The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

On the eve of their silver anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband, Jimmy - still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school - to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary's life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband's disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search.
She boards a plane for the first time in her life and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary learns that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she discovers fills her with an inner strength she's never felt before: perfect strangers who come to her rescue, an aging, sometimes hostile mother-in-law who needs her help, friends who enjoy her company. And through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.
With the generosity and delicate grace that had readers falling in love with her bestselling novel, The Girls, Lori Lansens brings us another moving and beautifully wrought story, this time of a woman taking small yet courageous steps toward her authentic self.

Release date: February 10, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

“Lansens’s clear prose unveils the connection between a body weighed down by flesh and a spirit smothered by loneliness. Mary’s
odyssey of heartache and hope is not so much about finding her husband as it is about rediscovering herself.”


—Lisa Kay Greissinger, People

“Lansens’s hopeful and gentle third novel (after The Girls) opens in the same fictitious Ontario county as its predecessors, but the heroine’s journey takes her to a vastly different
landscape, both literally and spiritually…. When Mary’s handsome husband disappears on the eve of their silver wedding anniversary,
Mary wonders whether her size or her aversion to adventure chased him off. With few clues, Mary leaves her small town for
one of the first times in her life, venturing first to Toronto and then to the suburbs of Los Angeles, where a series of encounters
with strangers shakes her out of her lethargy…. She’s a wonderful character, and Lansens’s handling of her eventual transformation
into someone capable of compassion and acceptance is handled with a light but assured touch.”


—Publishers Weekly

“It’s the urgency of Mary’s quest, along with Lori Lansens’s capacity for humor and insight, that makes this book so riveting
and compelling.” 


—Anne Chudobiak, Calgary Herald

“Mary wins us over from the start…. Lansens limns the world of the chronic overeater with sympathy and grace.”

—Cynthia MacDonald, Globe and Mail

“Heartbreakingly funny and sad…. Lansens—who lived so memorably inside the heads of conjoined twins Ruby and Rose in The Girls—sketches another indelible female character here. Mary Gooch, all 302 pounds of her, stays mostly at home, where she has
worn a rut in the silver carpet between the bed and the kitchen, trying to fill the emptiness in her heart with potato chips
and candy bars. Though she dreams of a waspish waist, she’s also comfortable in her own ample skin, reveling in her nudity—‘inhaling
the night like a postcoital cigarette’ when no one can see her.”


—Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly

“A sensitive but deliciously comic account of Mary’s fight against the ‘obeast’ that has lived inside her since childhood,
The Wife’s Tale offers more than self-improvement: there are loving reflections on marriage and family in small-town Ontario, hilarious travelogues
about American obsessions like McMansions and vanity license plates, and a tender documentary of the improbable compassion
of strangers for fellow travelers. Of course, there’s plenty of self-discovery too. ‘Maybe happiness was generally misunderstood,’
Mary thinks. ‘Maybe happiness was the absence of fear. She felt herself at the launch of her own transformation, and wished
she had a Champagne bottle to crack against her knee.’ . . . Lori Lansens has more than a few tales worth telling.”


—Casey Cep, New York Times Book Review

“Lori Lansens creates a memorable protagonist.”

—Cameron Woodhead, Age (Australia)


“Lansens’s portrait of a woman who hides behind the Kenmore as protection from life’s heartache is earthy and primal in its
pain. Yet Lansens doesn’t resort to an overnight makeover to save Mary. Instead, our heroine uncovers a hidden strength she
had all along. Those who loved The Girls will be pleased that Lansens is back. Highly recommended.”


—Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

“Lansens writes with acute insight into Mary’s bingeing and depression, fully immersing readers in her protagonist’s struggle
to find a new and better self.”


—Deborah Donovan, Booklist

“Mary is an engaging character.”

—Anne Stephenson, Arizona Republic

“Sensitively written and thought-provoking.”

—Katherine Whitbourn, Daily Mail

“Delightful, laced with a breezy, snappy style, good humor, and keen observation…. The Wife’s Tale is a good read: a page-turner, a life lesson, and a rare romp through the maze of untempered indulgence, rueful remorse,
and, in Mary’s case, self-discovery, which make up the world of the morbidly obese.”


