Neither of us said sorry. We had never been taught how. In our family, sorry was a casserole.
The chemotherapy began the Thursday before Thanksgiving. It is every other Thursday, twelve treatments over twenty-two weeks. A hundred and sixty miles each way, a long day in a recliner with a needle in your arm, and then forty-six hours at home with a pump in a pouch on your belt.
The first morning, the nurse, a big, easy woman named Sheila, hung my bag and talked about her grandson’s hockey team.
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“Is this your sister?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, before I thought. I could not have told you whether I meant it as a fact or a surrender.
The treatment leaves you cold in a way I did not know a body could be cold. For about five days after each one, anything cold sends a kind of electricity through your hand. I reached into the freezer for a bag of peas and dropped it, gasping, my arm buzzing to the shoulder.
When I came home from the second treatment, there was a pair of leather work gloves hanging from my refrigerator handle on a loop of baling twine. Thick, brown, stiff with age.
They had been Armand’s. Pinned to one was a slip of paper in her square handwriting. For the freezer. Don’t be stubborn.
I put them on. They were far too big. They smelled of fuel oil and cedar and a man I had not known well, who had once carried my wedding cake out to the car.
I wore them every time I opened that door for six months.
What we talked about, and what we did not
Twelve times we made the drive, and we talked about everything except one thing. The weather, which in Aroostook County in January has a great deal in it. Her sons, Marcel in Augusta with the state, Gilles with a dairy in Fort Kent. The price of fuel oil, and which neighbors had died.
We argued about hymn numbers and Shop ‘n Save butter. We did not argue about 1993. It rode between us in the Buick like a third passenger nobody had introduced.
In December, coming home from the third treatment, I threw up on the shoulder of the interstate in the dark, in six below zero, with my forehead against the passenger door.
She pulled over and came around. She held my forehead in her bare hand, cold as it was, and lifted what thin hair I had off my neck, and she said what Mama would have said, in the same words.
“There. Get it out. There.”
It was the closest I had been to another person in six years.