The Instant When Everything is Perfect by Jessica Barksdale Inclan Read Free Book Online Page A

be here now.
     
    Who knew how grief could turn a cell against the body that made it?
     
    A line has formed at the registration desk because the clerk is flirting with a man, taking her time swiping his card and laughing, tilting her head just so to show off her long lovely jaw line. Two women here for varicose vein surgery turn to each other and cluck, clutching their paperwork. The television flickers on, news, all disastrous. The weather will turn, winds will tear down power lines and delay traffic. The president will start another war, either in some underdeveloped country or here, at home, between gays and straights, conservatives and liberals, businessmen and environmentalists. The Congress and Senate will battle over the budget that is so far in deficit, Sally can’t even begin to imagine what the number would look like written down. Schoolchildren will lose years in a horrid educational system. Katherine will sit at home in Philadelphia in front of the screen and yell Fuck them! Fuck them !
     
    On and on it will go until the nurse swings open the door and calls out, “Sally Tillier.”
     

Three
     
     
     
    Robert
     
     
     
    Robert puts down the recorder, clicking pause, and stares at the chart in front of him. His last patient, Jackie Lagalante, has just had her final check up after her TRAM flap reconstruction. It wasn’t easy. In fact, when Jackie came in for her first consult and then later, after she’d gone through chemotherapy and radiation, she was thin, her bones like hooks under her skin. But she was a good consumer—she’d watched the videos carefully, and saw that the TRAM gave the best results. Breasts that were of her own skin, own flesh, supple, and natural.
     
    “I want those,” she’d said, the bangs from her wig dipping down over her eyes. “These are the breasts I want.”
     
    Robert didn’t know what to say, except, “You’re too thin.”
     
    Jackie stared at him, blinking once, twice. “Then I’ll gain weight. I’ll grow the fat for my own breasts, and you’ll move it from my stomach to the right place. I read about it. It can happen.”
     
    In his other life, Robert would have said, “Yes,” immediately, assuring Jackie that all of this was possible, and maybe more. These new breasts would be shapelier, better formed, and feel better than anything she could get with an implant. And certainly, this newly grown flesh would be cancer free, not prey to the disease that flowed in her lobes and ducts. He would have extolled the virtues of nipple tattoo and given out the phone numbers of former patients whom she could call for glowing reports on his technique, bedside manner, and wise counsel.
     
    But he was not in his other life now, so what he did was to nod and agree with her plan. They could do it. It would work. And her TRAM flap was, as it turned out, successful. But he didn’t promise anything. He never does, anymore.
     
    He clicks back on the recorder. “Patient was recommended to continue with her onocological check-ups and tests and was told to make an appointment if she notices any tissue loss.”
     
    Robert turns off the recorder, pushes his hair off his forehead, and picks up the appointment schedule his assistant Carla prints out each morning. Sally Tillier. From last week. Impending double mastectomy. Thin, too, like Jackie Lagalante.
     
    He puts down the schedule, rubs his forehead. Sally Tillier brought her daughter to her last appointment, probably because of something she’d read in a book about having an advocate. Probably the Breast Surgery Nursing Coordinator counseled Sally to bring another set of eyes and ears to every appointment. Sometimes Robert wants to open the door wide and shoo the family member/advocate out of the door, hustling them and their little notebooks and tape recorders out of the office. Too many eyes, too many ears. But he liked the daughter, felt it in his face when he opened the door, a flush of blood at what? A kindred