—Nancy Schiefer, Toronto Sun

“Lansens’s rendering of the hell that is compulsive eating somehow transcends these overarching positions, eliciting simultaneously
compassion, revulsion, and, for anyone who has ever struggled with emotional eating, undeniable recognition…. Mary Gooch becomes
real and unforgettable.”


—Margaret Wheeler Johnson, Slate

Alone in the evenings, when the light had drained from the slate roof of her small rural home, and when her husband was working
late, Mary Gooch would perform a striptease for the stars at the open bedroom window: shifting out of rumpled bottoms, slipping
off blousy top, liberating breasts, peeling panties, her creamy flesh spilling forth until she was completely, exquisitely
nude. In the darkness, she’d beg her lover the wind to ravish her until she needed to grasp the sill for support. Then, inhaling
the night like a post-coital cigarette, Mary would turn to face the mirror, who’d been watching all along.


The mirror held the image Mary Gooch knew as herself, a forty-three-year-old brunette standing five and a half feet tall,
so gilded with fat that hardly a bone from her skeleton could insinuate itself in her reflection. No hint of clavicle, no
suggestion of scapula, no jag in her jaw, no scallop in her knee, no crest of ilium, no crook of knuckle, not a phalange in
the smallest of her fingers. And no cords of muscle, either, as if she were enrobed by a subcutaneous duvet.


Mary remembered, when she was nine years old, stepping off the scale in Dr. Ruttle’s office and hearing him whisper the word to her slight mother, Irma. It was an unfamiliar word, but one she understood in the context of the fairy-tale world. Obeast. There were witches and warlocks. So must there be ogres and obeasts. Little big Mary wasn’t confused by the diagnosis. It
made sense to her child’s mind that her body had become an outward manifestation of the starving animal in her gut.


Such a pretty face. That was what people always said. When she was a child they made the comment to her mother, with tsking pity or stern reproach, depending on their individual natures. As she grew, the pitying, reproving people made the comment
directly to Mary. Such a pretty face. Implied was the disgrace of her voluminous body, the squander of her green eyes and bow lips, her aquiline
nose and deep-cleft chin and her soft skin, like risen dough, with no worry lines to speak of, which was remarkable because,
when she wasn’t eating, that’s what Mary Gooch did.


She worried about what she would eat and what she would not eat. When and where she would or wouldn’t. She worried because
she had too much or not nearly enough. She worried about hypertension, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke,
osteoarthritis. The contempt of strangers. The mouths of babes. Sudden death. Protracted death. She worried all the more because
all the worry made her sleepless, and in her dreamless hours hosted more worries, about her husband, Gooch, and the approach
of their silver anniversary, about her menial job at Raymond Russell Drugstore and about her list, which she imagined not
as Things to do but Things left undone.


Weight is only numbers on a scale, she told herself, and her mirror just another point of view. Squinting at her naked reflection
when the moon was waxing and the angle just right, Mary Gooch saw beauty in the poetry of her contours, in the expressive,
expansive, edible flesh, and understood why an artist sketching nudes might find appealing the mountainous gut, and favor
the pocked shore of sloping thigh, and enjoy the depth and shadow of pendulous breasts and multiple chins. A shape ample and sensuous, like the
huge round vase handed down on the Brody side of the family, in which she arranged her ditch lilies in the spring. Or like
the dunes of virgin snow on the hills beyond her home outside small-town Leaford.


Mary wished to be a rebel against the tyranny of beauty but was instead a devotee, coveting its currency, devouring images
in glossy magazines and broadcast TV, especially the kind that chronicled the lives of the rich and famous. She lingered over
the body shots, outlining with her fingertips, like an appreciative lover, the rock-hard abdominals and concrete glutes, sinewy
arms and pumped deltoids—so daring on a woman—coltish legs, wasp waist, swan’s neck, lion’s mane, cat’s eyes. She accepted
the supremacy of beauty, and could not deny complicity in the waste of her own.


