When we got the for sure diagnosis on dad, Alice wanted to run right out and have a CAT scan of her brain. She was worried she might have a tumor too. But Pearson said he’d been in business 25 years and this thing didn’t “run in families.” She got all crazy anyway. Maybe somehow she knew what was going to happen to her. Maybe that’s why she was so awful to be around. Maybe that’s why she looked at mom’s forehead one day and said to her, “You only have 6 weeks to live . . . that mole is gonna take over your face.” I hated my sister for that. She always poured over medical journals and disease periodicals. A fat house wife obsessed with obscure sickness—leprosy, elephantiasis, parasites and worms, spirochetes and carbuncles, creatures resulting from Thalidomide. She is the classic hypochondriac who will frantically clutch her chest and holler heart failure after eating four chili dogs with everything. But when that patch of skin wouldn’t go away, when she kept complaining of it, and finally went in to have it checked, I was just horrified at how much of Alice’s nose that friggin’ quack actually took off.