“Dabney!” Elizabeth said. “I’m so happy I bumped into you. I have the most interesting piece of news to share.”

Dabney was wary of “interesting pieces of news,” because they were usually rumors or gossip, and yet people came to her with “interesting pieces of news” all the time. Dabney did not want to hear any “interesting pieces of news” from Elizabeth Jennings, that was for darn sure.

“I’m in a terrible hurry,” Dabney said. She indiscriminately stuck two final ears of corn into her recyclable shopping bag.

But Elizabeth either didn’t hear Dabney or she chose to ignore her. She said, “You’re friends with Clendenin Hughes, right?”

Dabney froze. Her insides contorted. Lovesick.

Elizabeth said, “When we had dinner a few weeks ago, he told me the two of you have known each other since high school. So sweet!” Elizabeth smiled, showing off her capped teeth. She was wearing a turquoise-and-white dress with matching turquoise sandals, and her toenails, Dabney noticed, were painted the same shade of turquoise. Was it possible that Elizabeth Jennings had her pedicure done each day to match her outfit? It wasn’t impossible. What else did Elizabeth Jennings have to do all day except gossip and chase after Clendenin? She wasn’t even at the corn crib to pick out corn, Dabney realized. She had come only to torment Dabney!

“I have to go,” Dabney said. She turned to her cart and loaded in her ears.

“I went to Clen’s house to drop off a pie I made,” Elizabeth said.

Involuntarily, Dabney shook her head. There was no way Elizabeth had made a pie.

“And there was a young woman pulling out of his driveway as I was pulling in. A very beautiful young woman. I think Clendenin has a girlfriend!”

Dabney barely made it to the Impala before the pain became unbearable. Elizabeth Jennings had been jealous, spiteful even, and possibly suspicious of Dabney’s relationship with Clen. Either she had wanted Dabney to tell her who this young mystery woman was or she wanted Dabney to commiserate. Men always chose younger women. Life was unfair in many aspects, but this, perhaps, was the most unfair.

At the very least, Dabney knew that Elizabeth Jennings hadn’t been the guest at five o’clock. Someone else had been.

Dabney called Clen from the parking lot.

She said, “Who were your plans with the other day? When I wanted to come over at five o’clock and you said you were busy?”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, Cupe. I can’t tell you.”

“Clen!” she shouted. She was in so much pain, and now this. “A young woman? A beautiful young woman?”

“Dabney,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

The sharp, shining knives piercing her gut…She moaned. Her insides were being gnawed on by millions of tiny razor teeth.

I think Clendenin has a girlfriend!

I’m sorry, Cupe. I can’t tell you.

Lovesick.

No, she thought.

In the morning, she called Genevieve at Dr. Field’s office. “I need to talk to Ted,” she said. “Please, I think it’s an emergency.”

“Like, an emergency-room emergency?” Genevieve said.

“Please, Genevieve,” Dabney said. “I need to talk to Ted. Can you make that happen?”

“For you, I can make anything happen.”

Ted Field set it all up. He sent Dabney’s blood work to the correct person at Mass General, and they scheduled a CT scan for Thursday morning.

“You do realize,” Ted Field said, “that you have to go to Boston.”

“Yes,” Dabney said. It had long been her mantra that she would leave the island only if her life depended on it. Now, she was suddenly certain, her life depended on it.

She told Box first.

“I spoke to Ted Field,” she said. “I’m going to Boston for a CT scan.”

“That sounds serious,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Dabney said. “I’m going alone.”

“It’s my city and it’s been aeons since you’ve been there, or anywhere else, by yourself. Let me go with you. We can end the day with dinner at Harvest, spend the night in my apartment, and come back in the morning.”

“That sounds like your idea of a lovely time,” Dabney said. “I want to go and come back, and I am going alone.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Box said.

“First flight to Boston on Thursday,” she said. “Last flight back Thursday.”

“You can’t possibly expect me to believe that you’re going alone,” he said.

“I’m going alone,” she said.

She told Clen next.

“Boston on Thursday,” she said. “I have to have some tests.”

“I don’t like the way that sounds,” he said. “Let me go with you.”

“You can’t,” she said.

“Wanna bet?”

“Clen.”

He frowned. “Is the economist going with you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going alone.”

She told Agnes, and then Nina. Boston on Thursday for tests. Before either of them could open her mouth, she said, “I’m going alone.”

At the airline counter, she accepted her boarding pass and thought, Am I really doing this? It would have been far easier with Box or Clen or Agnes or Nina there to prop her up. But she felt it was important that she go alone, self-motivated, powered by her own two feet.

At the very moment the airplane lifted off the ground, something fell back down to earth. Her spirit, her soul, her self. She was nothing but a shell.

Taxi, Ted Williams Tunnel, Cambridge Street, Mass General. She had seen the Prudential Building and the Hancock Tower as she flew in. Skyscrapers, the wider world. It was just Boston, she reminded herself, only ninety miles from home. She had gone to college across the river, she had made it through four years of higher education; she would make it through today.

Blood pressure, temperature, needles, hundreds of medical questions, culminating with the CT scan, which was like something out of science fiction.

Then, a rather lengthy wait, while a doctor read the scan. Everyone at the hospital was being solicitous. Rosemary, the nurse-practitioner in Imaging, treated Dabney like she was a minor celebrity.

She said, “This is all being expedited. We know you want to get home.”

Dabney supposed that Dr. Field had some influence here, or maybe Box did, via Dr. Christian Bartelby.

