Single, Carefree, Mellow. Katherine Heiny

thought her relationship with Rhodes made the least bit of sense at all.

      Maya took Bailey back to Dr. Drummond, because Bailey would eat nothing now but a mush made of bread and milk, and the tumor in her cheek was almost the size of a grapefruit. Maya sometimes thought she could actually see it getting bigger.

      Dr. Drummond sat on the floor with Bailey again and opened her mouth to look in with his light. Bailey struggled, so Maya sat on the floor, too, and helped hold her still.

      Dr. Drummond examined Bailey’s mouth for a long time. Then he snapped off the light and looked at Maya. “The tumor is obstructing her throat now,” he said. “She can’t swallow very well and soon she’ll have trouble breathing.”

      Maya tightened her grip on Bailey’s collar.

      “I think in the next day or two, it will be time,” Dr. Drummond said.

      “Time!” Maya said. Her voice squeaked. “But I thought you said two weeks! Before that they said six weeks!”

      “I know,” Dr. Drummond said quietly. He didn’t seem to mind her blaming him. “It’s more aggressive than we thought.”

      “But forty-eight hours …,” Maya began. It was such a short time. She wanted to argue him out of it.

      “Think about it,” Dr. Drummond said gently. He put his hand between her shoulder blades and let it rest there. “Tomorrow or the next day. After that we’re into the weekend, and she won’t make it through until next Monday. I know you don’t want Bailey to suffer. I can come to your house and do it there, if you think Bailey would like that better.”

      Maya nodded because she didn’t trust herself to speak.

      Dr. Drummond gave Bailey another painkiller shot and some sort of very soft dog biscuit. He told Maya to call when she’d made a decision, and offered to walk her to her car again, but Maya shook her head.

      She went out to her car and helped Bailey into the passenger seat. Then Maya got in on the driver’s side, but she did not start the car right away. She was thinking that someday, possibly very soon, she would be a single, carefree, mellow, dogless person, able to date full professors and vets and whomever else she wanted. She wished this thought made her happy. She wished she could feel anything other than the purest, most leaden, darkest gray kind of sorrow.

      That night, Rhodes’s parents and Magellan brought over a homemade lasagna, some salad, and a bottle of wine. “I figured you probably didn’t feel up to cooking much,” Hazelene said.

      Maya looked at the food, and then at their expectant faces. “You should join us.”

      Rhodes was walking through the kitchen, and he stopped, scratching his stomach beneath his T-shirt. “Doesn’t it, like, counteract the helpfulness of bringing us dinner if you stay to eat it?” he asked. Rhodes said this kind of wildly negative thing in front of his parents all the time, which they either didn’t get or were used to by now.