The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [44]
“She’s jaundiced.” Ginger makes this sound as if it proves something.
“You have to remember,” Julianne says softly, “that the liver is only a secondary site for the cancer. The cancer originated in the pancreas.” From the look on Ginger’s face, Julianne feels she’s delivering a whole new set of bad news.
Then Ginger puts on a brave, wry smile. “It’s amazing what people will do to put sense to things that don’t make sense, isn’t it?”
“Amazing,” Julianne agrees.
“If it made sense, then maybe I’d feel like I could do something. It drives me crazy not to be able to do something.”
“You could go see her,” Julianne says softly. “I think that’s what she wants. I think that’s probably all any of us can do.”
Ginger studies the table. “I know. Every day I’m going to, and every day I don’t.” She lifts her eyes and regards Julianne questioningly. “Why is it so hard to go visit someone who’s sick?”
“I don’t know,” Julianne says, though she does know. It’s normal to shy away from illness and death. It’s natural to gravitate toward laughter and life. What’s not normal is to sense death in the tips of your fingers, to take it into your belly, into your blood. For all she knows, it’s the break from sanity she’s feared for many years. For all she knows, the next time, she might not come back.
Wrongheaded as it seems, she’d love to believe in Ginger’s theory. Paisley does drink. The habit has never left her incapacitated, as far as Julianne knows, but it’s always been part of who she is: Paisley Lamm, neighborhood beauty, mother of two, sweet as she can be but drinks too much. No one would dispute that.
She glances at her menu. The offerings haven’t changed much in the past decade. Daily specials with meat and two veggies. Grilled cheese sandwiches, BLTs, burgers. Nothing as self-important as the simplest pasta dish at Caruso’s. Doug would be appalled. From the middle of the table, the round paper pumpkin grins up at her with its yellow jack-o’-lantern eyes—merry enough, but devilish, too. In a quick, unexpected segue, her mind does a backward loop to a Halloween years before, when Paisley had looked at her with the same gleeful expression the jack-o’-lantern is wearing, while taking Melody trick or treating on the streets of Brightwood Trace. Melody was dressed as Barney, the purple dinosaur on toddler TV, so she couldn’t have been more than two or three. Watching Julianne dole out candy, Paisley had lifted her hand to toast Julianne with a beer she was holding. Conspiratorially, in a stage whisper, she’d said, “I brought a little adult treat along for myself.” She’d taken a long, dramatic sip.
Julianne had pretended she was too busy dealing with the children to respond. With three young sons already fascinated by fast cars and alcohol, she’d thought Paisley was setting a bad example. It was one of the few times she hadn’t admired Paisley, a moment so intense that even all these years later she can still call up the sharp sting of disenchantment she’d felt then. Couldn’t the woman even walk around the block without some kind of drink in her hand?
Can drinking cause cancer? The medical literature says maybe yes, maybe no. Julianne does the rerun again: of Paisley sipping beer while Melody fills her trick-or-treat bag. Of Paisley sipping Painkillers while dancing to the oldies around her hot tub. Of Paisley sipping wine on New Year’s Eve.
And when Paisley came into the pre-op exam room complaining about her stomach, maybe Julianne had suspected something more than an ulcer because, subconsciously, she remembered all the liquor Paisley had consumed over the years. Cause and effect: Paisley drinks too much. Drinking has made her sick. The blackness that assaulted Julianne was only her own horror at touching Paisley’s liver and having all her suspicions confirmed.
But no. Julianne has been horrified before. Horrified and shocked. This was different. Except for the day with Eudora Nestor, the leukemia victim, she had never felt like she was dying.
“Ready?” The waitress hovers above her.
“Oh, yes.” She gulps back the queasy memory