Anne looked like she might counter this, but instead bit her lip, giving me an inexplicably apologetic look. It made me want to take the chest and give it to her out of spite.
“Oh, honey, we should go.” Kathy glanced at her slim, gold watch. “I told the wedding planner we’d be at the dress shop at one sharp.”
“Patricia’s coming to the fitting?” Anne asked. “I thought it was going to be us.”
“It’s just one more person,” Kathy assured her. “And this way, if we do make a change, she can be ready to help us implement it.”
Just then, I heard footsteps, hurrying down the path between the boxes. A beat later, Kasey was hollering to Angela’s partner, Janine. “Quick, can I get a water? Cat passed out.”
Passed out?
“What happened?” Anne said.
“I don’t know. She just went down.” Janine was digging into a nearby cooler, pulling out a dripping bottle. I grabbed it from her as Kasey turned and headed back outside. I followed.
Everyone in line was rubbernecking at my mom, who was now flat on her back, Liz crouched beside her. I could hear a siren, getting closer, closer.
“Where’s that water?” someone yelled, and then I realized I’d frozen where I was. Somehow, I made myself move, across the sidewalk. When I got to her, my mom was trying to sit up. I thrust the water at Liz, who unscrewed the top.
“Drink,” she instructed.
“Slowly,” Kasey added.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It’s the heat,” Liz said, gesturing for my mom to sip the water again. “And I don’t think she ate anything this morning.”
“I don’t need an ambulance,” my mom said. But her voice was wavery, and I suddenly felt scared. “I’m fine.”
Still, she did not protest moments later, when a paramedic arrived and affixed a blood pressure cuff to her arm. “You’ve given blood lately?” he asked, nodding at the Band-Aids on her inner elbow.
“Preop,” she replied. “I’m having surgery next month.”
“For what?” He was fiddling with the gauge.
“Breast cancer.”
“Got it.”
My mom took another sip, then looked over at me. Once again I was with her in uncharted territory, everything new. I realized now that at graduation, and all my life since she’d left, her mystery had been in some ways a comfort. No longer. Another side of knowing a person, it turns out, can be knowing too much.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The good thing,” Liz said, putting on her signal, “is that the hospital is only eleven minutes away.”
I loved Liz. But it was the third time she’d said this since we’d gotten in the car to head home.
“It’s so funny how I remember!”
She was telling the story again?
“When Mom insisted on living in the Woods even after her broken hip,” she began, the words so familiar by now, I probably could have said them in unison, “I was a nervous wreck. The only thing that made me feel better was how close Bly General was.”
Travis clocked it for her,I thought.
“Travis was the one who clocked it,” she continued, “door to door. Eleven minutes. It literally helped me sleep at night.”
I was waiting for the next part—about how after all that, they’d never had to call an ambulance, my grandmother moving to assisted living before she began to truly decline—when her phone buzzed on the console between us. As she grabbed it, the turn to the lake came up ahead. Right at eight minutes.
