32: Minnesota

“I have cancer,” she says.

“Oh Jeez,” he says, “I’m so sorry.” He stands there a little longer then wanders off. The two women turn back to each other.

“You know, Bess,” Deb says, “you could break it to them a little easier.”

Bess chews her pierogi slowly and takes a swig of beer. “Do you mean less quickly,” she asks, “or less glibly?”

“Well, it’s a bit of a conversation-killer, any way you slice it, but you could be a little nicer about it, you know.”


Deb leaves, but Bess is still drinking, thinking again about how she doesn’t want her life to be one of those stories where the afflicted wife wastes away while looking out the window at the prairie, or wherever, feeling some combination of dread, anger, despair, philosophicality, and, finally, acceptance.

Or where it’s the husband playing out the remaining time God gives him on this good Earth, getting right with himself and going out and helping the homeless, or fishing with his son, or something.

Or where it’s some solitary person, and the story takes on a metaphorical quality, something about sickness and society.

Or where it’s just beside the point, whatever that may be.

In reality, it’s been a year since Bob died, and it still seems entirely out of character, how he went from being a big old pink-cheeked lummox to nothing in no time flat.

It had been his idea to refer to his tumors as “The Vikings,” because they’d showed up one day without warning and whatever they didn’t rape or enslave they burned. It had ended badly, but for a month or two they’d both laughed whenever the evening sportscast started, or the words “cancer” and “ravaged” were used together.

She takes his picture out of her wallet. In it, he’s showing off the purple and yellow logo he had tattooed on his cancer-ravaged chest. She laughs because it was so stupid and so perfect.

She orders another beer and turns back to the TV.


By last call Bess is crying and sends a text to Pam. “I’m watching SportsCenter reruns,” she writes, “and I’m drunk.”

“Bess?” Pam replies. “It’s two in the morning.”

She gets in her car and drives, full of the kind of grief where you go the wrong way down the street for no reason, where you end up at the lakeshore with your headlights off, nose of the car dipping toward the water.

“Goddamn it,” she says, because she’s one of those characters after all, staring out over Lake Wobegone and trying to remember a time when driving in didn’t seem like the only reasonable thing to do.

She can imagine Garrison Keillor narrating this on MPR. “It was cancer,” he intones, sad and tongue-in-cheek, and then you hear the sound of Foley-work oars and whistles across the water as The Vikings come.

She chuckles and turns the car radio on, throws the shifter into reverse. The end will come soon enough, but she isn’t done laughing yet.