Free The Forever Marriage by Ann Bauer

different when she was in last time; back then, the technician had said if the scan was clean, Carmen could wait safely until forty-five.
    “Well, my husband was very ill and I seem to have forgotten,” Carmen said. This was like a tactical checkmate, a move you couldn’t use until the opportunity was presented directly to you, but then it worked every time. Not that Carmen was much interested in chess. But Jobe had been determined to teach Luca—even buying a set with the characters from
Alice in Wonderland
to help capture him—and sometimes after dinner she would watch them play.
    “He passed away last month,” Carmen said, though she was still picturing the two of them hunched over the board. “I guess I haven’t been thinking clearly since.”
    “Oh, Lordy.” The woman’s face went through a montage of sad expressions; then she put her hand on Carmen’s arm and squeezed. “You’ve been through
everything
, haven’t you, dear? I don’t know how people like you stay so strong.”
    “Are there any other options?” Carmen asked, then immediately felt bad. If she was going to use Jobe’s death to elicit sympathy, she should at least be grateful when that’s what came her way.
    “Now, dear, I want you to show me where you found the lump.” The woman sat, pen poised.
    Carmen looked around the room, where half a dozen womensat. There were also two husbands—if they were here, the X-ray probably was not routine for their wives either. She pointed with her right finger to her left breast. “Here.”
    “I need an exact spot, if you can,” said the woman, pulling out a sheet with a crude outline of a female form. “Can you still feel it? Has the lump gone away since that first time?”
    Carmen shook her head, amazed that her fantasy was such an ordinary possibility. She’d been prodding herself obsessively, hoping the comet would simply disappear. But each time she’d checked, it was in the exact place where Danny discovered it nine days earlier.
    Now, she slipped her hand inside the robe and palpated her breast until she homed in on the location, touching herself directly above. “It’s right here,” she said, and the woman with the key made a neat cross on the top left side of the drawing. Like a treasure map.
    The procedure itself was as Carmen remembered. She was ordered to turn, lift her arm, slant her body at a weird angle so her breasts could be smashed between two plates. And as she had the first time, Carmen wondered how much damage was being done. A few of these lifesaving tests and a woman could end up with two stretched-out teats dangling to her knees.
    The technician did her right breast first, pictures from the front and the side, then released that one and gingerly lifted the left onto the Plexiglas platform of her machine. “Will it hurt, because of the …”—Carmen forced herself to speak the way others did, using the word they preferred—“lump?”
    “It shouldn’t. But if it does, you tell me the minute you feel anything and we’ll stop and readjust.” She was young, probably not yet thirty.
What did she know about these things?
But the girl patted Carmen’s back in a friendly way and scratched it a bit with her long fingernails, which felt good even through the fleece. Carmen relaxed and was surprised when her left breast lay squashed below her that the comet neither hurt nor popped from the surface of her skin. She’d been expecting to see an outline, the way you did with a baby’s foot when it kicked from inside.
    “Everything okay?” the technician asked.
    “Fine,” Carmen said, though it was at least in part a lie.
    They had her sit in the waiting room, still in her robe, in case they needed more “films,” as the technician referred to them. Carmen did nothing as she sat, neither reading a magazine nor drinking tea, but simply waiting for what she knew would come. And then it did.
    A man emerged from a back room—the first one on staff that she’d seen