It was often an unbearable burden for Mary Gooch to carry both her significant weight and the responsibility for it, and she
naturally sought to blame. The media was her target, just as it was another of her addictions. She would tear through the
pages of her magazines, gratified by the celebrity cellulite, horrified by the gorgeous anorexics, noting the fall must-haves,
sneering with the critics about fashion disasters, then realize she’d eaten a quart of premium ice cream, coerced by the advertisement
beneath the picture of the TV cutie with poor taste in men. Mary knew it was all the media’s fault, but finger pointing was
too much exercise, and she couldn’t sustain the blame for long. Especially since she was so often confronted by the stupid
genius of just saying no.


Jimmy Gooch, Mary’s husband of nearly twenty-five years, read Time and Newsweek and Scientific American and The Atlantic and National Geographic. He watched CNN, even when America was not on red alert, and cable talk shows with clever panelists who laughed when nothing
was funny. With Gooch working late most evenings, and busy playing golf on the weekends, Mary reckoned they were down to spending
only a handful of waking hours a week together and wished to relieve the silence between them, but didn’t share Gooch’s passion for politics. The couple sometimes
found common ground in musing on the vagaries of human nature. “Read the essay at the back,” Gooch had said recently, tapping
her on the head with the rolled-up magazine—a gesture she charged was aggressive, but he argued, playful.


The article spoke of the ills of North American culture, the mistaking of acquisition for success, gluttony for fulfillment.
Gooch clearly meant for Mary to draw a comparison to her gastronomical indulgence, and she did, but the piece was provocative
in its own right, posing the question: Are people generally happier now, with instant access and quick fixes and thousands of channels and brands to choose from,
than they were before the Industrial Revolution? Mary instantly decided no. In fact, she wondered if the opposite was true, that in the hardscrabble life of her pioneering ancestors, whose singularity
of purpose was clear, there had been no time to ponder happiness. Chop wood. Carry water. It was impossible to imagine that
the early Brodys, who’d cleared Leaford from the Burger King to the gas station, had ever endured a sleepless night.


Having read enough magazines, and having spent hours lurking in the self-help section, Mary Gooch knew that she wasn’t alone
in her morbid obesity or her abstract malaise. Symptoms of despair were everywhere, and formulas for success within her grasp.
A person could get a good night’s sleep and wake refreshed, shed unwanted pounds without dieting, make dinners for six in
twenty minutes or less, rekindle sexual passion, and achieve five personal goals by the end of the month. A person could.
But in spite of the step-by-step instructions, Mary could not. The secret remained classified. She appeared to be missing some key ingredient, something simple and elusive, like honesty.


Mary had been raised without religion but instinctively drew a separation between her spirit and body. Her spirit had no gravitational
pull. Her body weighed three hundred and two of earth’s pounds—the two pounds significant because she’d once vowed that she’d kill herself if she got up beyond three hundred. Another
promise broken. Further recrimination. The truth of what drove her hunger was as present and mysterious as anyone’s God.


Certainly grief fed the beast, and with her encroaching middle age came more and greater opportunities for it. Every passage,
but particularly the corporeal kind, further embellished Mary Gooch. Thirty pounds for her mother, accumulated over many months,
years ago, although Irma was not actually deceased. The babies, so long ago, had added fifteen and twenty pounds respectively.
Then it was the ten when her father died in the spring. And another ten with Mr. Barkley in the summer. She felt vaguely charitable
assigning the poundage to her loved ones, in the same way that she was mildly comforted by calculating her load in UK stones,
in the British style, rather than North American pounds.


During her painful cycles of grief and gain, Mary thought it would be better to have any religion and lose it, than never to have one at all. She relied on dubious knowledge and remedial understanding to cobble
together a system of beliefs that she was forever editing and amending, depending on the latest magazine article or persuasive
celebrity endorsement. Except for the rule of three—an enduring belief, if unfounded by religious text. Terrible things happen
in clusters of three. Death, serious accidents, financial ruin. One. Two. Three. What would end the trilogy after her father
and Mr. Barkley, she wondered. Another death? Or just more deceptively endurable misfortune?


Hauling her corpulence the few steps from her truck in the parking lot to the back door of Raymond Russell Drugstore, starved
for breath, heart valves flushing and fluppering, Mary would think, It’s me. I will end the trilogy. Here comes my fatal heart attack. Drowning in regret, she’d see everything clearly, the way reckless adults do, too late. But like all things, the feeling
would pass, and she would click on another worry, each one dense and nuanced enough to sustain her interest, with intriguing links to distract her from the larger picture. The ticking of time. The machinations of denial.


