On nights when John and I can get a sitter we often gather in Tita and Drew’s writing shed in their backyard with a playmate of ice and some handles of liquor and a party sampler of Pepperidge Farm cookies and John deejays us through eighties and nineties dance grooves on his cell phone and we pretend we are childless. Tita and Drew have their kids asleep in the house on the baby monitor.
Both of them are writing professors, and this semester Drew is teaching a class of freshmen who he swears hate him.
“I lose them a little more every time I open my mouth,” he tells us. “I told them that before they could be writers they had to go out and get their hearts broken a little bit. They looked back at me with what I can only call disgust and pity.”
“We are disgusting and pitiful,” I say. “And broken. We are so broken we count as the adults now.”
John, who hates to dance, pulls me to my feet when “Take My Breath Away,” starts playing and sways me in his arms. Tita and Drew do the same. We are laughing. We are tired. We are drunk.
“Take me to bed or lose me forever,” says John. My back aches, my chest hurts, and the old chemo nausea is rising in my chest. “Show me the way home,” I say.