The lump was discovered during a routine mammogram two and a half years earlier. She spent the last normal afternoon of her life on the train, Baltimore to Penn Station, taking tickets and trying not to notice that an elderly passenger had a dog in her pocketbook. Amtrak had a rule against animals riding its trains, but unless someone complained, Cheri didn’t intend to notice. She planned to frown at the lady when they got to Penn, but she didn’t even do that since it was quitting time and she felt cheerful. The Chihuahua’s tiny face was poked all the way out of the bag by then, smugly gazing about.

Before her appointment, she went to the gym, ran and sweated, saunaed, showered, and tried to fluff her hair up a little. She needed a haircut more than a mammogram, but what she really needed more than either was to find her Mastercard, which had better be home on her dresser, because otherwise she had no idea where it was. She walked to the radiology place in her running shoes, going over the past three days, mentally taking her credit card out at various moments—grocery store, dinner at Ollie’s, a weak moment with an L. L. Bean catalog—and putting it back in her wallet. The waiting room was disappointingly full and so she looked at fashion models in a magazine and watched the other patients until she was called.

The X-ray technician was a young woman with cat’s-eye glasses and an unprofessional sense of humor. She wore bright yellow clogs. Here comes the S and M part, she said as the machine closed its jaws. Click, flash; other side. She collected the trays and went off to show the films to the doctor. Be right back, she said as she left the room. And didn’t return.

Cheri sat waiting, searching her mind until she thought she might have located the credit card in the back pocket of her black jeans, which were probably stuffed in the hamper. As the minutes wore on and then on, her hearing became heightened and her hands turned damp and cold. She rubbed them on her paper shirt. There was activity up and down the hall, doors opening and closing, voices leaking out. After twenty-six minutes had passed, she no longer wanted the technician to return. Every time she heard footsteps in the hall she willed them in the other direction. Get lost, get lost, she said under her breath, and they did get lost, until once they didn’t and then the knob turned and the room was filled with the starched air of courteous detachment:

“Doctor wants more films.”