I’m not going to make that sound like a montage. There were four months in the middle where she couldn’t hold water down and I learned to change a dressing and we did not talk about the future at all, on purpose, because talking about the future was a thing that could hurt her.
Fourteen months after the dining room, Dr. Oduya used the word remission.
Twenty-six months, still clear. She goes every three months. We do not celebrate the scans anymore; we just come home and I make eggs.
Her hair came back curly. It had been straight her entire life. Nobody warned us about that, and the first time she noticed it in the bathroom mirror she yelled for me so loud I came in with a hammer in my hand.
I did one other thing, and I want to end with it.
About a month after the dinner I drove down to Ivory Street and found the shop. Little place, hand-lettered sign, a woman named Pell — no relation to Ruthann, I checked, Marrowfield is just like that.
I asked her if she still had thirty-one inches of dark brown hair bought about six months back.
She’d sold it. Of course she had. That’s the business. But she remembered my wife, and she went in the back and came out with the carbon copy of the receipt, and she said, “I gave her one fifty. I want you to know I could have given her a hundred and she’d have taken it.”
The receipt is in a frame in the hallway of the house on Pellham Road. Just a slip of yellow carbon paper with a date on it and a description and a number.
$150.00.
People come over and see it and don’t ask, because it looks like nothing.
That piece of paper is the most expensive thing anyone in my family ever bought. It cost my mother her house, her name in the town she’s lived in for forty years, and every remaining day she was ever going to spend with a son.
And all it bought my wife was the right to find out that she was sick — in a house with a two-thousand-dollar gate, twelve feet from a crate in the garage where the card that would have paid for all of it was sitting under the Christmas decorations, waiting.
