A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) by Marie Bostwick Page B

asked when I’d had my last mammogram. I told them I was a few months late for my checkup, that I’d been too busy, that my new, cheaper insurance only covered mammograms every two years, that I hated going because every time I did, cysts showed up on the film, benign cysts that had been there since I was twenty-five, and set off all kinds of alarm bells and sent me back to the lab and doctor’s office for all kinds of extra tests (just as they had this time) that always turned out to be nothing, but they weren’t impressed. They shut their ears to my list of excuses and my promise to go in for a checkup as soon as the event was over and things calmed down. They scolded and hounded me until I made an appointment, not because I was convinced of the urgency of doing so, but because not to do so would have been to tear down the very thing I was trying to build. Busy as I was, helping these women validate their own experience by sharing their warnings and wisdom with others was surely worth the price of a few hours in the doctor’s office.
    They came through my door by the dozens, looking for a place to share their lives, just as I’d imagined they would. It was my dream, and it was beginning to come true.
    And it all started with one little call to the newspaper office , I thought as I tossed the ancient copy of People onto the waiting-room coffee table. Good old Charlie.
    The sound of the glass reception window sliding open startled me from my reverie. “Evelyn?” Donna said. “Come on back. The doctor can see you now.”
    I had not been worried when, after my mammogram, the technician said that there was a spot that looked a little unusual and the radiologist wanted to do an ultrasound in that area. I was not concerned when Dr. Thayer called and said he wanted to do a needle biopsy on my left breast. I had been through all that before, more than once.
    Years before, when Garrett was still little, my doctor had felt something unusual in my breasts and ordered a baseline mammogram. Then, I was only twenty-five years old and terrified. I woke up in the middle of the night, crying, and Rob held me in his arms until morning, assuring me that everything was going to be all right, and it was. I had a number of harmless fibroids in my breasts. But year after year, every time we moved, or my doctor retired or a new physician came to work at the clinic, I was subjected to annoying rounds of post-mammogram testing. Of course, the other tests had been to extract and test fluids from the cysts; they weren’t tissue biopsies like this. But because my test results had always come back negative before, I was sure it would be the same this time. Busy as I was, it hadn’t crossed my mind to be worried.
    But when I stepped through the door from the waiting room and Dr. Thayer himself was there to greet me, my heart started to beat a little faster. Something in his greeting, his solicitous tone as he asked how I was feeling today, and the weight of his arm across my shoulders as he escorted me into his private office rather than the examining room made a sick anticipation rise from the center of my stomach.
    But it wasn’t until I was sitting in his office and Dr. Thayer folded his hands together, rested them on his desk, and said, “I’m sorry, Evelyn. The biopsy was positive. You have cancer,” that I understood what was happening.
    He said those three words—You Have Cancer. And for a moment, everything stopped. My heart. My mind. My breath. Everything.
    And when I took my next breath, everything had changed.

10
Abigail Burgess Wynne
     
    “E xcuse me?” I asked, certain that I must have heard her wrong. “You’re going to get a what?”
    Liza, who had broken with tradition by actually joining me at the breakfast table instead of pouring herself a cup of black coffee and going back to her room to drink it, stared at me over the edge of her cup.
    “A tattoo,” she said. An inky ribbon of black eyeliner made her large brown