Kate, I’d like for you to have my silver chain necklace, ruby ring (which Gramma has), camera and accessories, rocking chair, bike, round mirror, word processor, stereo and political books and pottery from Mexico.

By early November her yard is done. If there were going to be a next year, she would have moved some of the plantings—the peonies closer to the house, the little yew farther away. But it’s set for now, everything mulched, her tools cleaned and stored in the basement. By the time she has her household in order, the exhaustion has become so acute it feels like sandbags are hanging from her limbs; sometimes just pushing the hair back from her face takes more energy than she can summon.

The lady who lived here before died. The body devolves into compost, but we live on in our parakeets. She dreams of them, fluorescent feathers glimpsed through dark foliage. Her naps have become restless, sweaty affairs, the pain now unceasing, surrounding her and fading, like the Doppler wail of an air-raid siren. She half imagines it will get better, like a fractured bone or the stomach flu, but of course it can only get worse. Worse than this!

She has Thanksgiving with Linda, Wayne, their family, and her daughters. They linger at the table for a long time, telling stories and drinking coffee, Cheri so exhausted by the effort of sitting upright that she mostly listens, watching their familiar faces in the warm light, attuned to the murmur of daughters in the kitchen, the comforting sound of water running. By the time she leaves—supported on either side by her girls, Linda following behind with leftovers to stow in the trunk—Cheri is so depleted that she can’t keep the perilous thoughts at bay. She’s nauseated with envy and rage, the unfairness of it all.

And of course, nobody truly understands, but she can’t see how it would matter if they did. The sandbags, the diminished lung capacity, the clangorous pain. It’s all so intensely personal and claustrophobic, the heightening present mixed up with the banal past—this morning she nearly swooned from the vertiginous sight of her old maple dresser rising and falling, a pistoning bedpost, and the striped-shirted body of her brother Sean flinging himself up and down as they jumped on her bed. And last night she only catnapped, moving from bed to armchair and back to bed, dreaming random images of turkey farms, of rickrack on the neckline of a blouse, of the Beatles walking single file across a road. Once, right before dawn, she looked down in her dream and saw phosphorescent insects alight on her hands and arms.

I can’t make it to Christmas, she tells them. I thought I could but I can’t.

The news is devastating; she supposes it’s possible none of them really believed it before now. The girls collapse against her and then grow strangely calm, wandering shell-shocked through the house, speaking to each other in thin echoing voices. Linda flinches when she’s told, then breaks into tears, hands over her face.