The Bear He Won Twice

Viv looked down at that bear for a long time. The lights from the Ferris wheel went around and around on its white fur.

Then she looked at me. And I braced myself, because in twenty years of family Christmases I had never once heard Viv back down from anything.

What came out of her mouth instead was a sound I had never heard her make.

It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when they have been holding something up for a very long time and their arms finally give out.

“I didn’t,” she said. She pressed her hand flat over her mouth. “Mack, honey, I didn’t mean to take it from you.

“I didn’t see you. I didn’t see anything. I just saw her face.”

Mack stood there patiently holding the bear out, waiting, the way he waits for everything.

Viv took a breath that shook all the way down. “Kinsey’s sick,” she said, and she said it to me, not to him.

“She has Hodgkin lymphoma. They found it the week after school let out. She’s been doing chemo at Children’s Mercy every other Thursday since July.”

I felt the gravel tilt under my feet.

All summer, I had been angry at Viv. She had skipped the Fourth of July picnic at the lake.

She had backed out of the float trip on the Niangua that we had planned since winter. She had stopped answering the family group text.

I had told Malcolm, more than once, that his sister thought she was too good for us now.

I had said it in the truck. I had said it on the porch.

I had said it with Mack sitting right there tossing rings at his bottle.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked her. It came out a whisper.

“She made me promise,” Viv said. “She didn’t want to be the sick cousin.

“She didn’t want everybody at church looking at her like that. She wanted one thing in her life to stay normal.

“And I said yes, because what else was I going to say to her?”

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, hard, like she was angry at it.

“Rich is out on the combine sixteen hours a day with the beans. Mom knows. That’s all. That’s the whole list.”

I thought about Rich, Viv’s husband, a big quiet man who drives a grain truck and runs a combine for two different farms every harvest.

He had looked so tired at the church supper in August. I had thought it was just the season.

“She’s been so sick,” Viv said. “Her counts were too low to do anything all summer.