Mary Gooch did not so much pray to God as wish to God, of whom she was sporadically unsure. She wished to God for an end to all wars. And that her manager would catch his
scrotum in the cash register at work. She wished for her mother’s peaceful death. And that she had something nice to wear
to her silver anniversary dinner party. And then there was the wish that pre-empted all other wishes, the one she wished hourly,
eternally—that she could just lose the weight. This wish Mary would offer to her uncertain God in the smallest and most humble of voices. If I could just lose the weight,
Gooch would love me again. Or sometimes it was, I could let Gooch love me again. The state of her body was inseparable from the state of her marriage, and the universe.


If I could just lose the weight.

For all her uncertainty about God, and in addition to the rule of three, Mary Gooch believed in miracles.

The night clock never ticked for Mary. On this autumn night, the eve of her silver anniversary, the clock thumped, a downbeat rhythm in time with her heart, alternative jazz, restless, like a tapping toe or a wandering eye, awaiting the
first notes of an uncommon melody.


Adrift, mattress springing leaks in the dark, thoughts scurrying through portals, drawing conclusions, mixing metaphors, Mary
felt beads of perspiration mingle in a stream down her temple. Slick and sealish in her faded gray nightgown, a triangle of
sweat tickling her crotch, she was dizzy from the dueling sensations of heat and hunger. Heat from the furnace, which she’d
tried to shut off earlier, was still blasting through the floor grates in the tiny country bungalow. Hunger, as always, shouted
to be heard.


Mary held her breath, listening to the sound of a vehicle in the distance. Her husband Gooch? No. Gooch would be coming from
the east. She tossed her undulating flesh and rode the tidal waves until she was breathless on her back, humming a tune to
distract the obeast within. She hummed more loudly, hearing faint assurances from a distant chorus that she was not alone. There was hope in the harmony, until hunger snickered from the kitchen.


In the hallway, damp nightgown suctioned to her spread, eating from a foil bag she’d grabbed from the kitchen counter, Mary
checked the temperature on the thermostat, licking her salty finger before she slid the lever from Off to On to Off again.
The furnace purred, disregarding its directive. Huffing, she set her bag down and threw open the basement door. Scent molecules
of must and mildew fled like trapped birds as she flipped on the light, struck by the sight of the rotten bottom stair she’d
broken last winter. She hesitated, then closed the door, deciding the heat was to be endured until Gooch got home.


She checked the clock, reminding herself that her husband was often late, and sometimes very late. Mary had kept such nightly
vigils over the years, never questioning her husband’s whereabouts, never admitting her fear of the dark. She returned to
her chip bag, kettle-fried shards piercing her palate, painful but soothing, like the blues. Enough, she told herself, then, Just one more. And one more. And just the one extra.


Parched, she opened the old Kenmore refrigerator and, while gulping cola from a huge plastic bottle, saw through the window
above the sink moon glow filtering through fast-moving clouds. Flipping her tail of chocolate hair, she sailed across the
tile floor and pulled open the window, welcoming the breeze, stirred by the fall fragrance of ripened red apples and soft
yellow pears, wet earth and decomposing leaves, a savoury decay that would soon fade away when winter came to embitter the
car-exhausted air.


The breeze kissed her soft skin and she shivered, thinking of Gooch. A feral cat yowled in the distance and Mary swiveled
instinctively to check the silver bowls on the floor near the back door. Mr. Barkley’s food and water.


Prick of pain. Gone. No Mr. Barkley. No more worry about Mr. Barkley’s food and water. Mr. Barkley’s worm infection. Mr. Barkley’s
tooth decay. Mr. Barkley had been Mary’s boy, and no less loved by her than any human child by his mother. A decade ago she had rescued the kitten from a hole into which he’d fallen at the
back of the garage, and named him after a basketball player in hopes of getting Gooch to bond. She nursed the mewling wretch
from a turkey baster filled with infant formula from the drugstore, cradling him in a hand towel, grooming him with a little
wet paintbrush to simulate a tongue. She referred to herself as “Mama” when Gooch wasn’t around. Mama creamed turkey for Mr.
Barkley. Mama let Mr. Barkley sleep in the scooze of her cleavage. Like any mother, Mama didn’t love Mr. Barkley less for
his meanness, even though the cat spent the best of his ten years hiding behind the living-room drapes, shedding orange hair
on the green chair, and hissing when Mama was late with his dinner.


