“Oh. No. No, thank you.” I just want to be alone. Can’t you see that?

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m . . . I’ll be fine. I just needed a few minutes to . . .”

To throw up my lunch and splash water on my face and look into the mirror and try to absorb the news that I have cancer and what if I die?

Me . . .

Dead?

It’s unfathomable that her worst fear might actually come to fruition after all these years, but then . . .

Isn’t it everyone’s worst fear?

We’re all mortal, aren’t we?

I wouldn’t be the only person in the world who’s ever lain awake at night, tossing and turning, terrified that I’m going to die, only to have it actually happen.

No. But it becomes second nature to reassure yourself that it’s not going to happen—not really, or at least, not anytime soon. You almost believe you’re safe, that you’ve escaped the inevitable, and then suddenly . . .

“I know it’s difficult to hear news like this,” the doctor is saying, “but the important thing is that we caught it early. We’re going to discuss your treatment options, and there are many. New ones are being developed every day. The bottom line is that the survival rates for a stage one malignancy are . . .”

Treatment options . . .

Survival rates . . .

Stage one . . .

And here she is, right back to malignancy.

Jaw set grimly, she wills herself not to cry, but the tears come anyway.

Part I

Saturday, June 1

Sixty Is the New . . . Oh, Who Am I Kidding? Sixty Is Old!

I can’t recognize a single musician on the cover of Rolling Stone, I can’t remember my user names and passwords if they’re not saved in my laptop or phone, I can’t see a blessed thing without my bifocals, and if they’re not on my head, chances are I have no idea where I left them . . . Still, faced with the prospects of old age and senility—or not sticking around long enough to grow old and senile—I’ll take the prior.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks

Chapter 1

Nightgown on, glasses off . . .

About to climb into her side of the bed she shares with her husband, when he’s not up in Cleveland tending to his elderly mother, Meredith Heywood winces and reaches back to rest a hand against her spine.

The ache is even worse now than it was before she took a hot bath, hoping in vain that it would relax her muscles. An entire Saturday spent working in the yard—followed by a few hours hunched over her laptop, writing about the garden she just planted—had been inarguably good for the soul. But for her middle-aged, cancer-tainted, bones . . . eh, not so much.

“Why don’t you wait until I get home to do the planting?” Hank had asked on the phone this morning when she told him of her plans. He’d always liked to do things with her—and for her. Now, more than ever.

It’s not just her illness; he was laid off from his job as an airline mechanic a few weeks before they got the news that her cancer has spread.

It’s almost been a relief to have him away. When he’s here, he hovers, trying to take care of her.

There was a time when she enjoyed that kind of attention. That was in another lifetime: a younger and thus occasionally emotionally insecure lifetime that was, at the same time, a physically self-sufficient and healthy lifetime.

A lifetime before cancer.

“I can’t wait until you’re back to do the garden,” she told Hank. “It’s getting too late.”

“It’s not even summer yet, Mer.”

Had he really interpreted her statement to mean that it was too late in the season?

Or maybe . . .

Was that really what she’d meant, in a momentary lapse with reality?

Too late . . . too late . . .

Those two words have taken on a whole new meaning now.

“We usually get the vegetables in over Memorial Day,” she pointed out to Hank. “That was last weekend.”

They’d been planning to do it then, but Hank’s mother took a bad fall the Thursday before, and he had to jump into his truck and head to his hometown. He’s been there ever since, trying to convince the most stubborn woman in the world that at ninety-three she’s too old to live alone.

Mission accomplished—finally.

“I can handle the planting,” Meredith assured him when he mentioned that it may be at least a few more days before he gets his mother acclimated to her new nursing home and cleans out her condo so the realtor can list it. “It’s going to rain for the next couple of days, so this is the perfect time to get the seedlings in.”

“Why don’t you call the kids to help you?”

“Maybe I will,” she lied.

Their daughter and sons, all married and scattered within an hour or so drive of this small middle-class Cincinnati suburb, have their hands full with jobs, young children, household obligations of their own. She wasn’t about to bother any of them to come help her.

Especially since . . .

Well, they don’t know yet that her cancer has returned a third time and spread. And she doesn’t want them to suspect anything until she’s ready to tell them. No need for anyone to worry until it’s absolutely necessary.

Only Hank is aware of the truth. He’s having a rough time with it.

“There are so many things we’ve been waiting to do until I retire,” he said one night a few weeks ago, head in hands.

“We’ll do them now.”

“Now that I don’t have a job and we’re broke?”

“We’re not broke yet. Don’t worry. You’ll find another job.”

“Where? Not here. And how can we move, with—” He cleared his throat. “I mean, you need to be near your doctors now that . . .”

Now that it’s almost over.

But he didn’t say it, and Meredith, who has spent decades finishing his sentences, didn’t either.

She just assured him, “You’ll find something here. Some other kind of work.”

“With decent pay? And benefits? If I don’t find something before our medical insurance runs out . . . I can’t believe this is happening to us.”

“Not just to us. Teddy’s in the same boat, and with a baby on the way,” she pointed out. Their firstborn, an accountant, lost his job and health care last year and has been struggling to keep a roof over his family’s heads and food on the table. Hank and Meredith have been giving him whatever they can spare—but that’s now gone from very little to nothing at all.

“Yeah, and then there’s my mother . . .” Hank was on a roll. “No long-term care insurance and she can’t keep living alone. And of course I get sole responsibility for her since my brother fell off the face of the earth.”

Hank’s only sibling stopped speaking to both him and his mother after a family falling out years ago.

It would have been easier if the old woman hadn’t fallen last weekend, accelerating the need to get her out of her condo and into the only available—though not necessarily affordable—facility.

Easier, too, if Hank’s mother wasn’t so damned adamant about staying in Cleveland. They could have moved her to Cincinnati years ago to make things easier on Hank—though certainly not under their own roof. Even if Meredith were healthy enough to be a caregiver—as opposed to facing the eventual need for one herself—her mother-in-law is downright impossible.

“She’s never living with us, no matter what happens,” Hank said flatly many years ago, when his mother was widowed shortly after their engagement. At the time, Meredith found the statement unduly harsh and started having second thoughts, wondering what kind of man would say such a thing.

That was before she got to know his mother—in small doses and from a distance, thank goodness.