The moon is high in the sky now, looking smaller and less certain. Tiny, long-legged lizards run along the sidewalks. In just a few days she’ll be back home, tending her garden with its sturdy, quintessential-Iowa flowers—morning glories, zinnias, black-eyed Susans, and the tall lavender coneflowers, with their rusty hearts lifted up toward the sun, petals flung backward like arms. You can live. For one prolonged, irrational moment, hope circles the courtyard like a great winged heron, banking slowly over the pool and the lawn chairs, the dark foliage, and then wheeling out into the night. Gone.

Others have lived. She won’t be one of them. She feels it in her bones, quite literally.

The summer that follows is long and luminous. They canoe down the Wapsipinicon River, a rowdy cavalcade of humans and their coolers, and camp along the reedy banks, faces sunburned and firelit, marshmallows melting and blackening on sticks, the green nylon glow of flashlights inside tents. They climb into the car—Linda, Wayne, Cheri and a pan of brownies—and take a road trip, fourteen hours of stupefying knee-high corn and then the mind-blowing Rockies in all their vertical splendor. An outdoor music festival in Telluride—bands they’ve heard of and bands they’ve never heard of, old tie-dyed dudes in stretched-out T-shirts and slender gray ponytails, and the new generation of hippies with radiant, stoned faces, hair dreadlocked into felt. They forgo the brownies and hike a steep mountain trail, Cheri faltering only once, when Wayne tries to haul her up onto a boulder so she can see the vista. It’s her mind, not her body—the vertigo of seeing it all fall away in front of her, leaving nothing but bright air and the strange shadows of clouds far below.

The new house turns out to be hotter than expected, and the snow peas don’t take off the way she thought they would, but who can complain about sun-drenched rooms and vines that produce flowers instead of food? She drives out into the Amish countryside one afternoon, returning with a black bear cub of a puppy that she names Ursa. They take long surreal walks together through the cemetery down the street, the puppy dragging her leash among the tombstones and Cheri ambling behind, reading the inscriptions and doing the math. Forty-six years is a long time if you look at it a certain way. Ursa is her seventh dog.

The glimpses from her past are benign and interesting—the sullen face of a beautiful girl framed in a Dairy Queen window; the chrome-and-tan dashboard of an old Beetle, rearview mirror draped with Mardi Gras beads; a gnarled and mossy live oak standing in the middle of a chicken-scratched, red-dirt yard; and once, amazingly, what had to be her own tiny feet, grasped and lifted into the air in the classic pose of a diaper change. Weird. And she keeps them to herself, these unportentous images, as she does the gradual onset of pain. By September the cancer has divided itself like an emigrating clan, dispersing to her liver, lungs, and spine.