Last Summer at Mars Hill Read Free

crabbed script across the top. The bills were for tests only, tests and consultations. Nothing for treatments; no receipts for medication other than vitamins. At the bottom of the envelope, rolled into a blue cylinder and tightened with a rubber band, she found the test results. Stray words floated in the air in front of her as Moony drew in a long shuddering breath.
    Mammography results. Sectional biopsy. Fourth stage malignancy. Metastasized.
    Cancer. Her mother had breast cancer.
    “Shit,” she, said. Her hands after she replaced the papers were shaking. From outside echoed summer music, and she could hear voices—her mother’s, Diana’s, Gary Bonetti’s deep bass—shouting above the tinny sound of a cassette player—
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wake up
    In the kind of world where we belong?”
    “You bitch,” Moony whispered. She stood at the front window and stared down the hill at the gazebo, her hands clamped beneath her armpits to keep them still. Her face was streaked with tears. “When were you going to tell me, when were you going to fucking tell me ?”
    At the foot of Mars Hill, alone by a patch of daylilies stood Jason, staring back up at the cottage. A cigarette burned between his fingers, its scent miraculously filling the little room. Even from here Moony could tell that somehow and of course, he already knew.
    Everyone had a hangover the next morning, not excluding Moony and Jason. In spite of that the two met in the community chapel. Jason brought a thermos of coffee, bright red and yellow dinosaurs stenciled on its sides, and blew ashes from the bench so she could sit down.
    “You shouldn’t smoke in here.” Moony coughed and slumped beside him. Jason shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette, fished in his pocket and held out his open palm.
    “Here. Ibuprofen and valerian capsules. And there’s bourbon in the coffee.”
    Moony snorted but took the pills, shooting back a mouthful of tepid coffee and grimacing.
    “Hair of the iguana,” Jason said. “So really, Moony, you didn’t know?”
    “How the hell would I know?” Moony said wearily. “I mean, I knew it was something —”
    She glanced sideways at her friend. His slender legs were crossed at the ankles and he was barefoot. Already dozens of mosquito bites pied his arms and legs. He was staring at the little altar in the center of the room. He looked paler than usual, more tired, but that was probably just the hangover.
    From outside, the chapel looked like all the other buildings at Mars Hill, faded gray shingles and white trim. Inside there was one large open room, with benches arranged in a circle around the walls, facing in to the plain altar. The altar was heaped with wilting day lilies and lilacs, an empty bottle of chardonnay and a crumpled pack of Kents—Jason’s brand—and a black velvet hair ribbon that Moony recognized as her mother’s. Beneath the ribbon was an old snapshot, curled at the edges. Moony knew the pose from years back. It showed her and Jason and Ariel and Martin, standing at the edge of the pier with their faces raised skyward, smiling and waving at Diana behind her camera. Moony made a face when she saw it and took another swallow of coffee.
    “I thought maybe she had AIDS,” Moony said at last. “I knew she went to the Walker Clinic once, I heard her on the phone to Diana about it.”
    Jason nodded, his mouth set in a tight smile. “So you should be happy she doesn’t. Hip hip hooray.” Two years before Jason’s father had tested HIV-positive. Martin’s lover, John, had died that spring.
    Moony turned so that he couldn’t see her face. “She has breast cancer. It’s metastasized. She won’t see a doctor. This morning she let me feel it…”
    Like a gnarled tree branch shoved beneath her mother’s flesh, huge and hard and lumpy. Ariel thought she’d cry or faint or something but all Moony could do was wonder how she had never felt it before. Had she never noticed, or had it just