“Who has a baby at forty? And who mates with a loser who dies drunk and stoned in a car when his child is only three and leaves behind a mountain of online gambling debt?” In that moment in the porch, it was as though I was hearing Ruth describe someone I didn’t know, an obtuse woman who was blind to the reality of her life.

I wish I could leap out of this chair and run away and leave myself behind. But my arms and legs are numb. I can hardly move them.

A door opens. Footsteps. I wish for it to be Athena but it isn’t.

“Do you mind if he sits in?” Clara says.

It’s so cold. I open my eyes and all I can see is a bright light. I hardly slept last night. Maybe exhaustion is making time slow down. Making the past flash before my eyes.

“Do I mind if who sits in?”

My voice breaks. It’s not tears. It’s the blood in my head. I wiggle but my right breast is clamped into the machine. It is a preposterous position. My johnny gown keeps falling away and Clara tucks my ass back in. They’re trying to find the right position to crush my tit, to scan it, so they can find the spot the second mammogram had caught. The abnormality.

But locating the exact spot is proving unusually difficult.

“The medical student. Do you mind if he joins us?” Clara is kind, extra kind. She remembers when I took her family portrait. Clara thinks I’m about to cry. I might cry. I’d wanted it so badly to be Athena who walked into the room, her low voice reassuring me it would all be okay. Maybe crying would help me relax. I haven’t decided yet. It’s hard to decide anything in this position.

They know they should have checked with me earlier, not assumed. A man kneels down now. In blue scrubs and wearing thick glasses and a face mask. “I’m a medical student. Ian. Is it okay?” He sounds young.

“The more the merrier.” Spots in my eyes now. I might pass out.

Ian-the-medical-student laughs. “I see you have a sense of humour.”

My friend Athena would approve of Ian. Humour is our shield, Athena always says.

“What’s that about a shield?” Ian asks.

At first I don’t know what he’s talking about and then realize I’m so disoriented in this position I’m thinking out loud, quietly speaking Athena’s words of wisdom.

The specialist speaks. When did he come in? “Sorry we have you in this position. It’s a bit hard to get your breast in the right spot, with the suspicious area in the inside corner like it is. And your breast is small. You’re so thin.”

My mistakes hang around my neck, a garland of shame I’m sure everyone in town can see when I walk holding Saul’s hand as we take the path which cuts through the back streets to the library. There goes Crazy Daisy, they probably say. Saul wants to take laneways and alleys. He likes to lead the way. When we moved out of the city, I rented a small house on a dead-end street full of retired people who might not approve but who have enough life behind them to knit some pity in with their judgment. The house was built in the seventies, the landlord told me when he showed it to me. He was a commercial property developer and this was his only residential rental. For a particular kind of tenant, a word-of-mouth tenant, he said. It was his parents’ retirement home. He couldn’t bear to sell it now that they had passed away. He lived in a huge house across the street.