The best way to tell the girls about Theia’s cancer, they decided, was to take them someplace they liked, to spend one special family day together, before Theia broke the difficult news. They signed the girls out of school on a Tuesday, the day before Theia’s surgery, and drove to Rock Springs for a spree at the mall.
As they traveled the countryside, leaves rattled across the road in front of the car. Fields of ripe barley rippled in the breeze. A herd of antelope grazed beside the roadside. Combines waited to harvest, parked atop the rolling hills like guards against the sky.
After an hour or so, the farmland gave way to subdivisions. Traffic began to pass them at speeds that made Theia dizzy. “Can we go to the pet store first?” Heidi glanced up from the game of hangman she and Kate were playing in the backseat.
“I want the music store first.” Kate drew an arm on Heidi’s hanging body.
Joe readjusted the rearview mirror so he could see the girls. “Guess you two are going to have to take turns.”
Once they’d gotten to Grand Teton Mall, the girls were anxious to go their own ways. “Please. I’ll meet you at the pet store in fifteen minutes,” Kate pleaded. “All I want to do is look at the new releases.”
Heidi pulled them in the opposite direction. “There’s ferrets in the window. They’re so cute. Can we go in and look at them?”
“We aren’t getting a ferret, Heidi.”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I can’t hold one.” She disappeared into Pet City.
So much for their family togetherness, Theia thought. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done it this way, Joe. Maybe we’ve ruined one of their favorite things for them. Every time they come shopping from now on, they’ll remember today.”
“There isn’t any ‘best way’ to do this.” Joe wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Any way we do it, it’s going to be awful.”
After everyone had spent time in the shops of their choice, they ate lunch at Garcia’s. The four of them piled into a half-moon booth with paper flowers in jugs behind them and a bright piñata dangling overhead. The waitress served a basket of chips, bowls of salsa, and brought them each a Dr. Pepper.
Joe took Theia’s hand and started. “We brought you here because your mother and I needed a good place to talk to you.”
Chips paused in midair. “What?”
Theia had practiced the words many times, but her voice froze now. What do I say? How do I tell them? She forced the words from her mouth. “I’m going into the hospital tomorrow for surgery.”
Kate dipped her chip and munched it with feigned nonchalance. “What kind of surgery?”
“I won’t be in there very long. Just two or three days if everything goes well.”
Heidi peeled the paper meticulously off her straw and left it lying beside her glass. “Can we come visit you?”
“I’d like that very much. And after I get home, I’ll need to take treatments. I’ll need you both to help me before this is all over.”
“Treatments for what, Mom?” Kate laid the chips on her plate and stared at her mother. “What do you have?”
Theia glanced at Joe, willing strength into all of them. “I have breast cancer.”
Silence engulfed the table. The waitress came and placed steaming hot plates in front of them. No one ate. No one said a word. Until Heidi said what they were all thinking, with a hint of a cry in her voice. “But some people die from breast cancer.”
“Yes, I know that. But others don’t.”
“You’re not going to die, are you?”
“I don’t know, Heidi.”
How could she attempt to reassure them when she had no idea what lay ahead?
“Well, I know what’s going to happen,” Heidi said with sudden aplomb. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. It can’t. Jesus heals people who are sick.”
“Sometimes.”
“When they believe enough, He does. It happened to everybody in the Bible.”
“We just have to trust that He’s doing this because it works for our good.”
How can something like this work for good? They’re my daughters. They need me.
Lip service, all of it. When it came to trusting God right now, Theia knew that neither she nor Joe stood a chance. Ever since her diagnosis, she’d awakened every night, doubts assailing her, loneliness cutting into her, fear calling out to her from the dark corners of her bedroom.
A Scripture came to her from out of nowhere: “He who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”
I don’t want to doubt, Father. I don’t want to be double-minded. But I can’t be something that I’m not.
They didn’t discuss cancer again during the meal. The waitress came to check on them. “Is your food okay?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” Theia said.
What began as a festive occasion had degenerated to a hushed clanking of forks. The waitress came back and took their plates away, still half full.
Kate didn’t often allow her little sister to hang out in her room. “Private Property of Kate McKinnis,” read a sign that she’d made in art class and hung on the door. “Do not knock. Do not enter.”
Heidi knocked.
“Come in.”
Heidi opened the door and stood still for a moment, not sure how she should behave being allowed into such a hallowed place.
“I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”
“I told Mom that, too. I want to be at the hospital.”
“You worried?”
“Sort of. Yeah, I am. Are you?”
“Yeah.”
Kate opened a desk drawer and began to organize it. Pens. Lip gloss. A seashell she’d brought home from a trip to Olympic National Park. “Do you think Mom’s scared?”
Heidi had to think about that. “No. Moms are never scared about anything.”
“I’ll bet she is.”
“She didn’t act like it.”
“That’s the way mothers are. They act like they’re scared over things when they aren’t. They don’t act like they’re scared when they are.”
