Four hours after Dr. Bhatt said the word cancer, I turned into my own driveway in Caribou and found a gray Buick parked behind my truck, with the engine running and the exhaust curling white in the cold.
The first hard frost had come that week and burned the tops off every potato field from Fort Fairfield to Van Buren.
I knew that Buick. I had not been close to it in thirty-two years, but I knew it the way you know a dog that once bit you.
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My sister Ginette was standing on my porch with a red cooler at her feet. She had on our father’s old barn coat, the brown canvas one with the corduroy collar worn down to the threads.
She is sixty-six. She has bad knees and a worse temper, and she had gotten smaller since the last time I looked straight at her, which was across a kitchen table in 1993.
I sat in my truck with my hands on the wheel for what felt like an hour and was probably a minute. Then I got out, because it was my porch.
“I have people to take me,” I said.
That was the first thing I said to my sister in three decades. It was also a lie.
My husband Raymond had been gone six years. My daughter Colette is a night nurse at a hospital in Portland, five hours south, with a four year old and a husband who works days. I had called her from my truck in the clinic parking lot and said about forty words. I had told her not to come. I had told her I would manage.
Ginette looked past me at the dark windows of my house, and then at the empty road, and then at me.
She did not say one word about the thirty-two years. She did not say she was sorry, or that I looked thin, or that she had heard.
“Surgeon is at ten on Thursday,” she said. “In Bangor. We leave at five.”
I had not told her the time. I had not told her anything. I had been told myself less than four hours before, and I had driven home thinking I would tell nobody else until I knew what to say.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“Five o’clock,” said Ginette. “Wear something warm. I don’t turn the heat up past seventy.”
She set her cooler on my porch swing, walked back down my steps, and backed out of my driveway as carefully as if she were leaving a church.
I stood there until the exhaust smell was gone.