The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [15]
Or is Paisley protecting Andrea from hearing news she doesn’t think Andrea can bear, having been through cancer with her own child? She hopes not.
“She’s had too many tests and too much waiting,” Mason says. “You know how it is.”
This is hard, but Andrea takes her cue. In the blithest tone she can muster, she chirps, “Oh, Mason, tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I’m looking through my cookbooks right now, trying to find my super-duper energy potion to make for her.”
“She’ll appreciate that.”
“Let me know when she’s up for visitors,” she adds lamely. But then . . . no! A steel bar of defiance knifes through her. She is not going to be cowed into silence the way she’d been after Paisley’s last miscarriage. Abandoning the cheery tone, she says, “At least tell me what the specific diagnosis is. The neighbors are already speculating. Would you rather have that?”
“Pancreatic cancer,” Mason says flatly, “with metastasis to the liver.”
“Oh, Mason.” Andrea notes in her peripheral vision that Courtney, hearing that, quickly turns her attention to the counter, pouring polish remover on the spilled polish.
“It’s always grim when it progresses to the liver,” Mason goes on, so professorially Andrea can almost feel him putting on his objective newspaperman’s face, “but there’s plenty of research being done and some clinical trials. I’m taking Paisley to see a specialist tomorrow. We’ll be gone overnight. Two nights at the most.”
“Then let the girls stay with me. Courtney would love it.” This is a lie. Although they’re the same age, Courtney and Brynne tolerate each other but aren’t friends. And Melody is only eight.
“Rita is coming to watch the girls,” Mason says. This is Paisley’s mother. “She should be here any minute.”
“Then what can I do?”
“A little while ago I drove Paisley around the neighborhood to see the ribbons again. She said she can’t even express how moved she is. She asked me if you’d thank everyone for her.”
“Well, of course I will. Of course.”
That’s the extent of it. Thank the neighbors. Make small talk. Don’t rub it in.
Andrea hangs up. On the other side of the kitchen counter, Courtney uses a cloth to absorb the puddle of polish remover she poured to remove less than three drops of polish. She doesn’t ask what Mason said. Her lips are a tight, thin line.
“They’re going to a specialist,” Andrea tells her. “I guess we won’t know anything definitive until they get back.”
Courtney nods almost imperceptibly. Andrea supposes she and her daughter will have a moratorium on open talk, as mothers and daughters often do. She won’t talk to Paisley and she won’t talk to Courtney. It will be an exercise in solitude. Blinking back tears, she tosses the peeled potatoes into a huge pot. She swallows and swallows, trying to reassure herself she can still do this, that the lump in her throat won’t choke her.
Then her mind spools back nine years to that other phone call from Mason, after Paisley came out of the anesthetic from her D&C. At the time, the whole neighborhood knew Paisley had had two failed pregnancies in the five years since Brynne had been born, but only Andrea knew about this third one. Paisley had almost made it to the end of her first trimester. She’d planned to tell everyone the good news as soon as she reached twelve weeks.
She came home from the hospital as pale as if she’d lost a gallon of blood.
Then Mason phoned with his cryptic message—Paisley’s wiped out, so she asked me to call you—and the topic of the miscarriage became taboo. For four months, Andrea and Paisley danced around it, avoided it, pretended it didn’t exist. Then, in a tearful rush, Paisley broke her silence. She told Andrea about the horrible doctor who had handled the miscarriage and its aftermath, about her despair, about the act of