“Because that’s all I think about,” she’ll say. “My body. All my cells. Everything in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is that what life comes down to? Luck?”

I won’t know what to say, so I won’t say anything.

“If I had kids I would just die,” she’ll whisper. “I know you don’t want to hear that because you have one, but if I had one and if I knew I was dying like this, I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I couldn’t take the heartbreak.” She’ll sigh, but now that she’s started she won’t be able to stop talking. “Parents get sick and die all the time. How do they stand it? Knowing they’re leaving too soon and not being able to fix it?” There’ll be a long pause and then the words that come next will be thin and full of air. “As it is, I can hardly bear the idea of leaving Lucy.” Her little corgi, her constant companion.

“Lucy will be fine.”

“But what will happen when I’m gone? Who will take her when I’m gone?” She’ll cry then, and the sound of it will be so crushing that I’ll wish I could throw the phone across the room to make it stop. It’s excruciating to watch someone disappear, slowly at first, and then quickly. Having done it twice, I can’t fathom having to do it again.

“I will,” I’ll say. “I’ll take her.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Of course I will.”

“But how could you handle another dog? You can’t wear two slings.”

“Maybe by then I’ll be better,” I say, thinking of a day in the future that neither of us believes will actually come, “and I won’t be wearing any slings.”

Part Two

Cabin Fever

Host Family

In the kitchen, with the autumn sun going down fast and a sharp chill in the air, since like all self-respecting long-suffering New Englanders we refuse to turn the heat on until well into October, Gary and I make dinner. I’ve been tempted over the years to try one of those meal-box delivery services, to spare us the hassle of figuring out what to cook and then doing all the shopping and chopping—and mostly to collect those colorful laminated recipe cards that, according to all the social media ads and posts, you get to keep—but Gary won’t do it. He feels sorry for people who get those boxes, like the young couple next door, a doctor and a professor, who, in my opinion, are legitimately too busy to shop and chop. He’s embarrassed for them and their infantilized style of noncooking, and he hates that he knows something so intimate about them—that every week they open a big box with wonder and excitement and play at cooking like oversize children. He wishes he could unsee it on their stoop every week, full of tiny wasteful little plastic baggies of ingredients they should already have—one garlic clove, a teaspoon of cumin, two wedges of lemon—that they will use to re-create the meal pictured on the laminated card.