Angie

We have plenty of time.

***

I’m sitting at the foot of her hospital bed at Kaiser Hospital down in El Cajon. She’s not doing well. Okay, so that’s really understating the fact: she is in fact dying. She’s down to around 70 pounds and has a bedsore the size of dinner plate where her tailbone is. She’s in diapers and is only conscious for perhaps a minute at a time.

She wakes up and looks at her mom and then me. “You,” she says.

“You,” I say back, my eyes tearing up. 

“Go home. You have a life,” she says, looking at me pointedly. It’s a struggle for her to get the words out to me.

“Fuck you. This is where I want to be.”

“Stubborn bitch,” she says, rolling her eyes at me.

“Yep.”

She laughs a little bit and then the morphine starts to kick in. “What are you making?”

“I’m crocheting a blanket for you. I started it before all this.”

“Hold it up,” she says, nearly asleep. I do and she nods. “It’s…it’s…really pretty. Pink and gray. I really like the…” and she’s out again.

***

On my 24^th birthday, Angie calls me and says, “I have bad news. The cough that I have? They did an x-ray. I have cancer.”

“Fuck. You tell me this on my birthday? Are you kidding? ‘Happy Birthday. I have cancer’?”

“I forgot it was your birthday,” she says quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“I’d imagine that you’re preoccupied. That was selfish of me to say, wasn’t it? I’m sorry. I’m just shocked,” I say, tearing up. “What kind of prognosis did they give you?”

“Six months without treatment; maybe two years with treatment.”

“Oh, Jesus…you…you’re not going to do chemo, right?”

She’s quiet and then answers me: “Yeah, I’m going to do chemo.”

“If you need anything…”

“No you don’t,” she interrupts, “you have a life, and you aren’t stopping everything for me.”

“But if you need anything…”

“Bobby can take care of it.” It’s a definitive statement. End of discussion. I’m a stubborn bitch? Compared to her, I’m a compliant, meek little mouse.

***

“I have a pain in my side,” she told me over lunch one day. “The doctor says it’s just stress and with the way me and Bobby are fighting and how Colette just up and decided that she didn’t need me for a maid of honor, I guess it might be that.”

I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I? We were 23 and had plenty of time.

***

When my boyfriend and I decided to get married, she wailed at me. “YOU CAN’T JUST GO TO THE COURTHOUSE! Colette went off and got married in Hawaii and if you don’t have a wedding, I’ll NEVER get to be maid-of-honor.”

“Well, you’re invited, of course. You and Bobby and we’ll have…”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! You are going to have a proper wedding for me. Or I’ll NEVER be maid-of-honor!”

“Alright,” I said quietly, “fine. I’ll do the wedding thing for you.”

“You’re the best. It doesn’t have to be big. We’ll shop for dresses together.”

“No, it’s fine, Ang. You have a better sense of style than me and you’re my only girlfriend so it’s not like I have to match a full set.”

“You aren’t going to ask his sisters to be bridesmaids?”

“No, I’m not that close to them and that is too much to-do over this all for me.”

“Well, I have to dress YOU. I do have a better sense of style than you.”

“My mom will take that over. You know that.”

She laughed. “She’ll probably stand there while you get ready and ask if you need that much blush. What are you? A clown?” and breaks down into giggles. It’s an old joke from back when we were kids and she was over at my place and my mom yelled at me over a broken thing of makeup. “How did you go through THAT much blush,” she spat out at me, “are you a clown?”

Angie and I busted up at that since we were 14. One of those you had to be there and see the look on my mom’s face when she said it things.

When she gave me the news on my birthday, I told my fiancé, “We’re getting married early.”

“What?” Ross asked.

“I said we’re getting married early. In a couple of months. Angie has cancer and…” And I couldn’t finish the sentence is what.

Somewhere, I really knew that I should have called it off because Ross said: “That’s a stupid reason for us to move our wedding date up.”

I blinked at him incredulously and then glared at him the rest of the night. I slept on the couch on my 24^th birthday and sobbed myself to sleep.

***

Two months before my wedding, planned just for her so she could be maid-of-honor, she cancels. “I can’t. My health. I’m tired all the time. I’ve lost 20 pounds. I have a dress, though. Whoever you pick for your maid-of-honor can wear it. I already bought it.”

This is only a month after her diagnosis.

***

“Get over it,” my mom says.

“What?”