“When has Mom ever acted like she was scared when she wasn’t?”
“Remember that time on our vacation when Dad put the pinecone in the bed? And Mom started screaming because she thought it was a frog?”
“Oh yeah.”
“She isn’t afraid of frogs. She isn’t afraid of pinecones. So why did she go screaming and jumping around all over the motel room?”
“I don’t know. It was fun.”
“The whole time she was acting scared, she had just as much fun as we were. She did it because she’s a mom. So Dad could laugh and we would have a good time.”
Heidi surveyed her Winnie the Pooh watch that her mom and dad had given her for Christmas. “Do you think we’ll ever know how to do all this stuff? How to laugh? How to know when it’s not right to laugh at all?”
“It’s hard thinking about that, isn’t it? I hope it won’t be as hard as it looks, learning to be somebody’s mom.”
Heidi nodded. And waited. And hoped.
To hug your sister when you’re a teenager is a disreputable thing. So Kate maneuvered Heidi into a playful headlock instead. She knuckle-rubbed her sister’s head before they fell, giggling and tussling, on the carpet. In the end, Heidi had to beg to be let go.
Theia entered the hospital through the wide panel of glass doors at the same time a young mother was being wheeled out, her arms full of balloons and teddy bears and new baby. Once she’d gotten to the surgery center, she folded her clothes into the white plastic bag printed with bold blue letters. “Property of __________.”
Did anyone ever take the time to actually write their names on those things?
Theia donned a threadbare gown, thick socks, and a green paper cap. The girls and Joe, their arms already full of presents, waved goodbye. The orderly pushing the gurney took Theia down one hall, up another, through double doors. The last thing she remembered was bright light.
When she woke up, she felt as if hours had passed. Voices surrounded her, voices she didn’t know. “There we go. We’ve got her. That’s good.”
A blood pressure cuff tightened, released, tightened, released on her arm. Theia wanted it off. If she could scratch around and find it, she’d throw the thing across the room.
She needed to wake up and she knew it. The girls and Joe were waiting for her. Heidi would be so tired of sitting around she’d have at least ten get-well cards cut out and glued together by now. And Kate would be wandering the halls, begging another soda off Joe, dealing with this on teenager terms, silently, not talking until things were better, when she didn’t have to show that she was afraid.
Theia didn’t cry until she saw Joe. They’d led him into the recovery room, and here he came, looking handsome, his hands covering hers, the rhythm of the heart monitor beeping overhead, the IV threaded into her arm, oxygen tubes jabbing her nose.
“Hey, Theodore.” How she loved the sound of his voice. “They’re having a hard time bringing you around, I hear.” He held her head and stroked her hair.
There were so many things she wanted to tell him. “Joe—”
“Shhhh. Don’t talk now. Just rest.”
She tried to raise her head; it flopped back of its own accord. “Are the girls tired of waiting for me?”
“The girls are in your room. They’ve got it all set up and ready. Heidi’s got plenty of pictures drawn. And Kate’s watching some game show.”
“Tell them I love them.”
“I will.”
For long moments, she closed her eyes, slipped in and out of consciousness. Her hand, taped and tethered with IV tubes, began roving. She searched for the bandages by feel; when she found them, she touched her bosom.
“Did they have to take all of it? Or did they leave a little bit?”
No matter how woozy the drugs made her, Theia could see the answer in Joe’s eyes. He’d been dreading this moment. Perhaps, like she’d done yesterday, he’d been practicing in his head, over and over again, what he should say.
“They had to take everything, Theia.”
“It’s gone? All of it?”
He nodded. “There was a lymph node involved. Dr. Waterhouse did what he had to do.”
Fresh tears came and rolled down the sides of her face.
“I know, honey. I’m sorry.” He kept stroking her hair. “It’s going to be okay.” They both realized, as he repeated himself for what seemed like the hundredth time, that the words were feeble and empty. “We’re going to get through this.”
“It isn’t fair that my father has to do this twice.”
“It was different with your mother, Theia. Everything has changed so much since then.”
“No, not everything. So many things are still the same.”
A tube led from her underarm, draining fluid into a bottle pinned to her hospital gown. She watched as it filled with peach-colored liquid. Everything ached. It hurt just keeping her eyes open. From behind them, an unnamed nurse began to work. One by one, she disconnected various wires and tubes. “We’re taking you to your room now.” She hooked the IV bag to a rack where it could ride shotgun on the gurney. “They keep delivering flowers and balloons with your name on them. It’s like a birthday down there.”
The girls met them halfway out in the hall. Both of them acted exuberant and happy. “That took forever, Mom.”
“Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Ballinger came by and sat with us for a little while.”
“Everybody from the church is taking food over to the house. Only we told Rhonda Stuart not to make chicken tetrazzini because Dad hates mushrooms.”
“Do you feel better, Mom?”
“No, silly. She feels worse. She just had her operation.”
