Chapter 1

December, 2006

“Hi, sweetheart.” The deep voice on the answering machine sounded strained. “I finally heard back from the doctor, and… well. There were malignant cells in the fluid around my lungs.” A pause. “Call me.”

I stood in my kitchen, my knees shaking. He’d carefully phrased it so that if a kid happened to be listening, they wouldn’t understand what he was saying. But I knew well enough what “malignant cells” meant.

Not again, I thought.

I listened to the message twice more, but it didn’t change. My husband had cancer.

Again.

*****
August, 1984

“Hi. I’m Don.”

Government was my first class, and I’d wound up standing in the hall with a bunch of other kids, waiting for the teacher to show up. I was a geeky girl in glasses, who was always reading or writing, but I had the usual teenage interest in boys, and I noticed this one mostly because he was tall. He stood literally head and shoulders above everyone else. He had a nice, wide smile, too.

“I’m Ellen,” I answered, smiling up at him. Way up. He told me later he was six foot four and a hundred and fifty-five pounds, which made him about as big around as a pencil. But despite his skinniness, and the normal teenage acne, he was cute, in a geeky way. His most obvious feature, besides his height, was a prominent nose, which he liked to tell people he’d often considered renting out as condo space. His most remarkable feature was a pair of ice blue eyes. Depending on the shirt he wore, they could turn vivid sky blue, turquoise, or almost clear.

But on that first day, all I really noticed was his height and his smile. The teacher opened the door and let us in, and we walked in together and sat down next to each other, talking.

For the rest of our life together, we never really stopped talking.

Read Chapter 2 here.