He almost wept when he said they had passed away.

The back room facing the huge lawn and garden had been his father’s study. There was a woodstove. He would leave it in for me.

Athena had recommended me. Her uncle is friends with my landlord and her recommendation was all it took. It was hard to explain my unusual work of freelance photography, art shows, and workshops. You do what you can to make a living when you have a fine arts degree.

The landlord already knew I worked for the hospital part-time. I didn’t tell him it wasn’t actually a job; it was just a grant the hospital kept getting renewed every year, for me to take portraits of mothers and their babies. He said it was noble work.

The 1970s house has not been renovated since it was built, except that my landlord replaced the windows and ripped out the orange shag carpet. But it has the original appliances and the original tile and fixtures in the bathroom. It may be a bit shabby now, dated, but no expense was spared when it was custom built, made for easy living. You lose sense of time when you walk into the porch. The world falls away. Life is gentler. The past is framed with blurry nostalgia.

Nostalgia feels like a distant luxury to me, though, suspended here in the terror of the present and what this test might reveal. It’s been so hard living as a single parent, having this little child who depends on me and me alone ever since his father died. Little Saul’s artist mother, living hand to mouth, trying to pay the bills and keep at her art, looking after her parents, keeping Ruthie at arm’s length. I suddenly realize how terrified I am of dying, how I feel I can’t even die, there are so many people depending on me.

The first mammogram had been in a cold room just down the hall. I stood there while my breast was crushed flat. Any sense of being a sexy woman was squashed along with it. They don’t tell you ahead of time what breastfeeding does to your breasts, how they dangle and seem deflated, empty sacks, the result of two years of nursing. They said breastfeeding helped reduce the risk of cancer. I thought it was insurance.

The technician and the nurse said it could very well be calcium deposits. Or scar tissue. Maybe I had banged my breast at some point in my life. The dots in the mammogram reading were like salt and pepper flecks. These weren’t as concerning, they weren’t as dense. That was reassuring. We’d do another scan and hopefully it would show nothing.

After the second abnormal results, my family doctor called me to set up the core biopsy. “It could be nothing,” she said, her face noncommittal. “The core biopsy will tell us. Remember, breast cancer is a treatable disease most of the time.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “Try to relax. Keeping doing yoga.”