“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she muttered, and I could almost see her checking her watch. “Can this wait an hour? Jenna is about to open the big gift from her mother-in-law. It would be incredibly rude for me to be on the phone.”
The sun hit the windshield of a passing car, blinding me for a second. “No,” I said, the word coming out as a jagged sob. “It can’t wait. I have cancer, Mom. Breast cancer.”
There was a pause. In a movie, this is where the music swells, where the mother gasps and drops her glass. In my reality, there was only the sound of muffled chatter and my mother’s heavy, irritated sigh.
“Are you serious, Claire? Right now? You’re telling me this right now?”
“I didn’t exactly pick the timing of the pathology report.”
“Well,” she snapped, her annoyance flaring like a match. “What do you want me to do about it this second? We have guests. I have a house full of people celebrating a wedding. I can’t just walk out because you’re having a crisis.”
I stared at a discarded gum wrapper on the pavement, feeling a cold, crystalline numbness begin to spread from my chest to my extremities. “I thought… I thought you’d want to come over. I thought you’d want to be here.”
“Tonight isn’t possible,” she said, her voice regaining its social-butterfly poise. “Call your sister. Megan is here, but she’s leaving early to meet some friends. Maybe she can stop by. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Stay positive!”
The line went dead.
Cliffhanger: I stood in the silence of the parking lot, the phone still pressed to my ear, unaware that while I was mourning my health, my sister was already composing a text that would prove my life was worth less to them than a social snub.
