The night before my mother’s double mastectomy, we went skinny-dipping. She’d wanted to see her breasts buoyant in the moonlight one last time. I was seventeen that August; she was fifty-three. The bravest thing about me then was the calluses on my heels.
She invited five women: my two aunts, my cousin, her best friend, her mother. One last breaststroke, she joked. No boys allowed. It was August, and we were staying in a cottage on the edge of Wellfleet Bay. Back on the mainland, they’d said the cancer had not yet spread—and in clinical terms, it hadn’t. It was confined to her breasts, but it was also in the notes of my mother’s ambient laughter when it trailed off, and in the coffee grounds piled like black sand castles in our kitchen trash—then suddenly it was everywhere, from how I could no longer tolerate the smell of lilies to the way my mother cried when the grocery store was out of gherkins.
