Dear Brother, You Loved Me Too Late novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: No Treatment

Angie refuses chemotherapy and signs the form herself, then tells her best friend. A text from her father gives her until Friday to collect her things.

The oncologist's office opened at eight, and Angie was sitting outside it at 7:40 with a paper cup of vending machine coffee.

She had slept on a bench in the Evanston train station until the first train.

Then she had ridden it up and down the line until the doctor's office opened.

The doctor was a tall woman with short grey hair and no patience for softening things.

She had liked her for that yesterday.

Today she sat down across the desk and said, "Tell me what you want to do."

"What are my choices?"

"Chemotherapy. It might shrink the tumors for a few months. It might give you a little more time than three. It will also make you very sick, most days, for most of that time."

"How much more time?"

"Honestly? Weeks. Maybe two months, if you respond well."

"And if I don't do it?"

"Then you'll have less time, but more of it will be yours. You'll have pain. We'll manage the pain."

Angie looked at the window, where it had started to snow.

"My father would say I should fight," she said. "If he knew."

"Does he know?"

"No."

"Does anyone?"

"You."

The doctor waited.

"I want to be awake," Angie said. "I want to be able to walk to a diner and eat toast. I want to say what I need to say to a few people before I can't."

"That's a real answer."

"Then I'm not doing the chemo."

"You're an adult. It's your decision." The doctor slid a form across the desk and a pen on top of it. "But I want you to sign this yourself, knowing what it means."

Angie took the pen.

Her hand did not shake.

She wrote her name at the bottom, Angelica Rose Boswell, and the date, and pushed it back.

It was the first thing she had decided all year that nobody else got a vote in.

The doctor took the form and did not smile, but her face eased.

"One more thing," she said. "Diffuse gastric cancer at nineteen is very rare. It's usually inherited. I'd like to run a gene panel on your blood. Do you know of any family history of stomach cancer?"

"My mother died when I was born."

"Of what?"

"Complications," Angie said. "That's what my father says. I never got to ask what kind."

The doctor was quiet for a moment.

"Records from that time may tell us something," she said. "If you can get them. A rush panel takes four or five days."

"I'll find them."

"Angie, you're going to need someone with you. Not for the paperwork. For the nights."

"I know."

She went out into the snow.

She did not take the train home, because she did not have a home to take it to.

She rode the train south to Rogers Park instead and walked to the Lakeshore Diner, where she had worked afternoons for two years.

The bell over the door jingled.

Clover Lund was behind the counter with a coffee pot in each hand and a pen stuck through her red curls.

She looked up, and her whole face lit, and then she looked closer.

"You didn't come in last night. You didn't answer your phone. Your dad texted me asking if I'd seen you, like you'd stolen something."

"Hi, Clo."

"What happened?"

Angie sat down on a stool.

She told it in the order it had happened, without crying.

The music box, and Delaney's smile, and her father's voice, and what Colin had said.

Clover set down both pots and came around the counter.

"He said what?"

"I think he meant it."

"I'm going to drive to that house and throw a brick through his stupid sunroom."

"There's something else."

Clover stopped.

Angie took the envelope out of her coat and set it on the counter between the napkin holder and the ketchup.

Clover read it standing up.

She read it a second time sitting down.

She did not scream, which was how Angie knew it had landed.

"How long have you known?" Clover said.

"I picked up the results yesterday. I went back this morning and signed a paper saying no to the chemo."

"You what?"

"I'd like to eat toast, Clo."

Clover pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, hard, and looked at the ceiling.

Her shoulders went once.

Then she dropped her hand and her chin came up.

"Okay," she said, in a thick voice. "Okay. We're going to make so much toast."

The bell over the door jingled again.

A blue pickup had pulled up to the curb outside.

A tall man in a paramedic's navy jacket climbed out of it with a bag of groceries in each arm.

Clover wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

"That's my brother," she said. "He's off shift. You're staying with us, and don't argue, because I already called dibs on you in my head."

Angie's phone buzzed on the counter.

It was her father, the first message since the foyer.

Pick up your things Friday at five. Apologize to Delaney or don't come.

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