She ate a tuna fish sandwich in the cafeteria. She looked around at all the other people-some sick, some healthy, some hospital employees. There were so many people in the world, people she didn’t know and who didn’t know her. That was, perhaps, the scariest thing of all.

Dr. Chand Rohatgi was a handsome Indian man with kind eyes.

“There’s someone here with you?” he said.

“No,” she said. “I came alone.”

He nodded. His face was pained.

“Just tell me,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Not a great prognosis,” he said.

Cancer of the pancreas, which had metastasized, already, to her liver. The lungs would likely be next. It wasn’t resectable, and considering her level of pain, she wouldn’t be strong enough for chemotherapy, and there was no guarantee that chemo would do anything other than make her sicker. At this point, Dr. Rohatgi said, there was little they could do but hope the progression was slow. He could help her manage the pain.

She said, “How long…?”

“Difficult to say.”

“Will I live to see the lights on Main Street at Christmas Stroll? It’s my busiest weekend of the year.”

He looked puzzled. He wasn’t familiar with Christmas Stroll, he said, but if it was in December, there was a chance, maybe. Again, difficult to say.

A chance, maybe? she thought. Christmas Stroll was only four months away. Was he telling her then that she didn’t even have four months? She felt blindsided. Someone else should not be able to tell you you’re dying.

No wonder she felt like a shell. Her insides were being consumed by disease.

She said, “I’ve always been an intuitive person. I thought it was something else. I thought I was…lovesick.”

He said, “Yes, I can understand that. The symptoms are probably similar.”

Or perhaps Dr. Rohatgi didn’t say the symptoms are probably similar, perhaps he didn’t say a chance, maybe, perhaps he didn’t say metastasized, already, to the liver. Dabney walked out of the hospital in a state of extreme confusion, and the most confusing thing was this: she wasn’t thinking about Agnes, or Clen, or Box. She was thinking about her mother.

Dr. Donegal had asked her time and again, during the eight or nine years that she had gone to see him, to describe what had happened the night Dabney’s mother left. Time and again, Dabney had stared mutely at Dr. Donegal because she couldn’t remember.

Why, then, all these years later, with the onset of this…news…was the scene so crisp in Dabney’s mind? The suite at the Park Plaza, a ceramic vase holding ostrich feathers, the chandelier in the lobby that was as big and bright as a bonfire, the king-size bed that Dabney had been allowed to jump on for as long as it took her mother to put on her makeup, the front-row-center orchestra seats at The Nutcracker, her mother tapping out the rhythm of the music on Dabney’s hand during the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and Dabney agape at the beauty of the ballerina, her ability to float, twirl, fly. At the hotel afterward there were cheeseburgers from room service and, for Dabney, a hot fudge sundae. Her mother had been drinking red wine, which was what she drank at home, and it always turned her teeth blue, which Dabney found funny. Why blue and not red, Mama? It was quite late, Dabney remembered, pitch-black outside, and it had started to snow, and Dabney’s mother lifted her up to the window so she could see. Dabney was wearing her white flannel nightgown, she had spilled chocolate sauce down the front, which upset her, she grew weepy, she was tired. She brushed her teeth and climbed into the big bed and her mother sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed her hair from her face. Her mother was engulfed in green smoke, she might have been a bit drunk, her words were slurred, she said some things about Dabney’s father that Dabney didn’t understand, how he had come back from the war and vowed, Nantucket, always Nantucket, and her mother couldn’t do it anymore but her father wouldn’t live anywhere else. I’ll always love you, Dabney, you will always be my little girl, this is hard for me, so hard. Her mother’s perfume had smelled like a sugar plum, or so Dabney had thought that night. Her mother’s pearls had glowed even in the darkened room. She was right there on the edge of the bed, and then when Dabney woke up she was gone. May, the Irish chambermaid, was there.

Mama! Where’s my mama?

Your father is coming for you, my sweet.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

Mama!

Dabney climbed into a taxi. She was just able to tell the driver, “Logan Terminal C, please,” before the tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. They were not tears about the news, because the news was incomprehensible. She cried all the way to the airport because her mother had left, and still, to this very day, Dabney missed her.

There was no rhyme or reason to her thoughts. It just wasn’t possible, it was too terrifying to comprehend. She was very sick. She would die. She would die? It was a door she would step through without knowing what was on the other side. Her grandmother, Agnes Bernadette, had believed in Heaven, fluffy clouds, angels, harps, peace, and that was what Dabney had grown up believing. But now that she was faced with the concrete reality, she thought, Angels? Harps?

Then she thought, Everyone dies, absolutely everyone, there is no escaping it, so the only reasonable option was to focus on the time she had left.

Dr. Rohatgi had urged her not to look too far ahead. Take things a moment at a time, he’d said. He had given her some literature, which she stuffed into her purse, and a prescription to ease her pain. She thought of Clen, Box, Agnes, Nina Mobley, Riley, Celerie, Vaughan Oglethorpe, Diana at the pharmacy who made her coffee, people she cherished, the people who made her who she was. She would tell no one. But was that feasible? She was holding in so many secrets now. How long would it be until she burst, like a dam?

Dabney’s life had been safe with her mother, and then not safe. Then safe again, and then when Clendenin left, not safe. Then safe for a long time, but now, not safe. Everyone’s life had moments of both. She liked to believe she was special because of what she’d survived, but this last thing she would not survive. Incomprehensible. The literature in her purse was supposed to help her grapple with being terminally ill, but who wrote such literature? And how did they know the best strategies for grappling? Nobody knew what happened next.