On a heat-wave summer night in July Mary had skulked into the kitchen for a snack, surprised to find Mr. Barkley collapsed
in the center of the cool tile floor. She nudged him with her toe and panicked when he didn’t hiss and flee. “Mr. Barkley?”


Unable to kneel down, she pulled a red vinyl kitchen chair to the sprawled cat and, using her feet as cranes, raised him high
enough that she could grasp his front paws and drag his limp body up to the shelf of her bosom. Seeing that he was dying,
she stroked his ginger head and whispered, “Mama’s got the Tuna Treats,” so his final thoughts would be hopeful. A brief spasm.
Mr. Barkley present. Mr. Barkley past. And no idea why he died, except a guess that he had eaten a poisoned rodent. The vinyl
chair mourned as Mary rocked side to side, kissing Mr. Barkley’s snout, which she’d never done in life for fear he’d bite
her nose.


The lights were on and the air foul when Gooch returned very late that night to find the contents of the fridge weighting
the table. Mary was tonguing rhubarb pie from the well of a large silver ladle and didn’t care that she’d been caught. When
Gooch stared at his wife, not comprehending, she managed to choke out, “Mr. Barkley.”


When Gooch still didn’t understand, she gestured to the refrigerator. “I didn’t want the bugs to get at him.”

Thoroughly disturbed by the thought of the dead cat in his refrigerator, Gooch set his large comforting hands on her shoulders
and assured her that he would dig a hole first thing in the morning. He kissed her cheek and said, “Near the big trees out
back, Mare. We’ll plant some bulbs to mark the grave.”


“Iris,” Mary agreed, chewing and swallowing. “Purple.”

With birds rejoicing in the oaks and Gooch towering at her side, Mary sprinkled dirt on Mr. Barkley, whose stiff body she’d
wrapped in two hundred feet of plastic food wrap, before Gooch set him down in the dark, moist hole.


Now, gazing into the brooding night past the trees and beyond Mr. Barkley’s grave, Mary was sorry to see that there were no
lights in the neighbors’ houses to either side. It made her feel less lonely when she could observe other people’s quietly
desperate lives. The fighting Feragamos with their brood of teenage boys lived in the ramshackle Victorian an acre to the
west. Penny and Shawn, the young couple with the newborn who screamed at each other whenever the baby cried, were on the other
side of the creek. The Merkels’ house beyond the breadth of cornfields was much too far to spy on without binoculars, though
she doubted there’d be much to see. And the scrubby orange farmhouse where the Darlen twins (famous because the two girls
had been born joined at the head) used to live was now the local history museum and kept only summer hours.


The old willow at the end of the drive was suddenly assaulted by a hard-driven wind. Parked beneath the tree, the red Ford
pickup truck with its custom-made sunroof gathered teardrop leaves. The sunroof had been jammed open since spring. It had
been on Mary’s list of things not getting done for months: Sunroof repair.


Come home, Gooch. Come home. Why are you so late? Where are you? Mary’s worry prompted a craving and she found the beef jerky
stick she’d hidden from herself, tucked in the back of the cupboard behind the soup cans. Chewing, she remembered her list.
Sunroof repair. Furnace repaired? Replaced? Checks due at St. John’s Nursing Home. Work extra shift for Candace. Gooch’s suit from the cleaners. She opened the buttons of her nightgown and padded back to her room, farting indignantly, tired of the list, making promises
to tomorrow. Tomorrow, self-confidence. Tomorrow, self-control. Balance. Restraint. Grace. Tomorrow.


Whiffing the scent of self-pity as she found her lonesome bed, Mary Gooch thought, as she often did, about a boy she used
to know.


As a girl, Mary Brody had been content spending her summers reading novels in her room or listening to loud music on the radio
while her peers gathered in tube tops to smoke their mothers’ Peter Jacksons and share their true despair. There were girls
down the street, Debbie and Joanne, who, like Mary, read books in their rooms, and with whom she believed she might have struck
an alliance, but Mary preferred to be alone, with her hunger.


