When Moonie called to tell me Mary Lou had cancer, she just said, “Mary Lou called me and said ‘The doctor told me I’ve got cancer in my breast.’” Just as plain as that. Moonie said that Mary Lou didn’t seem that worried about it. She said she’d had a lump for two years and tried to make it go away by practicing Christian Science. When Monk found out about it he took her to the doctor and they took off the breast. Monk was pretty upset. He could count on Mary Lou. Mary Lou and the kids were all he lived for. They took off the breast and Mary Lou went home. She used to tell me, “I haven’t got cancer anymore. I can just tell.” But it went to her lungs. They had to put her in the hospital on oxygen, but she finally suffocated. I hope I don’t die that way, and with diabetes I probably won’t. Diabetes gives you a heart attack; Chunky said it feels like a truck driving on your chest. Real bad pain, but it’s over in ten or fifteen minutes. Ain’t that swell, the way we have to live and die and suffer on this earth?

It was a relief to see Mary Lou’s suffering end, but still, after the death, Monk was left with a hole in his life. He didn’t want another woman, although Pug and Barney tried to tell him that it would be a good idea. Then his dog died and Monk went through a drinking spell. Nobody wanted to be around him. That’s how the family is about drinking—down on it. Ma drilled that into us pretty good.

Then Tootie comes home from Africa in her nun clothes. She isn’t pretty no more, she’s almost fifty years old. Her face is pinched and white, though you’d think it would have been tan—as black as the ace. It’s a hard life over there in Africa, with bad food and constant work, she says. “The futility of it all,” she says. “Such…futility.” She talked like the world was coming to an end, and that wasn’t like Tootie, even with her headaches. Futility, I had to look the word up in a dictionary. It means hopeless.

The Catholic Church gave Tootie a leave, and so she gets Monk straight off the booze and puts me on insulin shots. She didn’t come home for Ma’s funeral or for Ida’s funeral after Ida died of kidney failure, but aside from Pa, Mary Lou was her closest friend and she flew home on a jet plane.