And that’s how everything changed, not with the pronouncement, even, but with a woman’s disengaged expression. The room was engulfed in a tinny silence as she worked, arranging Cheri like a mannequin, folding her against the stainless steel, placing an arm up here, a breast in there, sending her home. Once, a long time later, when Cheri’s life was passing in front of her eyes, she caught a glimpse of it again—saw the bright yellow cartoon feet of the technician and then saw her own naked left arm, in slow, muted motion, rising obediently to embrace the machine.

The lump was a dreamy smear on the X-ray, barely there, unfeelable except in her throat when she tried to talk. She spoke to Linda late at night, each of them standing in a dark kitchen, one in Brooklyn and one in Iowa City. Lump, lumpectomy, chemo, Cheri said. Yes, Linda said, that’s what they do. A silence in which both of them wished they were seven-year-old hellions again instead of what they were—a train conductor and a nurse; mothers; women who wore uniforms and looked sexy in them. Best friends since age five. It seems to be happening to both of them, although it isn’t. For the duration of the phone call, they manage to remain calm.

And the illness proceeds on its trajectory, a knife, a scar, a plant-filled atrium where people sit in cubicles getting their treatments. One of the things she learns is how to vomit into a curved plastic trough while lying flat on her back. After six months another pale lump is photographed, no bigger but resolute, like a schoolyard bully who comes back even after getting a terrible pummeling. Linda waits for the phone call and when it comes she sits down. Lump, mastectomy, more chemo, Cheri says. Okay, Linda says, and she covers her face with one hand.

This time there’s a tray of knives; she sees them right before the anesthesia erases her. When she awakens, her breast is gone, melted into a long weeping wound across her chest. The first time she sees it, she feels a strange numbness, a smooth blank where her shock should be. A day later the mortification is so profound and clamorous that she has to disconnect, like hanging up the receiver when someone is shouting into your ear. Her daughters fold gauze and tear tape and change her bandages without flinching. They seem larger to her in her new whittled-down state, like giantesses come to bathe and swaddle her. I’m okay, she says forty times a day, until she comes to believe it, and then they relax. Katy returns to school and Sarah finds a job down the street at a Starbucks instead of going back like she planned. They decided it between themselves, keeping Cheri in the dark, under the looming purple shadow of follow-up chemo.