I feel stronger this morning, well enough to ask Koji to take me to Onekahakaha Beach, where we all met so many years ago. He looks at me as if I’m joking, but I keep my eyes on his until he knows I’m serious. “Time is short,” I say. The cancer has spread to my bones, yeah, and I’ve been a prisoner of this bed so I won’t break my brittle limbs. I think back to a time I couldn’t stop moving, and now I’m fragile as a teacup. I slowly push myself up from the bed to show him just how serious I am. Tomorrow the pain may be back full force, or the sorrow, or the anger of being cheated out of precious time with the people and the life I love. There’s no time to waste.

“Let’s wait for Daniel,” he says, hesitating. “He just went to pick up a few groceries, should be home any time now, yeah.”

Daniel is home from Chicago looking thin and tired, ever the serious young doctor who carries the burden of not being able to save his own mother. “All the years of medical school,” he says, “and there’s nothing . . .” His voice caught as he talked quietly to Koji in the living room last night, or was it the night before? What they don’t realize is that while my body betrays me, my other senses seem heightened. I can hear their whispers as if they’re in the room with me. “You did save me a long time ago when your father left,” I whispered back. “What would I have done without you?”

“No, we’re not waiting!” I say, too sharply. Doesn’t he know there’s no time to wait? Then I say softly, “Just you and me, yeah.”

Koji looks at me for a long moment, then nods. “Stay right here,” he says. “Don’t move, eh, I’ll be right back.”

I throw the sheet back and wait.

When Koji returns I’m sitting up. “Anxious, yeah,” he teases. He carefully wraps a robe around me before lifting me with ease into his arms as if I were a child, cradling me gently. I lean against him. I’ve always leaned on him.

Koji carries me outside. It’s warm and hazy and I breathe in the daylight as he carefully lifts me into the truck, the front seat a soft nest of pillows and blankets. Sitting up in the truck, I study my house from the outside. It looks as disheveled as I feel, the long grass, the overgrown shrubs, my grandfather’s mango tree gloriously full of hard, green mangoes, which delivers another sobering blow: by the time they’re ripe I’ll be gone.

“The mangoes,” I say, and a wave of grief fills me.

“Don’t worry,” Koji says as he settles into the driver’s seat.