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Libby, a phone operator. She waved from across the waiting room. Then there was the man with the bandage around his head. A younger woman, probably a daughter, always had to bring him. She noticed an older man with a goiter on his neck, or something that looked like a goiter, in the corner, looking at a fish.
    “Good night,” she said to the nurses, tying her scarf around her head. Paper Santa Clauses were pasted to the walls; a tiny tree gleamed dully in a corner. Outside the waiting room, the hospital corridors extended dim and yellow all the way to the revolving door. Mrs. Harrington pushed at the glass, and the first gusts of wind rose up, seeping in from outside. She pushed the glass away, emerging, thankfully, outside, and the cold, heavy wind seemed to bruise her alive again, brushing away the coat of exhaustion that had gathered on her eyelids while she was inside. It was cold, very cold. Her small heels crushed frozen puddles underfoot, so that they fragmented into tiny crystal mirrors. Rain drizzled down. California winter. She smoothed her scarf under her chin and walked briskly toward her car, a tall, thick woman, a genteel yacht in a harbor.
    The car was cold. She turned on the heat and the radio. The familiar voice of the local newscaster droned into the upholstered interior, permeated it like the thick, unnatural heat. Rain clicked against the roof. Slowly she was escaping the hospital, merging into regular traffic. She saw the stores lit up, late-afternoon shoppers rushing home to dinner. She wanted to be one of them, to push a cart down the aisles of a supermarket again. She pulled into the Lucky parking lot.
    In the supermarket the air was cool and fresh, smelled of peat and wet sod and lettuce. Small, high voices chirped through the public address system:
     
    Our cheeks are red and rosy,
    and comfy cozy are we;
    We’re snuggled up together
    like birds of a feather should be.
     
    Mrs. Harrington was amazed by the variety of brightly colored foods and packages, as if she had never noticed them before. She felt among the apples until she found one hard enough to indicate freshness; she examined lettuce heads. She bought SpaghettiOs for her youngest son, gravy mix, Sugar Pops. A young family pushed a cart past her, exuberant, the baby propped happily in the little seat at the top of the shopping cart, his bottom on red plastic and his tiny legs extending through the metal slats. She was forgetting.
    An old woman stood ahead of her in the nine-items-or-less line. She was wearing a man’s torn peacoat. She bought a bag of hard candy with seventy-eight cents in pennies, then moved out the electric doors. “We get some weird ones,” the checkout boy told Mrs. Harrington. He had red hair and bad acne and reminded her of her oldest son.
     
    Back in the car, she told herself, “Try to forget. Things aren’t any different than they were yesterday. You were happy yesterday. You weren’t thinking about it yesterday. You’re not any different.” But she was. The difference was growing inside her, through the lymph nodes, exploring her body.
    It was all inside. At the group therapy session a woman had said, “I think of the cancer as being too alive. The body just keeps multiplying until it can’t control itself. So instead of some dark interior alien growth that’s killing me, it’s that I’m dying of being too alive, of having lived too much. Isn’t that better?” the woman had said, and everyone had nodded.
    Or is it, Mrs. Harrington was thinking, the body killing itself, from within?
    She was at a red light. “If the light changes by the time I count to five,” she said, “I will become normal again. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”
    It changed.
    And maybe if I had asked for six, Mrs. Harrington was thinking, that would have meant another ten years. Ten years!
     
    As soon as Mrs. Harrington got home, she hurried into the kitchen. Her son Roy was watching “Speed Racer” on television. He was