I glare at her. She keeps nudging me, smiling as she pushes her bowl toward me. She wants me to get her seconds. “With more kimchi, too, please,” she says sweetly.
“Ugh, fine.” I roll my eyes, getting up. “I need sauce anyway.”
“Am I ever going to meet this asshole?” she calls out from the living room. “I guess it’s pointless to ask if he’s white.” I add more rice to both our bowls in silence, along with kimchi. I dump a fuckton angry scarlet chili shards into June’s bowl. I’m annoyed at my sister, but I’m aware that something’s loosening between us.
“Here you go.” I hand her the bowl before sitting down, smiling just as sweetly.
“What’s his name?” She picks up a whole pepper with her chopsticks and sets it on the chrome top of the coffee table.
I eat my food.
“Let me guess—it’s Tyler. Ooh, no, it’s Tanner. Oh, what’s up with that guy Chase Rice? Isn’t he on a TV show? How perfect is that name for a white dude who only fucks with Asian chicks?”
She sets another chili beside the first one. I get up and hand her a paper towel torn in half. Even in such a nice house, June’s a slob.
“So, what’s up? Like, cancer-wise?”
June raises her brows. “Cancer-wise?”
I just wanted a change of topic.
“Got my pathology report,” she continues, extracting more peppers.
“And?”
“They referred me to a gynecologic oncology surgeon.”
“And?”
“I’m gonna go see them.”
Gynecologic oncology surgeon. I glance down at the gloopy red-brown sauce in my bowl. “When?”
“In the morning.”
She’s not smiling anymore, utterly focused on her napkin. It’s why she called me. It’s why she wanted home-cooked food.
“Wait? You have surgery tomorrow?”
She sets her bowl on the table and doesn’t immediately respond.
“June?” Everyone in my family does this, gets really pissed off or shuts down when you ask them a question they deem too personal.
“June?” I ask my hands quietly. My nail polish has chipped off except on my thumbs. I try another tactic.
“Where’s the appointment?” I ask conversationally, pretending to take another bite of food.
Past her head, on top of her pale wood credenza, on a shelf below the TV, I see the pastel-colored DVD case from the Gilmore Girls box set. The familiar sight makes the tightness in my chest catch at my throat.
“Everything’s on the Upper East Side,” she says finally. “Total fucking schlep. And I hate when they take the FDR.”
“Take the Q.”
“I have cancer. I’m not poor.”
I choke a little.
My phone lights up on the coffee table. Jeremy again. Her eyes flit over to it, so I flip it over.
“We’re just talking tomorrow. Going over the biopsy results.”
I wonder if I’m supposed to go with her, but I feel stupid asking after all this time. She probably has friends she’d rather be with. People she’s close to.
“Thanks,” I tell her. She looks up at me as if I’ve said something stupid.
“Will you do something for me?”
I plonk my bowl down in my lap and nod solemnly.
“Can you just go the fuck to school? Please? I know that boy problems”—I wince at the wording—“are a lot for you, but don’t get distracted.” She sighs and closes her eyes for a beat. It’s painful to see how annoying she finds me. “Focus in class, do well, and over the next few weeks, or even months, try not to give Mom and Dad anything to worry about.”
I glance up at her. “Do you really think it’ll be months?”
She sighs again. I’m insufferable. “I don’t know, Jayne.”
“Okay.” I keep nodding.
“You’re so smart when you make the effort,” she says, and instantly my eyes well up. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear her say. Just not in this context.
“I’ll never be as smart as you,” I tell her.
June picks her bowl back up and laughs. “I didn’t say you were anywhere near as smart as me. Just…” Another loud exhale. “I’m smart in ways that make me stupid in others. I’ve made so many fucking mistakes, Jayjay.”
My throat tightens.
“You’re going to be okay though, right?” I hear the warble in my voice.
“What do you want me to say?”
I want her to tell me the day, the hour, and the exact minute when she’ll die. And I want her to go away so I can start preparing for it now with zero new memories because I have enough that I’ll miss.
She gets up. The conversation is over. When I stand, I’m struck again by the heft of it. My sister has cancer.
I follow her into the kitchen. From behind she’s so small. There’s so little of her to invade.
She stoops to start loading her dishwasher. “Siri, play The Graduate soundtrack,” she calls into the room.
I snicker, I can’t help it. “Have you ever even seen The Graduate?”
She turns to me. “You know I haven’t.”
“It’s a classic.”
“I’m good.” She leans over to pop a Cascade pod into the machine. “Who has time for whole movies? I’ve seen clips. I love the soundtrack. I get the idea.”
It takes every ounce of restraint not to fight her again on this. She switches on the dishwasher.
“I can’t believe you have a dishwasher,” I tell her, genuinely impressed. It’s like having a backyard in New York. “And that you use it.”
“I know,” she says, smiling, leaning up against the counter with her arms crossed. “Every time I run it, I imagine Mom shitting a brick.” Our parents have a dishwasher in Texas, but they only use it as a drying rack. June once modeled an elaborate graphic to prove how much more water was wasted doing dishes by hand, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Mom would have an aneurism if she found out detergent pods were even a thing. She dilutes dish soap.
“Man, when’s the last time I had your mapo tofu?” I rinse my bowl and hand it to her. “Probably high school.”
“It was high school. Couple months before I left for college.” She takes a long, pensive sip of water.
That’s when I remember too. She’d made it for Dad. As a consolation. And how on that lonely night, the three of us barely ate any.
chapter 11
I’m clutching the still-warm Tupperware on my walk to the subway. Cancer must feel like such betrayal, knowing that somewhere deep in your body you’re manufacturing tiny bombs that detonate and catch fire.
I barrel down the stairs to the train.
June doesn’t look sick. She always looks that way. Piqued. She has resting antagonism face. If there was visual evidence of frailty, all of this would be more believable. It’s not as if I don’t know how mortality works, but for June it doesn’t track. It’s that absurd cognitive schism where when somebody dies, all the thunderstruck dummies go, but I just saw them. The totality of death is inconceivable. It’s intolerable that you’re completely, utterly, irrefutably alive, filled up with decades of inside jokes, goofy facial expressions, all the love of your family, and then not.