Mom

She had called her husband two days earlier while he was on a cross-country college visit with their oldest son.

“Jerry, I felt something. A lump under my arm. I want to get it checked.”

They did. Then came the drive home, winding down their long dusty driveway while her six kids watched — someone mentioned she’d had a doctor’s appointment. Strange that dad went with her.

She has learned some new phrases in the last hours. Stage three. In the lymph nodes. Percentage. Odds.

“Mom. What’s going to happen?”

“We don’t know. I don’t know.”

Surgery happens. Her breasts are gone. Then radiation and chemotherapy. Her hair is gone. Not so long ago, people called her “the pretty mom” or “the skinny mom.” She’s skinnier now — her skin grey, her face drawn — and she walks with her shoulders pulled tightly in, bent forward as if movement is an act of will. Walks outside become too exhausting, and she spends most afternoons in bed. All her children are still in school; she home-schools them. She wants her son to go to Hillsdale College — she’d meant to help him, but now he might not be ready. She has always been a restless sleeper, but now she is too tired to sleep easily, and she is desperate for rest.

“Who took my iPod?” she calls down the stairs.

“Mom, it’s my iPod,” one of the children complains, but laughing.

It’s hers now. It helps her sleep, a deep man’s voice reading to her, reading promises. It’s still playing when she wakes up late at night. In the last few months, she has heard this voice read through the Bible half a dozen times.

“I’m afraid,” she says, but not aloud. “I am in pain, and I’m afraid.”

“Mom?”

“...to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.”

In the garage, he cuts planks with his son for a faux staircase. She volunteered him to  build scenery for the children’s musical because he was a carpenter before he sold software to auto companies. She’d said “Jerry can do that” before they knew she was sick, but you don’t renege on a commitment.

He hadn’t known the automotive industry was about to crash, that Detroit would be a ghost town and he would have his life’s worst year at work. He didn’t know that he would move out of his room because he lays on his bed writing emails and presentations long past midnight and she sleeps poorly enough as it is. He’d thought this staircase would come together, that this piece he’d just cut would fit.

“Shit,” he says. “Damn it.”

“Dad?”

His face slips from angry back to worn.

“It’s been a long year.”

Her friend dies of cancer. She was several years older — brittle but elegant. They’d ridden around in her red convertible: “Hot blondes with a hot car,” they joked.

“Ed,” she whispers to the widower at the funeral. “Ed, I’m so sorry.”

She thinks she will not have to leave Jerry. The news has been good. She is out of bed. A Pentecostal friend asks to lay hands on her and pray health into her limbs. She laughs, but submits. They want to help, and God didn’t send her this illness for her to be selfish with it. Share it — that life is precious when one starts counting days, that her self-reliance has been broken with her body, that “many will see it, and fear, and will trust in the Lord.”

She straps on her prosthetic chest and pulls on a sweater.

“Now I have a perfect figure,” she sometimes jokes.

“Mom, please, we have more curves than you do,” her sons answer. She only smiles.

Her oldest will start graduate school in the fall. She just saw her first daughter’s artwork published in a professional collection. She will cry in May at her second daughter’s wedding, and a few times before getting her ready. She cries easily lately, but laughs easily too. She wants to go back to school soon, to get the art degree she’d been too practical to pursue in college.

She is strong again. She broke her ankle on a camping trip last summer, and took crutches and a protective boot on the next one a few weeks later.

“Your mother’s an iron daisy,” Jerry says. “She’s bridled passion.”

She pulls on waterproof pants and long wool socks. She’s already broken her tailbone once doing this. But she’s still better on the hills than most of her kids. Jerry won’t admit it, but she’s better than him too.

“Snowboards in the car, gang,” she yells. “We’re going.”