As the staff cleaned up, I went into the back, made myself an espresso, and opened up the New York Times. I read the “Dining and Wine” section and the book and movie reviews, then started trying to fill in the spaces Jake had left blank in the crossword. I checked my phone to find two messages from my father in Ouray, Colorado; one from my little sister, Jane, who lived with her husband and three kids in the house we’d grown up in; and one from Beau and Camilla inviting us to dinner. I sent Camilla a text, telling her we were busy, but didn’t call anyone back home.
I had escaped my tiny town in Colorado as soon as I graduated from Ouray High School. Class valedictorian (number one out of twelve seniors, thank you very much), I was offered a full scholarship to Columbia and stayed on for graduate work. But as I was finishing my master’s thesis, “Recognition of Despair in the Essays of David Foster Wallace,” I found a lump in my right breast. My mother had died of ovarian cancer when I was eight and I’m a person who takes charge, so when the lump was found to be cancerous and a full genetic workup showed I had a BRCA1 mutation, I chose to undergo chemo and have my breasts removed. (That was an aggressive course of action, and I had no regrets. My sister, Jane, wouldn’t even get the test that would show if she had the BRCA mutation that killed our mother. Instead, Jane married a man who would take over the family grocery store, bore three children, and lived in complete denial. She drove me insane.)
In the midst of all this, I met Jake. I was walking through SoHo on my way to meet my Advanced Kierkegaard study group when Jake said, “Hey! You! How about some jerky?”
I stopped. Nobody talked to me that way, not since my diagnosis (not ever). I’d been “the girl whose mother died” all my life. Now I was “the girl with cancer.” When a heavy guy in boots and a UT baseball cap yelled, “Hey! You!” I took notice.
“Sure,” I said.
Jake laid out the various jerkies: beef, quail, venison. Hawaiian flavor, honey haba?ero, lemongrass chili, spicy beer. He cured the meat in his apartment, he said. I told him my dad was a butcher, so the plain beef had better be good.
“It is,” he said. “Go on, try it.”
I took a bite. Jake was right—the jerky had a spicy tang that melted to a savory richness as I chewed. I nodded. “Pretty fucking good,” I said. (Was this flirting? I could feel blood rushing to my face.)
“Pretty fucking good?” said Jake. He shook his head. “You’re a tough cookie.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Try the lemongrass chili quail,” he said. “If that doesn’t knock your socks off, I don’t know what.”
It was a warm spring afternoon, and a recent rainstorm had allowed the streets to release their steamy tar scent. My mastectomy and reconstruction scars had healed, and the chemo hadn’t made me sick yet. I wore a short pink skirt with espadrilles. The quail jerky was awesome.
“You love the quail,” said Jake. “Am I right?”
I nodded, trying (and failing) to keep from grinning.
“What about a cold beer?” said Jake. “Let’s be honest, you’re going to buy me out, so I might as well call it a day.”
I thought of my study group. We were reading Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and the latest pages argued that in order to live passionately you had to come to terms with the fact that death was inevitable. I could see my classmate Diane in my mind’s eye, the grim set of her mouth, her lank hair. Diane had written what she called a “Kierkegaard joke” on her notebook: I shall certainly attend your party, but I must make an exception for the contingency that a roof tile happens to blow down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend.
“Have you been to Pete’s Candy Store?” said Jake. I shook my head. “It’s not a candy store,” he explained, “it’s a bar. What do you think?” He was so good-looking, so cheerful … I couldn’t say no. So I said yes.
By nightfall, we were lying in the bed of Jake’s truck (he’d unrolled camping mattresses and pulled pillows from the cab), eating jerky and sharing confessions. Above us, the city lights were a constellation. I even told Jake about my cancer, and he said, “Oh, who cares about boobs?”
“I care,” I said, and added, “To be honest, my new boobs look better than my old ones.” My father, God bless him, had supplemented what my insurance paid toward reconstruction. A free boob job, I’d joked to my sister. Lucky me.
“Give me another kiss,” said Jake. I did. He smelled like home, in a way—like smoke and meat. People seemed to move around us so quickly in the dazzling night. I could hear Jake’s heart as I nestled close. Later, on his squeaky bed, I let him touch the scars that ran across my chest. I didn’t know what had come over me.
“Do they hurt?” said Jake.
“Not anymore,” I said. “And they mean I’m safe.”
“Yeah?” said Jake.
“Who knows?” I said.
Jake kissed me deeply, and I was surprised to feel tears leak from the corners of my eyes.
By the time the chemo put me into early menopause and I told Jake I could never have kids, we’d been basically living together for a few months. “We’re young,” he said. “Let’s be in love for a while before we worry about anything, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, giddy at his mention of love.
When they were finished filling my body with potent, corrosive drugs, I was left cancer-free but exhausted, like a castaway tossed to shore. I didn’t want to be anywhere near New York, the city where I had been sick. Once, Central Park had seemed romantic to me, a green wonderland where I could spend a lazy day, but now it was the place I took a cab through on the way to Sloan Kettering. Cabs in general were a problem—ever since I’d thrown up in one, I couldn’t hail a taxi without feeling bile in the back of my throat. When I told Jake I wanted to leave the city, he said, “My dad’s talking about retiring. What if I took over his BBQ place in Texas?”
“Texas?” I’d said. I’d never been to Texas.
“Lockhart is pretty small,” said Jake, rubbing his chin. I loved his close-cut beard, loved to touch it myself. “What about Austin?” he said, eyes lighting up. “You’d love it, Al. It’s completely different from New York. People smile at you.”
“I don’t like it when people smile at me,” I said.
“They talk to you as well,” said Jake. “Like, a lot.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“It’s so warm,” said Jake. “And it’s legal to sell food from a trailer. You could help me, if you wanted. We could sell BBQ right along Barton Springs Road. That’s a swimming hole, Barton Springs. You can lie on your back in the water and feel like a king. But that water is cold.”
“What about Fiji?” I said. I’d never been there either, but it sounded like somewhere different, somewhere no one would know me and what had happened to me.
“Austin,” said Jake firmly. “And my family can host the wedding. We’ll cater it ourselves, from our BBQ truck.”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” I told Jake, my bighearted (and big-bellied) love.
“Say yes,” said Jake. “To all of it. Why not? We’ll adopt seventeen Chinese babies and live happily ever after.”