Ella was concerned with something incredibly ordinary when she got the call—the surprising rate at which tomatoes went mushy, the never-ending need for toilet paper, the increasing number of campaign flyers that came in the mail before each election. She picked up the phone in the kitchen. Dad’s words glued her to the spot before the breakfast bar. Staring at a newly discovered stain on the sliver of wall between the bar and the counter—reddish brown, like dried blood—she tried to figure out what it could’ve come from. The stove stood against the wall behind her, and it’s not like she ate at the counter, standing up. What a depressing thought, having a meal on your feet. Only that’s not what she was supposed to be thinking about. Dad was telling her that Mom probably had cancer.
“But the hysterectomy,” Ella said.
“They left the ovaries.”
“Why?”
He told her it was common practice back then.
Back then. She remembered visiting Mom in the hospital, how tired and pale she’d looked. “Can I talk to her?” she said.
“She’s not up to it right now.”
“Where is she?”
“In the bedroom.”
Like that day in second grade when Mom left her and Ian to play while she lay down. Ella had known something was wrong but not what. She was afraid Mom was going to die. Now, it was a real possibility.
“Have you told Ian?” she asked.
“He’s my next call.”
She wondered what it meant, that Dad had called her first. […]
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Heather Turbeville’s fiction has been published in Zone 3 and Chariton Review, and is forthcoming in The Worcester Review. She received the 2020 Zone 3 Literary Award for Fiction. She lives in San Francisco, where she works as an editor and volunteers for Litquake.