That Nice Girl with the Dogs
“Well, she was on steroids, but that just slowed the progress of the cancer.” We fall silent, and I am relieved.
Then, just as my mind has gone to something else, my mother says, “So that one that died—what did she have?”
“Mom.” I look directly at her, hoping to plant the information once and for all into her brain. “Sirocco had cancer.”
“What kind of cancer?”
“Lymphoma, Mom.”
“And there’s no cure for that, is there?”
“No, there isn’t.”
At my exasperated tone, Mom looks down. She presses her lips together and starts jiggling a leg, bouncing it on the ball of her foot. These are her trademark signals she is hurt. After all, she is trying as best she can to make conversation, to talk about something she knows is important to me, but I am too slow and raw for this one.
I try to formulate a change of topic, but Mom says, “You know that light-colored one that was here before?”
“Yes, Sirocco.”
“She had cancer, poor thing,”
I am feeling an almost comic desperation. “Mama, we already talked about that.”
“Oh, we did?” She seems bemused. “Well, sorry,” she says with an apologetic smile. She looks around the kitchen. Within the circle of light, the two dogs are lying on the floor, dozing, listening.
She says, “That dark one.”
“That’s Sasha.”
