The Last Supper

The hospital cafeteria hummed with the desperate energy of people waiting for news they didn't want to hear. Mara sat across from me, picking at her orange Jell-O, her wedding ring glinting under fluorescent lights. Three months of chemotherapy had carved hollows beneath her eyes, but her smile remained—a stubborn, beautiful thing.

"You should go," she said, not meeting my eyes. "Chris is waiting."

Chris, her husband, stood near the entrance, talking to a nurse. Good, dependable Chris, who held her hair back when she vomited, who researched clinical trials until dawn, who remembered to bring her vitamin supplements in those little daily organizers. He was doing everything right.

I was just the friend. The one who came to appointments and made inappropriate jokes about our twenties. The one who couldn't make it better.

"I can stay," I said.

She shook her head. "No. You should go live your life. While you still can."

The words hung between us, heavier than the unsaid diagnosis. Stage four. Twenty percent survival rate. The numbers we'd memorized from Google searches at three in the morning.

"Remember that orange dress you wore to graduation?" I asked suddenly. "The ridiculous one?"

Her laugh was rusty but genuine. "I looked like a traffic cone."

"You looked magnificent. Like you were daring the world to look away."

Chris was walking toward us now, carrying a paper bag with her medications. The future. The certain, terrible future that belonged to them, not to me. I was being excused from the hardest part, given permission to return to my mundane problems—my difficult divorce, my stalled career, my petty grievances that suddenly seemed like privileges.

I stood up, leaning in to hug her. She smelled like hospital soap and something sweet, something familiar, like the summers we'd spent lying on her parents' dock, talking about boys we'd marry and lives we'd live. The lives we'd imagined were waiting for us.

"Next Tuesday," I said. "I'll bring those magazines you like."

She nodded, but we both knew I might not. That this might be the last time I saw her before the end, before she became someone's memory instead of my friend. Some exits you choose. Others are made for you.

I walked toward the automatic doors, past the gift shop with its bright displays of flowers and balloons, everything screaming reassurance. Outside, the sun was setting, painting the sky in impossible shades of orange and pink, the kind of beauty that feels almost cruel. I didn't look back.