Free One True Thing by Anna Quindlen Page A

absolutely right,” my mother said.
    “I remember when you won the essay contest,” said a nurse named Gina as she ran a needle into the catheter the doctors had implanted just above my mother’s heart so that the nurses wouldn’t have to hunt around for veins. “The Port-A-Cath will be a lifesaver later,” she’d said to me. “For the morphine.”
    “The morphine?” I’d asked.
    “Well,” she’d said, looking down at a tray of instruments, “maybe not.”
    Usually the two of us were alone, but one morning, I remember, there was an elderly woman who described in detail her hip replacement and the subsequent convalescence which had cast a long shadow over her life. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she asked my mother why she was there. “I need a chest X ray for a life-insurance policy,” my mother replied.
    “If I had told her the truth, I would have been there forever,” my mother said after her treatment was done that day.
    The woman could not have been from Langhorne, or she would have known about my mother’s illness. Everyone in town did. They were all a little too bright, a little too chatty when shewent to Phelps’s hardware or the supermarket. “How nice that Ellen’s home,” they said, but no one asked what I was doing there, because they already knew. “How well you look, Kate,” they lied. Lord, I thought, what a shock it would be if any of them ever had the guts to lean across a counter and say, “How’s the cancer?” But despite the scarves and hats my mother began to wear over the ruin of her pretty curls, despite how thin she became, I never heard the word “cancer,” not ever, until after the cancer was gone.
    The only person who used the word was Mrs. Forburg, my senior English teacher. One day soon after I came home I received a note in the mail addressed to me in her angular vertical script. It was short and straightforward, just as she was. “Ellen dear,” she wrote, “I think of you fondly and often, not only because of your mother’s illness but because of your own responsibilities. Would you come to dinner soon? My own mother died of cancer when I was young and perhaps we could be of help to each other. All love, Brenda Forburg.”
    I tucked it in a corner of my desk blotter and took it out from time to time to call. But there never seemed to be the time.
    For despite the chemotherapy, and the days afterward when I could hear her heaving pitiably in the master bathroom, despite the weekly blood tests and exams, I suspect that my mother would have said that those were wonderful and full months for her. She and her daughter finally had the relationship she had always imagined would accompany the canopy she had made for the four-poster bed in the attic bedroom, the scrapbooks she kept of report cards and literary magazine poems, the hours she spent on birthday parties and Care packages to college and camp.
    We went to the movies, took a day trip to the beach, ate lunch a few times at little restaurants whose ads she had clipped from magazines and newspapers. She got tired very easily, and once or twice the way she breathed made me frightened. But she refused to be housebound, or to let me be.
    “What exactly are you doing all day?” Jules asked one nightwhen she called to regale me with the stupidity and arrogance of the Yale man who had my former job.
    “I’m being a girlfriend,” I said.
    “Picking over the perfidy of men?”
    “Shopping,” I replied.
    I suppose today that I should say that those months were wonderful for me, too, a chance to make amends for a lifetime of taking for granted. The truth is that while it was happening I tolerated it, and when I thought about it I hated it all. In the beginning I thought it was because of all that I was missing, because of the life just an hour away that was passing me by, in the city where you could become yesterday’s girl in a weekend.
    But it was more complicated than that, and simpler, too. As my mother