Joan H. Parker, Robert B. Parker
Three Weeks in Spring
For Jude. She made it better.
Prologue
He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t loved her. It was the fundamental condition of his life. It seemed as if he had been born loving her. But, in fact, he hadn’t loved her until he was eighteen and they met at college. She was old family, good manners, and what does your father do. He was at some momentary place between poet and thug. They were drawn together and sustained by a shared sense of humor that developed over the years into a complex and delicate instrument of communication, a ritual of relationship, inviolate and enduring.
Twenty-five years after they first met, and eighteen years after they married, her cancerous left breast was removed, and when she came out of the anesthesia and saw him standing at the foot of the bed in the green hospital room neither of them knew if the cancer had spread and she was going to die.
She said, “Easy come, easy go.”
He said, “Look at the bright side, you can probably get bras at half price.”
She smiled and nodded and closed her eyes and went back to sleep and he stood in the quiet room with the television set making antic motions but no sound and watched her sleep.
Chapter 1
Friday, April 11
It began late, Dave and Dan in bed, a steak poised on the grill and half a gallon of Gallo Rhine Garten chilling in the refrigerator; the house they’d built mostly themselves was gleaming and orderly the way she always put it before she went to bed, and she was in the bathtub while he, showered and shaved, strolled about in his blue bathrobe with the sleeves cut off, saying lascivious things to her through the nearly closed door of the bathroom.
She always took a long time in the bath before they made love and he always waited impatiently. She shaved her legs and then lathered and shaved under her arms. As her hands brushed her left breast she felt a lump. She denied it. She stopped. Felt it again. What the hell is this? It’s the weights. She had been firming the backs of her arms with two small dumbbells that he had bought her at Sears and she thought, this is new muscle, that’s all, I’ll have one on the other side. She felt it again. It was there and it didn’t feel like a muscle. It didn’t feel like anything she could define. She felt the other side. If there’s a lump on the right breast I’ll know it’s okay. Please God let there be a lump there too. There wasn’t one there.
She could hear him walking around, putting two wine glasses in the freezer to chill, talking to the dog. She could hear the dog’s footsteps. His claws clack-clack on the kitchen floor in a sound so familiar she didn’t remember hearing it before. This is impossible, she thought, this cannot he happening to me. I’m sitting up in the tub and I’m feeling my left breast and there’s something there and it could be a cancerous tumor, but I’m not doing it right I’ll lie on the floor like you’re supposed to and I’ll elevate the shoulder blades somewhat and I’ll go over the breast with my fingers flat in a circular motion section by section like the face of a clock. She did this. The lump was there and she felt the sick panic come over her in waves like nausea. She sweated and fought off the panic.
“If you don’t get out of there pretty soon I’m going to make a move on the goddamned dog,” he said through the door.
“In a minute.” The panic was there, heavy on her chest, and she had to have more time to fight it off. I’m a pessimist, she said to herself, I always assume the worst Eighty-five percent of tumors are nonmalignant. And there’s Ace waiting for me and I’ll put this aside. I will make love to him and I will put this aside. There are all sorts of cysts and benign tumors and that’s probably what I’ve got. And she learned the first thing that she was to learn in these three weeks. She learned that she could put aside her panic and deal with the things that were coming along in the order that they needed to be dealt with.
She toweled dry and brushed her teeth and put a touch of perfume at her throat and went in to make love to her husband.
In bed with him, her arms around him, she pressed her open hands against his back. He was a big man who lifted weights and his back was as broad and solid as a steamer trunk. The solidity of his physical presence had always seemed to her the visible embodiment of his commitment and now it made her sad to think how little avail that physical strength was if the lump was bad. But the commitment, she thought, the commitment is there. Even if the lump is bad, the commitment is there, and she pressed her hands as hard as she could against the mass of his back and felt his weight against her and kissed him and thought no more of the tumor for a while.
At two that morning they sat at their kitchen counter and ate steak and drank the chilled white wine, as they had a hundred times before.
“You won’t tell about how I drink cold white wine with steak, will you?” he said. “We could never eat at the Ritz again.”
“It’s not the temperature that will get you in trouble,” she said. “It’s the quantity.” She pretended to scratch under her left arm. The lump was still there. The knowledge of it never left her, but she had put it into a spot in her mind, off the main track, isolated there like a frightful star, bright but remote. I must be crazy, she thought. I can’t be sitting here with a lump in my breast. At least he didn’t discover it while we were in bed and say, ‘What’s this lump in your breast?’
Maybe, she thought, I should tell him. I could say, ‘Hey, you know what? I have this lump in my breast and I’m really afraid I have breast cancer!’ But she couldn’t. She couldn’t say it out loud. That would make it real. Much realer than it was now. Much scarier. And to see it in his face, reflected back at her. The fear made tangible in his eyes and the set of his mouth. No, it was better to be quiet. Not so much to spare him. To spare her.
He poured the last of the wine and raised his glass to her.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” he said in a barely recognizable imitation of Humphrey Bogart.
“That is probably the most terrible Humphrey Bogart imitation I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“That’s not what all the co-eds say,” he said.
“What do the co-eds say?”
“They say I’m such good tail that it doesn’t matter.”
“They’re wrong,” she said.
He laughed out loud. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.
And they did.
And she slept.
Chapter 2
Saturday, April 12
The morning was bright spring. The lump felt smaller than it had Friday night. Saturday afternoon it felt bigger than it had Saturday morning. She went through the weekend feeling the lump in her breast, touching it, touching it. Talking to herself. It’ll go away. It’s the kind that changes like that, it will be gone soon. I take good care of myself.
She did take good care of herself. She was regular in going to the doctor for Pap smears. She was careful about her eating. She rode her Exercycle three miles a day. She’d given up smoking more than a year ago. She cared about her body and was proud of it. My mother did not have breast cancer, she thought. I am not menopausal. The odds are with me. It is just unlikely that this will be a malignant mass.
The front yard was mushy. The frost had melted and the last traces of snow were gone, except in the recesses where the trailing roses rah along the low fieldstone fence they had built. The bright April sun shone on the debris of winter: dead grass, MacDonald’s wrappers, the sports section of the Globe, crumpled and water-stained under the willow tree. There were dog droppings and a dead bird decomposing near the maple tree. The brick walk that they had laid in sand together three summers ago had buckled and needed to be reset here and there.