CHAPTER ONE

IF KATIE CALLED HOLLY

What I did at my house when I got the call about my best friend Katie’s cancer: I inhaled through my nose, like my relaxation app told me to do when my body was deep into the whole fight-or-flight fiasco. As humid air rushed into my lungs, I asked myself, Are you safe? Do you need to slap something or run away? Is this a good time for a drop of RumChata in your morning coffee?

I exhaled and answered in the most grown-up way possible while trying not to hyperventilate. Yes, I’m safe. No, I don’t need to punch anything or, God forbid, exercise. And no, Samantha, no alcohol for breakfast—even just this one time. So instead, I threw a plate that hit the drapes and slid into a full laundry basket with a muffled thump, in the least satisfying dish-tantrum of all time.

I steeled myself and dialed the number I hadn’t pulled from my phone since Katie’s first cancer battle. And before that, maybe once or twice after a couple of glasses of wine and some college reminiscing. But I always hung up before the connection was made, knowing how Holly’s voice would sound. Terse, distant, unwelcoming.

Today, I had to see if Holly had heard from Katie. If she had gotten the news that our college roommate and mutual best friend might be deathly sick again. I put my head against the cool stainless steel of the refrigerator. I’d lived through the death of my husband, Jeff, and both of my parents, effectively leaving me alone to raise my daughter—I couldn’t lose my best friend too. Holly’s voice mail kicked in: “You’ve reached Holly Dunfee’s phone.” I hung up quickly and felt my brain go, Whew!

At first I didn’t know why I had such an urge to call Holly. The person who used to mean so much to me but who hadn’t acknowledged my existence in years.

I shuffled in my Birkenstocks to my bedroom, where I slid off my pajama bottoms and grabbed the jeans I’d been wearing all week while helping Maddie, my daughter, pack to leave for the summer.

In the mirror over my dresser, my hair looked like I’d been stored upside down and in a tube all night. With a drop of gel and water, I reconstituted my flattened fine and frizzy hair and wiped the remnants of mascara from under my eyes. Embarrassing confession: partly why I called Holly was because I wanted to know which best friend Katie had on speed dial when life was about to get hard. Was it Holly my best friend wanted, or me?

You’d think that I’d have been so devastated by the cancer news that I wouldn’t have been wrapped up in such ugly, competitive mean-girl things. I pulled on a wool cardigan because despite it being a warm June in Wisconsin, I was shivering.

I needed to be Katie’s emergency contact, her first call. We joked that we were each other’s life partners, but it wasn’t a joke. We were life partners by now, after twenty-some years as besties. After sliding my feet into a pair of unlaced tennis shoes, I hopped on one foot, then the other, so I could yank them over my heels.

It wasn’t enough for me to be Maddie’s point person—that was a given, at least while my daughter was still at home. Who knew what would happen when she was free of me, on her own. I could only dip my toe into the feelings of emptiness I’d experience without Maddie in the house. So, until I could face that, I needed to know that the other person that I loved so much, my Katie, would call me first when she needed help. I told myself that most widows probably felt the same when life was about to dramatically change, like a solitary helium balloon with no one to hold on to my string.

That was some of it, of course. But not the whole Samantha, Katie, and Holly story. Not even close.

I grabbed my keys, pushed my way out the front door, and started my durable Subaru. Katie and I had already defeated cancer once. Like a good Wisconsin native, I had organized the call tree, collected casseroles, and returned the washed dishes with ovarian-cancer-teal thank-you notes. I had made spreadsheets of her treatments, composed Facebook posts, and shared Instagram stories of Katie’s plucky progress as she recovered. Katie sometimes credited me for saving her life, but I didn’t. She was my dearest friend, and being command central kept me too busy to consider what it might mean to be without her. What that cold and lonely tundra would feel like. I was happy to manage the details of life while she managed to stay alive.

My tires squealed at the familiar corner on the way to Saint Mary’s Hospital, and I made a mental note to check the air pressure, one I would no doubt quickly forget.

When my husband, Jeff, died before Maddie was born, an aneurism having burst in his brain, Katie moved into my house. At midnight and four a.m., she picked up fatherless baby Maddie and nestled her in my arms to nurse. Katie fed me broccoli and made me walk so my muscles didn’t turn into the cheese I ate on so many delivery pizzas. I gave her all my computer passwords, and she kept the mortgage paid, the heat on, and teenagers coming to shovel snow.

When Katie got sick, I had my chance to repay her love and care. I would have traded places with her if I could have. Every time she threw up, I wished I were the one retching into the basin instead of the one holding a cool washcloth to the back of her neck. Honestly, that was saying something because anyone who knew me knew I was a huge emo-barfer. I tended to cry and bargain with God and get barf up in my nose and hair. Then, for days, it was all I talked about. Like barfing was news.

I’d have done so much more than organize things and barf for Katie. I’d have taken the chemo for her, if I could have. But that wasn’t the way cancer worked. Cancer accepted no substitutes. That was why we all shuddered when the word was uttered. Cancer was synonymous with loss of control for everyone involved.

I squinted into the rearview mirror and swiped one of those three-in-one makeup sticks over my lips, cheeks, and eyelids so I didn’t look as terrible as I felt. In the reflection I saw the hopeful reason that I had called Holly and that it wasn’t because of misguided competition, pride, and fear.

If Katie had called Holly first, maybe she wouldn’t need the over-the-top Full Radical Healing Experience-for-Katie. I had nicknamed my brand of caregiving FRHEK to make fun of myself, to lighten the load. I was proud of the friendship Katie and I shared and that I could go the distance with someone who I hadn’t created, with help, in my womb. It proved I could be the kind of person, friend, you didn’t just walk away from for no reason. That my presence mattered in a life.

On impulse, I swerved into Walgreens to pick up a few essentials and still made it to the hospital in a respectable time. As I stepped into the hallway, I was reminded that the cleaning crew used a citrus-scented solvent. It smelled like Orange Crush, which reminded me of skating at a roller rink as a teen, but now it made me nauseous.

I tried to call Holly again on the way to the Oncology floor. But as I walked into room 425, iPhone to my ear, the first thing I saw was Holly in a chair next to the bed. A frosty fatigue slid through me, my body urging me to duck and cover. It was as if Holly’s presence were saying, I’m here now. You aren’t needed. Then I saw Katie’s smile, filled with ambiguity in the way smiles could be—happy to see me, stiff with resignation, sorry for what she was about to ask us to do.

Katie had called Holly first. I had to face it. Deep down, there was only one real reason for that. If my darling friend, the woman who was more sister than separate, had called Holly first, then Katie didn’t need casseroles and Facebook posts and someone to keep her life on track so it was in good shape when she returned to it.

Nope, if she had called Holly, she needed the kind of person who could smite a rapidly dividing cell with a look, wrangle an arrogant doctor to her knees, and throttle an insurance company with clever legalese. She needed a sanctimonious, irreverent, inappropriate-humor-filled bitch.

And Holly was the woman for the job.

CHAPTER TWO

FUN, FUN, FUN. DONE.