Hearing him, Yolanda is for a moment no longer sick; for a moment, she’s her old, pre-dying self, and they’re about to arrange a steak dinner followed by pleasant sex in his dusty bedroom with those beautifully oiled shelves that he’s filled with paperback mysteries and power tools and assorted bottles of vitamins. How easy to fall back into that old life—and then the impossibility crashes into her.
“Yolanda?” She pictures him extracting a toothpick from between his teeth, gazing at it blankly a moment before setting it on the table.
Yolanda’s voice won’t come. In its absence it takes shape: a toad, solid and afraid, backing down her throat with powerful legs.
Cal sighs. She imagines him chewing his thin lip.
“Cal,” she finally says, relieved that her mind is clear, her voice still her own. “I need to start by saying I’m sorry.” But instead she can’t resist self-dramatizing. “I wanted to see you. I have brain cancer. I’m dying.” This is the wrong note, the falsest note she can strike while technically still being honest.
But Cal doesn’t seem to hold the drama against her, maybe doesn’t even notice the performance. Being Cal, he attributes the best possible motives to her.
“I wondered if something bad happened. It had to be bad, for you to leave like that. That wasn’t you. I wrecked my brain to come up with what I done.” He falters here, hearing, perhaps, his unfortunate phrasing. “I’ve been worried, Yolanda.”
“I know.”
The conversation proceeds: Cal is disbelieving, and Yolanda manages to sound stalwart and brave as she confirms that, yes, her time is limited, very limited.
“Oh, no. Are they sure? Can I see you? Now?”
She agrees; they hang up. It’s that easy to get Cal to come back to her. She throws the phone onto the bed, but misses and it falls to the floor. Can’t Yolanda even die with dignity? Now she’s simply pushed pain onto Cal; before, at least, he could hate her for leaving, but now she’s made him subordinate his suffering to hers.
He’s there within the hour.
“Oh, hey,” says Amadeo from the couch, surprised, when Cal steps into the kitchen, and beats a retreat to his room. Yolanda knows that Amadeo likes Cal, but he’s always been cagey around her boyfriends. Cal is tall and stooped, canvas jacket zipped up. He turns his acrylic stocking cap in his hands.
He’s come directly from the job site （she was wrong, after all, to picture him standing in his kitchen; she’d already forgotten that people work on weekdays） and still smells of sawdust; he’s covered in it. Yolanda can’t help but picture it falling to the floor. Oh, shut up, she tells herself. This is a reunion.
“Yo,” he says, and pulls her into his arms. She allows herself to relax against him, to remember his old smell beneath the sawdust. The smell is the smell of life before her diagnosis, and breathing him in now brings her back to that old person. He pulls her tighter and arousal quickens in her.
She knows Cal’s body so well—long and brown and wiry, the ripples of loose flesh on his back. She’s seen pictures of the sandy-haired boy he once was, and can occasionally glimpse that boy’s stubborn, jutted jaw. He is a man who for decades worked outside with his shirt off, a man whose neck actually is red from the years of sun, crisscrossed in pale creases. She liked to run her finger along those creases. But she’s certain that if she were to lead him to her bedroom at the back of the house, he’d resist. With a shock, Yolanda remembers her current bony state.
“Oh, god,” he murmurs into her shoulder. “Why did you keep it from me?”
“You were having fun. You were on—” She sticks on the word. She sees real fear in his eyes, but pushes past, airily. “I didn’t want to bring you down.” This is disingenuous, and the knowledge flickers across his face, too. That he doesn’t call her on it is another sign of his generosity. He asks all the right questions: though it clearly pains him, he asks if they’ve told her how long she has.