Even as she wallowed in her feasts, she worried about her mother’s keen eye for inventory, and made frequent trips to Klik’s
corner store to replenish the stock, using money sent by distant Brodys for Christmas and birthdays. Irma had started working
full-time as secretary at the tool-and-die shop when Mary was five years old, and had told Mary then that, if there was ever
an emergency, she should go get help from Mr. or Mrs. Klik.


The Kliks were a stern couple with six children, one of whom, Christopher, in Mary’s grade, had been diagnosed with a rare
cancer the year he turned twelve. Mary, the fat girl, and Christopher, the sick boy, had some bond of distinction, though they rarely exchanged more than irritated glances.


Occasionally, as Mary Brody left Klik’s dusty store, she’d find the boy parked at the bike rack near the trash bins, perched
atop his one-of-a-kind moped, which Chatham Cycle Shop had donated because he was dying. Christopher’s photograph had been
on the front page of the Leaford Mirror, his frail white fingers gripping handlebars, the shop owners, puffed with charity, holding his emaciated body steady on
the seat. Mary hoped that Christopher hadn’t read the story below his picture, even as she envied the boy his prognosis. He
seemed to be better loved for the fact of his imminent demise.


Exiting Klik’s store one day when she was in seventh grade, carrying a loaf of bread and a jar of honey and a pound of mixed
candy, Mary had cringed to find Christopher hunched beside his moped, holding his legs at his ankles. He looked to be in pain,
though he didn’t appear to have fallen. She’d stopped without drawing near and asked, “Want me to get your mom?”


The boy shot her a look. “No.”


They turned their attention to a large black crow flapping around the trash can. The bird landed on a plastic bag and cocked
his head to watch them. “I hate crows,” Mary said.


“They hate you too.”

“I don’t care.”

“Like my motorbike?”

She raised a brow, pretending she’d just noticed.

The small boy sat up, finding her pretty eyes. “Wanna ride it?” She thought the question rhetorical. “Nobody but me’s ever
ridden it.”


“I know.”

“Everyone wants to.”

“I know.”


“You can.” Christopher glanced down the road to ensure that there were no approaching cars or strolling people. Then he drew his shirt up over his concave chest. “Do this,” he said,
pinching the pink nipple on his right breast, “and you can ride it.”


Mary had not ridden her own bicycle yet that summer, feeling the effort of peddling and balancing too great for her big, tired
body, and she was electrified by the prospect of such vehicular freedom. Had Christopher been a well boy, she might have run
to call Irma at work, but he was a sick boy, and Mary didn’t consider his request prurient, just odd.


She stepped forward, reaching her stubby fingers toward the boy’s translucent skin. When he batted her hand away, she was
shocked by his speed and strength. “Not to me, dummkopf.”


“You just said,” Mary said, screwing up her face.

“To yourself,” Christopher wheezed.


“Oh,” she breathed. “Sorry.”

“Do it and you can ride my motorbike.”

Fair trade. She lifted her ribbed tank top, allowing her pillowy breast to spill forward, and pinched her rose nipple lightly
before pulling the fabric back down.


Christopher grinned broadly. “Pervert.”

“Can I ride it now, Chris-to-pher?”


His regret seemed genuine. “I didn’t think you were really gonna. My dad’ll kill me if I let anybody.”


She sat down on the curb beside him, scooping slimy jelly beans from her bag, chewing with vigor. Remembering her manners,
she offered the bag to Christopher, who said, “I don’t like candy.”


Mary was incredulous. “But you own the store! You could have all you want!”

Christopher paused for effect. “I could.”

They were quiet a moment. The fact of the child’s premature death stirred within their mutual sense of injustice.

“No fair,” Mary said finally.

Christopher curled his lip and sucked his snot succinctly. For the moment, no distance between them. “You’d be pretty if you weren’t so fat,” he said plainly.


“Okay.” Mary shrugged, flattered. Studying him, she wondered, not for the first time, if he knew he was dying. She was astonished
when he answered her thoughts.


“I’m dying from what I got, so.”

It was clear to Mary that Chris