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goodbye to someone.”

Chapter Three
    Andie
    I felt pretty proud of myself this morning. In the first place, I got dressed. Not in sweats but in a pair of khaki shorts and an aqua tee shirt Miranda bought me for my birthday. I’m a size smaller since my illness and not too many clothes fit well, but these did.
    I washed my hair and ran a pick through it while it was still wet so that it lay in waves instead of kinking up. I was getting used to the white, and I kind of looked forward to not having it colored every five weeks.
    I even put on makeup, something Jean and I do well only because Suzanne’s drummed it into us when she gives us our free samples. All of her practice on us is the reason, we tell her, that she does the best makeovers in the Midwest.
    I gave myself a critical look in the mirror. As long as I was wearing a bra, you couldn’t really tell that my boobs didn’t match. The discovery made me ridiculously happy, and I turned away from my reflection quickly. There was coffee in the kitchen calling my name.
    Jake called, as he’s done every few days since I got sick, and we talked while I drank my first cup. He said he’d seen Suzanne the night before.
    “It was fun,” he said. “You should come up here for a weekend sometime, Andie. It would be good for you. Things don’t have to interfere.”
    “Maybe sometime.” I frowned. “But, Jake, have you told Suzanne?”
    The smile left his voice, and I was sorry I’d asked. “No,” he said, “but I will. Nothing’s going to happen there. Trust me, okay?”
    We’d just hung up and I’d poured my second cup when there was a knock at the back door. Expecting Miranda, I hollered, “Come on in,” and set about making a fresh pot.
    My children are as addicted to coffee as I am. Only young Jake says my coffee is too good for him. He’s a cop and considers himself a specialist in sludge.
    But it wasn’t Miranda at the door; it was Paul Lindquist. He was holding a green Mason jar with a ribbon tied around its neck and eight tulips inside it. He had on long denim shorts and a polo shirt in a peculiar faded green that turned his eyes the exact same color.
    He looked, as my kids would say and frequently do, fine. Very fine. Tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth fine.
    I was really glad I’d gotten dressed and put on my makeup and that he couldn’t tell by looking at me that my breasts didn’t match.
    He thrust the flowers at me and pulled something out of his pocket, holding them up in front of me. When he spoke, it was all in a rush as though he’d practiced it on the way to my house.
    “I’ve got two tickets to the Indianapolis Indians game this afternoon. I’d like you to go with me and have dinner afterward. If we leave right now, we can have lunch before the game. You look really beautiful with those flowers up around your face.”
    I’m not going to go into the subject of breast cancer, because I covered it all in that book, but I’ll say right here and now that if you’ve only got one thing to say to one of its victims, “You look really beautiful,” is an excellent choice.
    I said, “Do I need to change?”
    He shook his head, smiling. All of a sudden I could feel myself blushing like a kid on her first date. God, he had great teeth. “Do you want some coffee before we go?” I moved to the table to push aside the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowl and set the flowers in the middle of it.
    “No, thanks, but we can take some along.”
    I poured the coffee into two commuter cups the convenience store out on the highway had given away, and snagged my purse off the back of one of the ladder-back chairs. “Okay,” I said, cursing my wobbly voice. “I guess I’m ready.”
    He took the cups from me and set them on the counter, lifted my purse from my shoulder and put it beside them, and said, “There’s something I need to do first, that I’ve been wanting to do for more years than either of us wants to think