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into liver cancer; she didn’t know. She just knew that what lay ahead was not anything she wished for herself. She certainly did not want cancer. She preferred to be finished. She did not want to spend any more time at the hospital, and she did not want to face the treatments that she knew were once again inevitable.
    Margaret placed the recipe card on the table, put up her recipe box, and went to the bedroom. She stood in front of the mirror on her dresser and lifted her blouse and looked at her flat, scarred chest again. She must have done that a hundred times a day, but she just needed to keep looking at it, as if seeing what had been taken from her gave her strength, helped her accept the disease inside her body.
    She held her blouse up and studied herself. She noticed the right side, the scar that used to be a breast. Then she looked at the left side, the newer scar slightly more raised than the other.
    She could see how her chest appeared merely flat and smooth, likeher back or down along her sides under her arms. She looked closely at herself and realized that it wasn’t that upsetting. She was too old, she told herself, to worry about not having breasts. She had been asked about reconstruction surgery. She knew that many women who had breast cancer had chosen that option. She knew lots of women who added implants, but she had decided the first time that was of no interest to her. And now, studying herself as she was, she knew she had made the right decision.
    She had only herself to please, and she was just as pleased to be without breasts as she was to have a doctor build her a set. Now she was without both of them, and at least, she thought, she was even. Both sides of her matched, and in some way, that actually felt more normal than she had when just one breast was taken and she felt misshapen and off balance.
    She lowered her blouse and looked at her face, considered losing her hair, her eyebrows, wondered if she should go ahead and get a wig or just wear hats and turbans like some of the other women she had seen. She already had a couple of wool caps from the last time she faced chemotherapy. She knew they were sitting on a shelf in the closet.
    She slid her fingers through her short hair and smiled as she remembered the night all her friends had shaved their heads after the first surgery. She thought about how panicked she was when they started, how she tried to make them stop; but then how it felt to see their gift, their sacrifice, and how deeply and well she slept that night as she lay near her four baldheaded friends.
    Then Margaret laughed when she remembered how it was when she didn’t have to have chemo, how shocked the women were when they heard the news that she would keep her hair while they wouldhave to be bald without her. Louise had chased Beatrice out of the doctor’s office. Margaret had gotten a big kick out of that.
    She recalled how the women, her friends, celebrated the success of that first surgery and how Charlotte, the former pastor, had told Margaret that she had prayed for that very result. Charlotte hadn’t even minded that she had shaved her head for nothing, she had said.
    Margaret stood staring at herself in her mirror and wished Charlotte was still in town. Hope Springs had gotten a new pastor almost three years ago, after more than a year of searching. Margaret liked the new fellow just fine. He was from the area, wanting to get back before he retired. So he was older and he was a good preacher, prayed gentle prayers; but he was a man, and try as he might, he could not be present with Margaret in this crisis in the way that young Charlotte had been able to be.
    Margaret thought about the two pastors and didn’t know if it was just because Charlotte was a woman and he was a man or if it was their personalities. Charlotte was often quiet, never pretended to know something she didn’t. It was this kind of humble way for a minister to act that Margaret