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“Not one basket of fries, no. But it’s a slippery slope of habits and anxiety for me, so it’s easier to always stay on, so to speak. I plan my meals, where I eat when I eat out…” I pause, trying to think of how I can explain it in a more understandable way. “When I lay down in bed at night, I know that I still might get cancer tomorrow, but at least I’ll know I tried everything within my powernot to today. I know your fries will be delicious, but so will my salad. At some point, that has to just be enough for me.”

Her usual bright red lips, now faded from yoga and her drink, smile. “You’re kind of a badass,” she says, tilting her glass slightly toward me.

I laugh too loudly, organizing my silverware on the table. “Badass, I am not.”

“I’m serious!” she cries. “You have a chest covered with ink, the balls to manage your risk of cancer the way you do and were the most flexible person in that yoga class. And that last one?” She clicks her tongue. “I’m sure Boreallyappreciates.” She cocks an eyebrow as a wicked grin cuts across her face.

When my cheeks heat, she cackles.

“I knew it!” she yells, smacking her hand down on the table, causing people from nearby tables to turn and look.

And, for the first time since I was in college and not forced by work, I have dinner with a friend.

She tells me about how she opened a bar: “I thought, why the hell not, I hate working in a bank!”

How her and John met: “I told him if he let me off with a warning, I’d have a beer with him.”

By the time she’s finished telling stories, my cheeks hurt from laughing.

Standing by our parked vehicles, she gives me one of her hugs that I think she should be famous for. She’s thin, lean, and gorgeous, but she hugs like a boa constrictor. If I were thirty yearsyounger, I’d tell her she was my best friend and rush home to make us matching bracelets.

“I hated yoga,” she says, opening her car door and dropping into the driver’s seat. “But let’s do this again next week.”

I almost can’t wait.

Forty-one

October is the equivalentof living in a dream.

An alignment of the stars.

A natural phenomenon that few people get to witness, but for some reason, I do.

Bo has fully imbedded himself into my life. We go to church on Sundays. We have dinner with Lucy most nights and play board games. And after Lucy goes to sleep,wesneak off tohisbed.

All I keep thinking is, Bo lovesme. It’s as though nothing has ever made sense in my life until this truth.

On Tuesdays, I go to yoga and have dinner with Libby.

On Wednesdays, I pick up Huck. Most weeks, we spend the entire time sitting at the edge of the property where Bo’s building a cabin and drink dyed-red hot chocolate while we watch them work. Stacking logs and fastening them together, Huck loudly narrating the whole thing. One week, my dad even joins usso he can meet his future grandson, something that clogs my throat when I say it out loud for the first time.

“Birdie ate an earthworm when she was seven,” my dad tells him as they watch Bo and the crew move a log into position. Huck finds this to be both hilarious and appalling.

The realization that Huck is going to be my legal child knocks the wind out of me daily. When I get the notice a court date has been set for mid-November, I’m equal parts happy and terrified.

In a life where I never dreamed I’d have children, in my own way, I will. Huck will be someone I introduce as my son.

Sam tells me a normal number of times how disappointed he is with my chest and Mabel greets me every Friday morning with, “Now that’s the glow of a happily screwed woman.”

Veda is the outlier of perfection. The fall tree that doesn’t burst with color but drops its brown leaves with a single gust.

In all appearances to anyone who isn’t looking, she seems fine. She smiles at the right times, narrows her eyes like a hawk without mercy, and pins her hair back into her bun as her mismatched beaded earrings hang from her ears. But there’s a swift undercurrent of exhaustion too. A weakening.

All the while, Bo keeps asking how she is and I keep giving him the vague answer of, “A pain in my ass.” Not a lie, but miles and miles away from the truth.

After arriving at my usual time of eight o’clock and finding her sleeping two mornings in a row, I start coming at nine, making her breakfast at nine-thirty. She guides me through working the clay, but instead of sitting next to me with her own hands doing thework, she sits in the wicker chair with the blanket over her lap. As I mold clay into the petals of flowers, Veda sits quietly, often with her eyes closed.

I help her smoke pot—learning one joint is overkill from our first experiment—and fill her freezer with soups that she tells me are,“Better than every other healthy thing I force down her dying throat.”