Saving Graces Read Free Page A

ate a terrific breakfast at a restaurant called the Inn on Coventry. It was a wonderful local favorite, crafted of oak and chrome and vinyl and filled with customers who knew the waitresses by name. We ate and shook hands, spoke to the crew in the kitchen, and worked our way to the bright outdoors. The Secret Service detail always attracted a crowd long before people knew whom to expect, and there was the usual crowd outside the Inn. Most stood back and waved or shouted good luck, but two women came over to say hello. One had short, sparse hair growing in patches on her head; the other wore a wide scarf. They handed me a pink ribbon pin, symbolizing the fight against breast cancer. “Are you a survivor?” one of them asked me. I was caught off guard. I had done a good job of pushing thoughts of my ultrasound aside for the last few days, and now I found I didn’t know how to respond. So I just hugged each of them tightly and thanked them. For exactly what, I wasn’t yet sure.
                      

                      
    I held it together until Election Day. That morning—November 2, 2004—I woke up alone in my hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa, and discovered blood in my urine. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and with that discovery came all of the thoughts that I had been pushing aside the four days since seeing the technician’s face. I was pretty certain I had cancer, but there was still so much I didn’t know. Like how long the lump had been there—it could have been years—or what it was doing to me on the inside. Had it metastasized? Did the blood mean it had spread? I hadn’t allowed myself to visit that possibility before, but I knew that my chances of survival were much less if the cancer had spread.
Stop thinking about this,
I told myself.
Get through this day. John and Cate and the children are at the end of this day. But what if
…My mind played out the debate back and forth as I dressed.
    The knock on the door and Hargrave’s happy “Ready?” interrupted the debate. We hurried to meet Christie Vilsack, the Governor’s wife. We stopped at a local bakery and bought dozens of bagels to deliver to volunteers working get-out-the-vote drives. There was a slow cold rain as we stood on a downtown street corner thanking voters and handing out bagels. Then it was Des Moines and the Governor and a few dozen people who were once important supporters but were now even more—we had become friends during the two years I had been visiting Iowa. It seemed like the perfect way to close the campaigning—in the company of friends. By the time we got back in the car, my hair had gotten wet in the rain. I looked rough.
    Of course, I was headed to a television studio to do remote television interviews. I would sit in a room with an earpiece hidden in my ear and talk to the voice in the earpiece while looking at the camera in front of me in the darkened room, and I would be on television in Reno and Las Cruces and St. Louis, wherever. It was like talking on the telephone with a camera on you, so you couldn’t scratch your nose or fool with your hair or squirm because you were tired of the same chair.
    My rain-wet hair looked terrible. Typically, I did my own hair and makeup, but today, the campaign had found a young local woman to do my hair. As she worked, I tried to think of nothing—not of cancer or metastasis or what I would find out the next day at the doctor’s office in Boston. I asked her about herself, and as she talked, I watched her small pretty face. What I didn’t watch was what she was doing to my hair. By the time I did notice, it was too late. I looked awful. It would have been a darling hairdo on someone young and tiny, like she was. On me, it was dreadful. And so, bless this woman’s heart, I started to cry. Little tears at first, as I tried to say what was wrong with the style, then sobbing that stopped me from speaking at all.
    “Oh my God,” was all