Only my parents, Kate and Amanda, and I are left. My mother all but hurried the guests out the door, plates of food pressed into their hands, shortly after my marriage announcement. She knew something was up, and it was confirmed when I started crying and seemed unable to stop. I sat at the dining table with the tears streaming into my nose, my mouth, and my hair, until I was a sodden, damp mess that gaped like a goldfish every time one of them asked me what was wrong, incapable of words.

In the end my mother poured neat whiskey down my throat and that stopped the tears, at least long enough for me to tell them.

My father hasn’t said anything since, not a word. He is staring at the wall as if he can see through it, to some other place, another dimension, one where his only daughter hasn’t just told him he’ll be burying her before the year is out.

Kate and Amanda are crying. Quietly, unobtrusively, low sniffles and pained breathing. My mother gave them glasses of whiskey for the shock too. Amanda is already on her third measure; her coping mechanism anytime she has bad news is to get completely shitfaced. I feel like joining her. Anything that will help numb the sense of impending doom I feel, and the guilt that threatens to choke me for putting my parents through this.

My mother isn’t taking the news lying down. Even though I have told her everything the doctor told me, she is insistent I must be wrong. That I’ve misheard something, that in my shock I missed out on a vital piece of the conversation. She is angry that I went without her, as if her presence today would have changed the very outcome of the meeting.

I shake my head. “No. I didn’t ask.”

“Right. We’ll go see him again tomorrow, together. You’re in too much shock to ask the questions that need to be asked.”

I take another gulp of whiskey. “Fine.”

“We’re not giving in to this,” my mother warns me. “You have to fight, just like last time.”

The thought of going through all that again is unbearable. But what choice do I have? I nod.

My dad stirs for the first time and looks at me. “Should you be drinking? In your condition?”

“She’s not bloody pregnant,” Mum snaps, and he bows his head.

I put a hand on his arm. “It’s OK, Dad, it can’t get any worse than it already is.”

He nods and pats my hand. His face has gone that pale yellow color of the first spring daffodils, only on skin it isn’t anywhere near as pretty.

Chapter Five

How long does she have?”

Dr. Harrison gives my mother a look I’m sure he’s cultivated especially for mothers like her.

She’d bustled into his office today determined to change his mind, like my terminal diagnosis was just some half-cocked idea he’d come up with on his own.