The Pink House. Trish MacEnulty

lingered. Gotcha, she thought.

      “So do you like being in law enforcement?” she asked.

      “Well, I do meet some interesting people,” he said.

      His radio crackled. “We’ve got a break-in in progress on ….” The other police car pulled up alongside his and the officers spoke to each other through their open windows.

      “We’ve got to get over there, Zack,” the woman officer in the passenger side of the other car said.

      He turned and looked at Jen again.

      “What are we waiting for, Zack?” Jen asked. “Let’s go bust someone.”

      Zack rolled his eyes heavenward, chuckled, put down the ticket he was in the process of writing and sped out of the parking lot. Jen was thrilled. She hoped it would be full of drama, a hostage situation, and she would be called upon to negotiate with the desperate gunman. But the excitement turned out not to be much. A homeless man looking for a place to bed down for the night had set off the alarm of a barber shop. The cops ran him off. The other two gave Zack a knowing grimace and drove away.

      “You hungry?” he asked.

      “Starving,” Jen said.

      “Let’s get something to eat.”

      **

      After a few cups of coffee and a couple of waffles at the Waffle House, Zack drove to the two-story brick apartment building on Franklin where Jen lived. She liked being in the front seat of the cop car. It was like auditioning for a role on “Law & Order.” Now that would be a good gig. He pulled onto the hard-packed driveway and into the lot behind the building.

      “I’m going to walk you upstairs,” he said.

      “Good idea,” Jen said. “Who knows how much trouble I might get into.”

      He followed her up the stairs to her apartment. The hallway illuminated him. He was attractive, but she’d already seen that at the restaurant. She wasn’t sober yet, but she wasn’t sloppy drunk.

      “Want to come in?” she asked, slipping the key inside the lock and turning.

      She shoved the door open and turned toward him expectantly. He grinned but shook his head.

      “I’ll take a rain check,” he said. She shrugged and walked inside.

      “See ya later, copper,” she said flirtatiously and shut the door. Oh, what a night. She’d almost gotten busted bigtime and instead had spent the late hours of the night hearing about Zack’s exploits. It was funny. She was spending her Saturdays with convicts and her Wednesday nights with cops. And she found both of them fascinating.

      Teetering in her heels, she fed her cat, Manny, who was meowing cantankerously. Manny was an assertive beast, and she did her best to appease him.

      Then she pulled the red dress off and crawled into bed. Shutting her eyes she suddenly remembered Lolly. She sat bolt upright. She didn’t even know how the operation went. She was supposed to have gone back to check on her. But not only had she not gone back to check on her sister, she had gone and left Lolly’s car in the parking lot of a student bar on Tennessee Street. Then another thought occurred to her: What if Lolly had died? Jen felt a ball of lead in her gut as she slowly sank back into the bed.

      Thursday, June 29

      “We got out as much as we could. The tumor was five centimeters and we took out thirteen nodules,” the doctor said, looking down at Lolly. He was a young, corpulent man with a helpless expression on his face.

      “But you didn’t get it all,” Lolly said. The incision hurt. There on her left side was a line of folded skin; no nipple, nothing, just a scar. A red slash. They offered to put in an implant, but she refused.

      “No, I’m sorry. We didn’t. It was just too advanced. We’ll have to start you on weekly chemotherapy right away. The nurse will go over the procedures with you and you’ll need to sign a consent form.”

      Lolly didn’t say anything, just turned to look out the window at the parking garage and the hazy sky beyond.

      “When can I leave here?” she asked.

      “Well, we’ve got to keep these tubes in you for another couple of days to drain the fluid. And you’ll probably be feeling pretty nauseous for a few days after that, but I guess we could let you go home on Monday.”

      “Monday?” she said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I have work to do Saturday.”

      “You can’t work. Bed rest for the next week.”

      Yeah, right, Lolly thought. The doctor checked his watch and left without even saying goodbye.

      For the next thirty minutes Lolly lay in the bed snatching at pieces of silence. They had cut her up in pieces and now they would poison her body. She thought of all the people who believed they’d been abducted by aliens. She was the one abducted, and the doctors were aliens, pod people. She didn’t have to go into a space ship to experience it.

      “Hey.”

      She looked up. Jen had finally come. Lolly didn’t know whether to scream at her or cry.

      “Are you okay?” Jen asked.