The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

What the scan said

In June I had the scan. There is no describing the three days before you hear.

Dr. Amundsen, the oncologist, a small, exact woman in sensible shoes, came in with a folder and looked at me over her glasses. Ginette was beside me with the pencil.

“No evidence of disease,” said the doctor.

She said we would watch it closely for five years, and she made me no promises, and I liked her better for it. But she said, “This is a very good result, Mrs. Michaud. I want you to hear that.”

Ginette wrote it down. Then she put down the pencil and took my hand, and hers was shaking harder than mine.

Sunday

That was a good while ago now. I am writing this at my own kitchen table on a Sunday in late October, with a pot of pea soup on the back burner that I am making exactly the way Mama did, except with less salt.

Ginette comes every Sunday now, and on alternate Sundays I go to her. We have supper, and we argue, and then we sit with the radio and do not argue.

We went out to the cemetery in May, the two of us. It is on the hill above the church in Van Buren, with the river below and Canada gold on the far side in the morning light.

She had Mama’s blue rosary in her pocket. She put it into my hand, and I held it a minute, and I put it back into hers.

“You keep it,” I said. “You earned it.”

“We’ll share it,” said Ginette. “You can have it in the winters.”

Then she said, “She’d be mad at the two of us, you know. Thirty-two years. She’d say, I put one note in your pocket and you couldn’t manage it.”

“She’d be right,” I said.

Last week we met by accident in the Shop ‘n Save, which is still how we meet. In the cereal aisle, as it happens. She was standing by the oatmeal with her cart, reading a label through the bottom of her glasses.

“Gin,” I said. “Not that one. Get the steel cut. The other one tastes like paste.”

“You don’t tell me what oatmeal to buy,” said my sister.

She put the box in her cart. It was the steel cut.

Thirty-two years, and it took a motel in a snowstorm, and a note on pharmacy paper, and a woman who did not know how to say she was sorry but knew how to warm up a car for twenty minutes before I got into it.

I used to turn my cart around in that store so I would not have to see her face.

Now when I turn my cart around, it is to go and find her.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.