor, hands gripping elbows, listening to her mother breathe. Cheri feels the stirrings of a cough deep inside her lungs. It’s the monster locked in the basement, and eventually it will storm up the stairs and burst forth, attacking her in her own home, swinging a mallet at her chest over and over. Once she can breathe again, she makes a joke out of it: I’m Buddy Hackett, I’m Gene Hackman. Nobody even pretends to laugh at this anymore; they’re too tired.

“I thought you were sleeping,” Sarah says. “The phone was for you.”

Cheri nudges a cat away from her hip, making room, and Sarah climbs in bed beside her. It’s a slumber party minus the fun. She was awake; she could have taken the call.

“He said you should rest,” Sarah answers.

Who said?

Besides terminal and cancer, there are no more final-sounding words in the English language than these. Jack Kevorkian. That’s who.

And then, despite themselves, they are starstruck for a moment at the idea of this spry ghoul from the evening news picking up his phone in Michigan and dialing Cheri’s little house in Iowa, with its polished floors and eccentric armchairs. Backlit from the hallway, the cats’ ears are almost transparent, like parchment lampshades. They watch the humans in their giddiness, faces sharp and impassive.

They’ll be wide-awake alive and I’ll be dead, Cheri thinks suddenly. Not just the cats, but everyone. Sarah, Katy, her best friends, Linda and Wayne. Linda and Wayne’s children, the lady at the pharmacy who calls her Churry instead of Cheri, the man covered in dirt and desperation who sometimes slept on her stoop back in Brooklyn. Her first husband, her second husband, her own mother, all those medical professionals.

His nickname is Dr. Death, and yet when it’s over, he’ll still be alive.