Chapter Five. Melanie
CHAPTER FIVE
MELANIE
I hurry past the break room door, hoping my coworker, Tom, won’t notice me, but the swish of my scrub pants gives me away.
“Melanie Jane Campbell,” he says with the cadence of a headmaster calling out the truant student, “you are not skipping your lunch again.”
I turn to him, holding up two decks of cards like the guilty evidence they are.
Tom crosses his arms. “You can’t keep giving up your breaks. You are running yourself ragged.”
Just this last weekend, I stayed up late to bake Tom’s husband my famous turtle cheesecake for his birthday.
And Tom never minds asking me for a lift home when he’s had one too many margaritas at happy hour.
People love to tell people pleasers how to stand up for themselves, but don’t mind leaning on us when they need it.
I don’t hold it against them though. It’s just how people are.
And besides, I love people fawning over my cheesecakes.
“We stopped yesterday when Mrs. Whitmore was up by seven hundred points, and I can’t have that old biddy thinking she can clean the floor with me.”
Tom chews his lip, considering this. Tom is tall, with thick dark hair and thick dark eyebrows over chocolatey dark eyes.
The old ladies here go gaga for him. Earlier today, I heard Doris telling Lenore about how good his tight rear end looked in his navy scrubs.
“Canasta again?” he asks. He already knows it’s a lost cause.
I smile. “Canasta.”
“You better not let her win.”
“It’s all I can do to keep up.”
I spin on my heel and make my way to room 301, picking up Mrs. Whitmore’s chart before I enter.
My stomach dropped the first time I saw her name on my patient list. Tom isn’t from Anhalt—he doesn’t know the Whitmore name, doesn’t know the way people in this town still lower their voices when it comes up.
I take extra care with all my patients, but with Mrs. Whitmore it feels different, like a kind of duty. Playing cards with her is the least I can do.
I was in the same grade as her twins, Ingrid and Isabelle.
Of course I remember the day Izzy went missing—everybody my age does.
At the time, I only saw it through the lens of a teenage girl, whispers at lockers and candlelight vigils.
Now, with a seventeen-year-old daughter of my own, I can’t stop myself from imagining what it must have been like for her mother.
Mrs. Whitmore is sitting up in bed, pillows propped behind her back, watching HGTV on a volume so low I don’t even know that she can hear it. It happens a lot here. Too much time to think. So much time to worry.
When she turns to me, I hold up the cards. “Mind if we finish our game?”
Her face brightens. I love that, love when people look at me like I’ve made their whole day, their whole week.
“Honey, you bring that chair over here.” She straightens the hand-knit blanket that’s been laid over her hospital sheets.
She is wearing a soft, pink terry cloth robe her husband brought from home.
Her hair is smoothed, a rich dark shade like black coffee, though faint threads of gray glint at the roots.
Mrs. Whitmore has always been a portrait.
Even after surgery, she still finds the energy to put on makeup, to put in gold hoop earrings.
She pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper from between the pages of a paperback book, holds it at a distance to read our score from yesterday. “I believe,” she says, as I deal out the cards, “that I was in the lead.”
“Tides are about to turn, Mrs. Whitmore.”
She chuckles.
Two days ago, she told me that she’d be missing her weekly canasta night with “the girls.”
When people receive a cancer diagnosis, the fear comes from the unknown. Will the treatments work? Will I die? As a nurse, I don’t have the answers to those questions.
But canasta? I can learn to play canasta. That’s why I always tell families to maintain every bit of normalcy they can. Because the day-to-day anxieties arise from the disruption of the known. Bring a favorite blanket, a familiar terry cloth robe. Keep your routines.
Mrs. Whitmore discards a four. I draw two and discard a four of my own. She picks up the deck, showing me the two hidden fours in her hand. The smallest of pleased smiles turns her lips.
I raise an eyebrow at her. “Oh, you are clever.”
“I’ve just been playing too long.” She uses her little pencil and scrap paper, tallying up her canastas from the spoils of the deck. There will be no comeback.
“That’s a lovely bouquet,” I say of the flowers on her bedside table.
“Isn’t it? It’s from the ladies on the pageant board. They’re trying to butter me up.” She laughs.
Mrs. Whitmore has been a member of that board for as long as I can remember. She was the very first to win the title of Miss Lone Star Princess fifty years ago.
“Well, who wouldn’t want to stay on your good side?” I rearrange the cards in my hand. “My oldest is entering this year.”
Hannah blindsided me with the news last night. I love my daughter to pieces, and I think she’s beautiful, inside and out, but Hannah is not your typical pageant girl.
When she was little, we called Hannah “The Ham.” A wild mass of curls, a Jack Nicholson brow, and a smile that spread her chipmunk cheeks wide. She’d go to church in July, wearing Christmas pajamas with a pink tutu, Peppa Pig rain boots, and seven plastic bracelets.
For heaven’s sake, my mother would sigh.
What happened to all those cute dresses I bought her?
Mama was always pushing the pinks and sparkles, the patent Mary Janes.
I’d shrug and say, She dresses herself, feeling a secret bloom of pride.
It was the one time I’d allow myself to disappoint my mother, to disappoint anyone, because I was preserving Hannah.
When Hannah started kindergarten, she became best friends with a boy named Samuel.
They were inseparable, holding hands on the playground and sharing snacks.
One morning, Hannah tried on a frilly pink dress from Mama.
Waylon whistled when she walked in, told her Samuel would have hearts in his eyes.
I know my husband meant well, but in that moment, I could have killed him.
Hannah wore the dress to school, and everyone—Waylon, Mama, the teachers—told her how pretty she was.
After that, she refused to wear any of her old favorites. I’d hold up her blue T. rex shirt, reminding her how much she loved dinosaurs, but she’d stamp her foot. I don’t want to be cute. I want to be pretty.
Waylon yelled from the couch. Since when do you care what she wears?
I didn’t care what she wore. I cared about the why. I didn’t like that she looked at her closet, looked at her reflection, and thought about what someone else might think.
So I don’t like the idea now of her getting up on a stage to be picked at and judged.
And, to be honest, I don’t like that she’s getting dragged into this whole thing by the likes of Sarah Lynn Preston.
Hannah insists the two of them are friends, but I can’t help my suspicions.
I know from experience the way pretty, popular girls can find a target in a chubby girl who doesn’t fit their mold.
“They want me to do the crowning,” Mrs. Whitmore says. “I’ll have to get my hair done.” She touches the top of her head gently with the tips of her fingers. “That’ll be nice, I suppose. Getting my hair done. While I still have it.”
My eyes go to hers, and she looks away. She blinks, and I see the glitter of tears on her lashes.
“You must think I’m so silly,” she says, pressing her fingertips into the corners of her eyes. “Crying over hair.”
I pull a tissue from the packet I keep in my pocket, hand it to her. “Mrs. Whitmore, you get to feel however you feel.”
She dabs at her eyes and nose. “I don’t want people to look at me and just see a sick person. I’m still me. I don’t want to remind people of death.”
I pick up my cards just as the door opens behind me, and we both turn.
The blood drains from my face, leaving me lightheaded and cold. The cards slip from my grip, fall to the tile floor like a tumble of leaves.
I don’t bend to pick them up. I can’t take my eyes off the woman in the doorway, Mrs. Whitmore’s daughter, the one who didn’t disappear.
If there is anyone who makes people think of death, it is Ingrid Whitmore.