it filled me with panic.
“There must be health services or—”
“Yummy, I’ve been taking care of your parents for almost a year now, cooking and cleaning up after them—”
“I know, and they appreciate it. They really do. Mom was telling me how much Lloyd enjoys your pot roast.”
“I change his colostomy bag, Yum.”
“Oh. He wears one of those?”
“He needs to be changed twice a day.”
“Wow.” I watched her. She had taken over feeding Poo, and the older kids were eating in the living room. I really wanted a drink. I’d remembered to stop at the liquor store on the way back from the nursing home, but I had been too strung out for the supermarket. I knew there were some cans of soup in the cupboard and a bag of french fries in the freezer, and I figured I could feed the kids that, but when we pulled up to the house, the smell of cooking wafted across the yard from the kitchen. Phoenix and Ocean, sensing a hot meal, perked right up, and they tore across the snow, leaving me lugging the baby. As I approached the house, I had a sudden strong sense of how it used to feel to come home on a wintry night, in from the cold, and smell dinner in the oven.
Cass had a casserole heating. She took one look at my face and held out her arms for Poo, planted him in his high chair, then instructed the kids to take their dinners and eat in front of the TV. They hesitated, but when I didn’t object, they scampered off, delighted. I could hear them quarreling about the remote control, but finally they found some show about cops and settled down. Cass spooned macaroni into Poo’s mouth while I told her about the tender meeting between Lloyd and his grandchildren, and that’s when she’d casually sprung the subject of Lloyd’s care.
Now, thoroughly spooked, I poured whiskey for us both. I sat back down at the table, raised my glass, and glanced around the room. It felt so strange, to sit at my parents’ kitchen table drinking whiskey, that I had to laugh. Cass got it.
“I feel like we should hide it or something,” she said.
“Yeah, like we’ll get caught.” I took a long sip. It felt good. It could feel even better. “Hey, do me a favor. Smoke a cigarette so I can have a drag?”
“Have one of your own.”
“Can’t.” I glanced toward the living room, where a police siren wailed. Phoenix said something, and Ocean’s laughter peaked and faded like a whitecap on a wave. “They’re worse than parents.”
Cass nodded. “In my purse.”
The purse was a loaf-shaped thing, something her mother would have carried. I fumbled around, half expecting compacts and hairnets, and found the pack. Old Gold Filters. I lit up and inhaled, and when the nicotine hit, so did the feeling of being twelve or thirteen, getting high on the rush of another small rebellion. I passed the cigarette to Cass, and for a fleeting moment there she was, the girl I grew up with, who knew how a cigarette should be smoked and shared because I’d taught her.
She exhaled and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Yummy. Good to have you back.”
Hearing her words, though, I felt another wave of panic. “It’s good to see you, too, Cass,” I said. “I just wish I could stay for longer.”
I didn’t wish any such thing, and she knew it. She looked at me evenly, as she pulled Poo from his high chair.
“I mean, I’ve got to get back to teach, and the kids have their school and all. . . .” I took another drag of the cigarette, passed it back to her, and changed the subject. “God, that tastes good. I quit fourteen years ago, when I was pregnant with Phoenix.”
“Oh.”
“You ever quit?”
“Oh, sure. A bunch of times. Every time I got pregnant, in fact.” She had Poo on her lap now, and she was careful to direct the smoke away from his curls, into the air above his head. Her jaw jutted upward, tightening the muscles in her throat. She paused and watched the smoke disperse, as though she were remembering something, and when she spoke again, her voice was quiet.
“I’d get pregnant, quit, miscarry. Then do it all over again.” She ground out the cigarette in the saucer, pressing the filter down to extinguish every last spark.
“Oh, Cassie, I’m sorry. Do you know why? I mean, was there a reason, or—”
“Oh, jeez, Yummy.” She looked at her watch over the hump of Poo’s back. He was on the edge of sleep. There was a finality in her voice, as though she wanted to wrap up the conversation, get to her feet, and leave, but instead she shifted and sighed.
“Could be anything,” she said, rocking the baby gently back and forth. “At first we thought nitrates in the groundwater, so we got the well tested and got filters and everything, but it didn’t help. Then we thought it might be one of the other inputs—stuff we use around the farm. For a while Will even thought it might be some kind of chemical exposure from overseas or something.”
“Overseas?”
“He fought in Vietnam,” she said. “And it could be any of these things, or none of them, or maybe even some combination. It’s just impossible to know for sure. And even if we could prove it was something we were using, what could we do?”
“Can’t you stop using it?”
She looked pityingly at me. “You really don’t know shit about potatoes, do you? We got three thousand acres, it’s not that easy.”
“But if it’s poisoning you . . .”
Poo had fallen asleep and started to slump. Now she hauled him higher on her lap. “Banks don’t lend money to farmers who don’t use inputs. Not sound farming practice.”
Poo woke and started to make little mewling noises. Cass bounced him and smiled. “Mind you, we haven’t stopped trying. We’ve still got hope.”
The baby butted her with his big, sleepy head, burying his face in her chest.
I held out my arms. “I’m just weaning him,” I told her. “He’ll go back to sleep. You want me to take him?”
But Cass shook her head. I watched my son’s dark, pudgy fingers knead the front of her pink sweatshirt, looking for my breast, her breast, any breast. Not finding—
“He likes you,” I said, then I realized what was wrong.
Cass was resting her chin on the crown of Poo’s head, watching me. When she saw the look on my face, she nodded. “Both of ’em.” She spoke into Poo’s soft baby curls. “It’s been seven years now and no sign of reoccurrence, so they think they got it all.”
“Oh, Cass.” The sounds of a car chase seeped in from the living room. I tried to say something else, but I’d run out of words.
“I told you my mom died of it,” she said. “I’m the lucky one. As soon as we found the lump, I decided to have them take everything, just in case. The whole shebang.” She smiled and looked down at her chest. “Remember how I used to complain about my cup
