I still can’t believe that Glenn’s breast cancer—which was diagnosed right after my third book, and second dud, Why Don’t You Like Me Anymore? came out—returned a year and a half ago with such a vengeance, to her bones and her liver, the way she always feared it would. Before that, her nonstop cancer-talk annoyed me, as if illness was her identity and she couldn’t let it go; she’d been healthy for over five years, and it seemed ridiculous to keep worrying about recurrence. She. Was. Fine. She should get over it already. I’m embarrassed to say that I actually thought that. Then came the news that changed everything: it was back, and it was bad. I’d just lost both my parents and Teddy both his grandparents: How would we all survive this now?

Glenn was told she might have three years, or ten years. But only a year of chemo and radiation and two clinical trials later her cells are dividing and redividing faster than ever. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, which I hate to be—I much prefer the fog of dissociation and denial—she looks worse today than she did two weeks ago. I’m worried that she’s on a downward trajectory that can’t be stopped.

“Shit. Now I’ve traumatized you, too,” she says. “I shouldn’t have used the d-word, but everyone’s dying. We’re all dying. All the time. You know that more than almost anyone else.”

I nod, and suddenly we’re both crying—then laughing, then wiping our noses and eyes and sipping from our drinks, which don’t even taste good anymore.

“Please,” Glenn whispers, trying to sit up straight and wincing, though to anyone watching it would have looked like she was just recovering from the kind of breathlessness that comes from laughing too hard at some great girl talk. “Distract me. I don’t want to think.”

I tell her about Mr. Noah and his new man bun and his bib; about how tall Teddy is getting and how every day I miss him even though he’s still right here, sort of; about Gary and I leaving our most recent couples therapy appointment early; about being behind in tuition and about wondering what will become of us if I can’t find a better paying job than Well/er or if I can’t ever write another book. And then I tell her about my disastrous school presentation, how it was interrupted before it even began, and how the school is bringing in People Puppets from Vermont for Inhabitancy this year.

“People Puppets?” Suddenly she’s paying attention.

I describe the photo Mr. Noah showed of adults wearing animal costumes, taken outside, on a farm, near bales of hay. “The school is looking for host families,” I explain. “They’ll even give you a credit toward tuition if you host them.”

She is sitting up now. “Host them.”

“Are you kidding? You know that Gary is phobic about anything in costume, and Teddy would die: at his age, all he wants to be is invisible. The last thing he’d want is a bunch of weird people living in our house.” I can’t help remembering the younger version of Teddy, who would have begged me to let them come and stay, how he loved anything and everything that involved filling our house with friends, with voices and energy, with life.