The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

The soup

The next Thursday, about eleven in the morning, I heard a car in the gravel.

I went out on the front porch, and Norma was coming up the steps with a big pot wrapped in a dish towel, holding it against her hip.

“Vegetable soup,” she said. “Beef and tomatoes and corn and the last of my green beans. It’s soft. You can keep it down. Jean could keep my soup down when she couldn’t keep anything else.”

I took the pot. It was still warm through the towel.

She stood there on the porch a minute, looking out at our yard, which I noticed somebody had mowed. Then she took a folded paper out of her dress pocket and handed it to me.

It was a receipt from the specialty pharmacy. The replacement copay for my bottle, four hundred and eighty dollars, marked paid in full. Not by my card. By hers.

“How did you even,” I started.

“I called them,” she said. “Took me two days to get to the right person. I told them I was the one burned it and I’d be the one paying for it. They put the money back on your card and charged mine.”

She pressed her mouth together. “That girl on the phone asked me why I’d burn somebody’s chemo. I told her because I was a foolish old woman.”

I stood there with the soup pot on my hip and the receipt in my hand and could not think of one thing to say.

“Duane says your next infusion is a week from Monday,” Norma said. “He can’t get off. The plant’s still running hard.”

“I was going to ask Gina about the van service,” I said.

“You’ll do no such thing,” Norma said. “I’ll drive you. What time do you have to be there?”

Morehead

So Norma drove me to my infusion.

She picked me up at six-fifteen in her old car, with a thermos of warm ginger tea and a sleeve of saltines on the seat, because I had told her cold drinks hurt my throat after an infusion.

We drove over to Morehead through the hills with the fog still lying in the hollows, and she did not turn on the radio, and she did not mention turmeric once.

At the cancer center she walked in with me. She sat in the chair beside my recliner for four hours.

When the nurse came to hook up my port, I saw Norma’s hands grip the arms of her chair, and I saw her make herself look.

“That’s what they gave Jean,” she said quietly, when the nurse had gone.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Jean had something different. And this is a long time later. They know a lot more now.”

She watched the bag drip for a long time. Then she took a little book out of her purse and a pencil, and she asked me to tell her the names of everything they were giving me, and she wrote them down slow, in her careful cursive, all of it.

“So I know,” she said. “So I can read about the right things.”

In the afternoon she went down to the cafeteria and brought me back a cup of chicken broth and a pack of crackers and made me eat both.

When I fell asleep in the recliner, she pulled the hospital blanket up over my shoulders, and when I woke she was still sitting there, reading her little book, moving her lips.