Free One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

fingers through her thinning red curls.
    “Oh, come on, Mama. You must have thrown up ten times the last time.”
    “Any pain?” said Dr. Cohn.
    “Nothing to speak of,” said my mother.
    “Are you sure?” I said.
    “Ellen,” said my mother.
    When Dr. Cohn left I followed her out into the hallway. Her stride was long, and I had to hustle to catch up with her.
    “Doctor, I really feel at a loss here. I don’t know enough about what they found during her hospital stays. I don’t know enough about her prognosis, about what to expect. I really need ten or fifteen minutes of your time.”
    She put a hand beneath my elbow. “Come,” she said, and walked me back down the hall.
    “Privately,” I added.
    “I won’t do that,” she said evenly. “This is your mother’s illness. She deserves to be part of any discussions we have about it.” She pushed open the door and walked over to the cubicle.
    “Kate,” she said, and my mother opened her eyes and smiled. “Ellen has some questions about your condition and I wonder whether you’d like me to answer them now or to see you both upstairs later?”
    “What kind of questions?” my mother said, and for a moment I could not answer.
    “About where the cancer started. About whether it’s spreading. About what comes next.”
    My mother looked into Dr. Cohn’s eyes and not mine as she answered. She recited like a child called to give an answer in class. “The scan showed it was in the liver. And maybe in the ovaries, too, although they can’t find that on the scans. There’s something in the blood test that makes them think maybe the ovaries are involved. The doctor in the city who looked at the pictures and the slides and gave us a second opinion said that’s highly unusual but not unheard of. Do I have it right so far?”
    “Exactly,” said Dr. Cohn.
    “What else, Ellen?” my mother asked.
    “I just feel as if I need to be filled in.”
    “On what?”
    I knew what I would have said if the doctor and I had been in the hallway together. I would have said: how long? I would have asked: how bad? I would have wanted a blow-by-blow of disintegration, the road to death. But I could not ask the questions with my mother there. I suspected she already knew the answers, that she’d wanted the same ones I did, and wanted to keep them to herself.
    “That’s all,” I said. “I’m going down to the cafeteria for coffee.” Dr. Cohn followed me out.
    “I’m the kind of person who likes to know things,” I said.
    “So is your mother,” the doctor said. “Why don’t you ask her about some of them?”
    Suddenly I stopped and snapped my fingers. “I just thought of something,” I said. “My mother’s parents owned a dry-cleaning shop. Do you think the chemicals there could have caused this?”
    “Your father asked the same thing,” Dr. Cohn said.
    “And?”
    “And your mother said ‘What does it matter now?’”
    The only time I saw my mother break down during those weeks was when we were passing through the lobby just as a woman wasrising from a wheelchair at the automatic doors, turning to take a sleeping newborn from the arms of a nurse to carry it out to a waiting car. The baby’s hand was splayed on the swaddling, a pink star, and my mother’s mouth began to work as she stood and watched mother and child move through the doors. “Ah,” she breathed, and she pressed a tissue to her face.
    Within weeks she knew the names of all the nurses, their family backgrounds, the ages of their children. As she waited they would smile and say her name: Good morning, Kate, how are you? Just a moment more and we’ll get you in. And naturally, the county being what it was, they knew us. One of them had a son who had gone to school with my brother Jeff. Another had a daughter on scholarship at Langhorne. “She says your father is one of the best professors there,” she said. “She says when you get an
A
from him it really means something.”
    “She is