“Like the game. OPERATION! Did they take out your funny bone, Mom? I always make the buzzer go off.”
The girls think it’s over, don’t they? They think I’m safe.
“No.” Joe knotted his knuckle on Heidi’s head. “I told the doctors to leave your mother’s funny bone in.”
“Very f-funny.”
“Is the cancer gone? Did they get it out, Mom?”
Theia reached for Joe’s hand, but he wasn’t standing close enough for her to grasp onto. “We don’t know, sweetie.”
Harry Harkin plunged his spade deep into the soil, freeing the root-bound English ivy from its terra-cotta confines. He shook the roots free of old dirt, gingerly checking to make certain that the plant didn’t have rot or nematodes, before he settled it with care into the soft new loam of a larger pot.
It always made him feel like praying, fiddling in the dirt. Nothing like repotting plants to make one think about the Father, he thought, humming as he tamped down new soil around the ivy stems. Every so often, a man got root bound. God had to pick him up and shake the soil out of his innards and transplant him to a larger pot.
Usually, he’d been thankful for the transplant.
Sometimes, he hadn’t been.
Harry rattled through his array of tubs and tins that fit together in size like the nesting soldiers he’d once played with as a boy. He glanced up and, through the wavery greenhouse glass in the waning light, saw his son-in-law drive into the driveway and his two granddaughters jump out of the car.
Where had everybody been all day? Place had been way too quiet with the whole brood away.
Harry figured he had the best of both worlds, living in the father-in-law apartment the church elders had added onto the parsonage, being close to the grandkids, having his separate life and his life with his family, as well. More often than not, he knew the entire McKinnis clan’s daily schedules and procedures, but for the past few weeks, everyone had been racing around so fast that he’d lost track. Dance rehearsals. Girl Scout meetings. Swim team competitions.
It was enough to make an old man’s head spin.
Now that he’d finished transplanting the ivy, he moved on to other things. The church bazaar would come faster than he knew it, and everyone expected his annual offering of forced paperwhites, just in time for the holidays. He’d just pulled out a burlap bag full of bulbs, sprouts already burgeoning from beneath oniony skin, when a knock sounded on the greenhouse screen door.
He walked over and opened it, a stack of planters in his hand. “Come in, come in,” he said to Joe. Something in his son-in-law’s face made him wary. “It’s about time we ran into each other somewhere.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I have some difficult news to tell you.”
There had been some discussion among the congregation last year that he ought to root his paperwhites in pebbles and not in dirt. He made his final decision and chose dirt. He turned on the garden spigot and ran water. “Out with it then. No need to drag it out.”
“Theia has breast cancer. She’s had a mastectomy today.”
Harry’s hands faltered as they moved in the soil. “Today?” A pause. “Come help me mix this, Joe. Make yourself useful.”
They stood side by side, old man and younger one, making mud pies. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“You might have told me a little sooner than this. I could have been at the hospital today.” Anger and fear caught like stones in his throat. Anger at Joe for not saying something until now. Fear that Theia might have to walk a path he’d never wanted to travel with anyone again.
“We didn’t want you to be worrying.”
“I wouldn’t have been worrying. I would have been praying.”
“You know why we waited, Dad. It’s because of everything that happened to Edna. Theia thought this would be harder on you than on anybody else.”
Harry said it again, for emphasis. “I would have been praying, not worrying.” But maybe Theia was right. After what had happened to his wife, he ought to be terrified. He turned from Joe and fiddled with the burlap bag, his only means of escape. He handed three bulbs from the sack to Joe, each of them plump and succulent. “You plant these. It’s nice when they’ve got tops on them like this. That way you know which end is up.”
Lord, surely you wouldn’t take two women away from the same old man.
He had to hand it to Joe. His son-in-law looked a whole lot more comfortable standing behind a pulpit than he did planting bulbs into buckets, but Joe was doing as he’d told him, burying the paperwhites deep and then sprinkling them with Harry’s massive watering can. For long moments, they listened together to the glub-glub-glub as moisture sank into the soil, the pleasant sound of something drinking.
You moving me from one pot to a bigger one, Lord? You out to show me something about my roots, that I’ve been sinking them too deep in the wrong places?
It occurred to him that the man who stood beside him had every bit as strong a reason to feel as mad and lost as he did. He turned to Joe. Paying no heed to his dirt-encrusted fingers, he wrapped his arms around the man who, through marriage, had become his son. “You’re working mighty hard to hold back your sorrow, aren’t you, Joe?”
Joe hugged him back, hard. Harry felt Joe’s warm moist breath against his ear. “You’re right. I don’t know what to do now, Dad. I don’t know what to say to people. I don’t know what to believe.”
“I’m here for you, Joe. There’s not much good about me, other than the fact that I’ve already been through this once. Maybe the good Lord can make some use of that.”
Harry hoped so. He truly hoped so. Perhaps some good could come out of this, and not just sorrow.
He’d had enough sorrow to last a lifetime.