“This is horrible,” I said. “This is a horrible story.” I did not want to hear any more secrets. “I’m sorry.”
“So the doctor said, ‘Chop ’em off and start over,’ so that’s what I did.” She put her hands to the sides of her breasts. “And they’re so much better now! Than the way they were. I kind of hated them before actually. They were flat and droopy. They looked like silver dollar pancakes. These look great in anything.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said. I got all hazy for a second. I thought about Thomas touching mine while he looked over my shoulder. I remembered a porn movie playing behind me on the TV set. Imitation and real, all at the same time. Thomas got to have it all.
“And Peter Dingle stuck through it all with me. All those years of surgeries—we were together for four years, and three of them I was in and out of the hospital all the time. He held my hand in the waiting room. He took off work. He helped me pick out what my new breasts were going to look like. He told me everything was going to be okay. He wanted to marry me and have children with me and spend the rest of his life with me and he didn’t care what was real and what was fake because he knew what was going on inside of me. That’s what mattered to him.”
We both started crying.
“I could feel him right here.” She clutched her hand to her chest. “He was my heart.”
I did not want to hear another word, but she could not stop. And I could not tell her to stop.
“We had the wedding date set. I had my dress. I looked perfect in it. We were going to start all over together. I went back to the doctor for a checkup. I was all clear, my breasts were healthy. But then it turned out there was another spot, but it wasn’t on my chest. It was down there.” She pointed toward her crotch. “Ovarian cancer. Just like that—” She snapped her fingers. “I had to have a hysterectomy and chemo and the whole works.”
I looked at her wig. I wondered how many colors she had.
“I’m all empty inside now,” she said.
“You’re not,” I said.
“And that’s what got him. After everything, it was the babies. He wanted his own children. ‘This isn’t what I signed up for,’ is what he told me. ‘It isn’t what I signed up for either!’ is what I told him. He tried to let me down gently, but I fell just like a rock.”
I hugged her, and she did not hug me back, and I said, “No, you hug me now.” I made her hug me. I think she felt better.
“Not his fault he’s a man,” she said into my shoulder. “That’s what they all want, is kids of their own. Men like that.”
I pulled apart from her and looked her in the eye. She was all glassy and drunk. I was, too, but I tried to concentrate. “It’s just wrong,” I said.
“Oh is it?” said Valka.
WHERE I CAME FROM, people did not drink much, and they sure did not drink till they were crazy. Where I came from, if people drank too much, they got quiet. Sure there were the high school kids running around the fields on a high after the football games. They liked to whoop it up, make a little noise. They were young: they needed to explode sometimes. But they would have been doing that whether or not there was a little nip of something in their thermos or not. Even those parties Jenny went to, the ones that got her in all the trouble, I knew those kids were just making each other warm at night.
And there was my mother, she drank until she got mean, but again, that was already in her. When I was little, she would drink herself so mean she would tell me awful bedtime stories. Jenny, too. It was a special kind of mean between a mother and her daughters. A whispered mean.
Mostly I thought about the farmers, who would drink themselves through the winter. That, or pray. Either way, they got quiet. We were a quiet town. One thing was possible: there was a lot of space between us, between our homes—there was so much land. Maybe if people got noisy I did not hear it. But I do not think so. I lived there my whole life and I think I would have known. If people were losing it, someone would have told me.