Chapter 7 — SIX WEEKS

The doctor's name was Ijeoma Nwosu and she was about forty and she gave me eleven minutes in a corridor because I asked for them and because Sarah had, that morning, put my name on a form.

That form is the first thing my daughter did for me in twenty years and I did not find out about it until Dr. Nwosu said "you're on her release now" as though it were nothing.

Ovarian. Stage four at diagnosis.

Diagnosed in April.

It was November.

"How long?"

She did not do the thing that doctors on television do.

"With the current treatment and if she tolerates it, weeks to a few months. I would plan around six weeks. I could be wrong in either direction and I have been wrong in both."

"Six weeks."

"Mr. Harrison, I want to say something to you that isn't medical."

"All right."

"Your daughter has spent every conversation with me since April on one subject and it isn't her." Dr. Nwosu had a folder against her chest. "She has asked me eleven separate times about what happens to her children. She asked me about it before she asked me about her own prognosis. I have been doing this for fourteen years and I have never had a patient do that in that order."

I said, "She won't let me take them."

"I know."

"Did she tell you why?"

Dr. Nwosu looked at me for a second longer than the conversation required.

"She told me you signed something once."

Six weeks.

I went out to the car and I sat there and I wrote a new list, and the new list was not like the first one, because the first one had been a list of favours and this one was not.

1. Get them enrolled in school — need standing

2. Get standing — need her signature

3. Get her signature — need to know what paper she means

4. If she dies without signing: county takes them, they split

That fourth line I wrote and then I sat and looked at it for a long time.

Then I drove to Poughkeepsie.

Renee Aldarisio is a good woman. I want to say that first.

She is forty-one and she works at a distribution centre and she has two teenagers of her own and a three-bedroom house with a mortgage that she is honest about, and she made me coffee and she cried before I had finished the first paragraph.

And then she told me the truth, which took her about twenty minutes to get to.

She could take Mabel.

She could not take both.

She had thought about it every night for a month and she had run the numbers and there was not a bedroom and there was not money and there was not, she said, and this is the part she could barely say, there was not enough of her.

"I keep thinking I'll find a way by the time it happens," she said. "And I'm not going to. And I've been letting Sarah think I might."

I said, "Does Sarah know?"

Renee put her hands over her face.

"She asks me every week," she said. "And every week I say I'm still working on it."