“Angie,” she says tightly, “you have to let it go.”

I didn’t really like my mom by that point in time. She wasn’t much of a mom, really and we worked together. She was a shittier boss than she was a mom and I really didn’t think she suck more at something than she had at the mom-thing. I glared at her. “Mom? It’s been three fucking weeks since she died. You of all people know how close we were.”

“She was always a bad influence on you,” she said, “I never liked her.”

Disgusted that she would even dream of saying something so fucking callous, much less have the nerve to say it to my face, we were pretty much over after she said that. “I’m going home for the day.”

“You have clients,” she reminded me.

I shrugged. “I’ll reschedule.”

“You can’t. I own this salon. You’ll stay here.”

“Fuck off.” For emphasis, I stuck my middle finger in her face and stormed out of the salon.

***

I’m eleven; she's ten; we’re in 5^th grade. Half the year has gone by and we’ve never talked. We’re in the same class, but she’s lived two blocks from Montezuma Elementary all her life and I just moved there at the beginning of the school year. In other words, she has all the friends she needs so why talk to the new kid?

On rainy days, Mrs. W allowed us to bring albums in so we were distracted from the boredom that not having recess outdoors brought. Most of the kids in class brought Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor—disco type stuff. Angie was standing in front of me with Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection; I was standing behind her holding Elton John’s Caribou. “You like Elton John?” she asked with some excitement.

“Yeah.”

“Oh my god. Did you see the new 16 Magazine and the pictures of his closet? Wouldn’t you love to have all those shoes? And that picture of him in the white pants and the white glasses with rhinestones? I’m going to marry him one day.”

I didn’t say anything back. I was too stunned. I considered her the most popular girl in class and didn’t know why she would talk to a nobody like me.

She studied me in a ten-year-old way. “I like that thing you do at recess where you sit on top of the bar, swing back, and then swing off the bar and land on your feet. Can you show me how to do that? Is it scary? Because it looks scary. Have you ever hurt yourself doing it?”

I still didn’t answer. I was a really weird kid. If I had brought an Uzi to school and shot everything up, people would have nodded and said, “Well, that was kind of expected. She was an odd one. So quiet. Too quiet.” 

I had been there six months already and the first substantive conversation I had was her rapid-firing questions at me. I was confused, I guess.

“You’re really good at hopscotch and 4 square and tetherball. And I really thought it was funny when you beat all the boys at the 50-yard dash. Want to have lunch with me and Colette? We’ve been friends since kindergarten. She won’t mind.”

“Sure.”

Mrs. W barked, “MARIA? Come here,” tightly, holding my album toward me. “This has bad words in it. You know the rules.”

Angie got a case of the giggles as I went up there to grab Caribou back and I thought that she was making fun of me but when I returned to sit next to her, she grabbed my arm and kept giggling and whispered, “She doesn’t want to hear a song with the word bitch in it because she is one.”

I laughed so loud that Mrs. W took recess away from both of us for a week.

It was the start of a trend.

***

We’re 14.

My mom had porcelain white skin; so pale she was translucent.

We, as most of us were back then, were tanning addicts, slathering baby oil to get the most out of our 4 or 5 hour pool sessions. My mom walks by as we’re lazing about in the living room and huffs, “You two. Keep it up and you’re both going to have cancer by the time you’re 20.”

When she’s out of earshot, Angie says, “Your mom is so uptight. I thought she was cool when I first met her,” and then breaks into giggles.

***

In the hospital, Connie, Angie’s mom says, “Go home, Maria. And stop working on that stupid blanket. She’s dying.”

I want to scream that it’s all her fault, goddammit. Because it really kind of is.

Angie and I called each other once we were adults every Sunday night after 60 Minutes. We’d talk about our week, catch up on things, or just discuss what was on the show that night.

We were 22 and she said, “You know that mole they took off me at 16?”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering where she was going with it.

“Well, no one told me, but I should have been following up every year and having tests done because it was melanoma.”

“You never told me that.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know what melanoma was.”

***

When the pain started in her side, because she was so young, no one really thought anything of it. If she hadn’t been part of the same health system all her life nearly, it wouldn’t have bothered me, but she was. Someone should have caught that.

By the time they did, the pain in her side was caused by a tumor on her kidney that was the size of a serving platter. They didn’t figure that one out until they x-rayed her lungs to see that she was fucked. Once they knew that, they finally decided to investigate this stress-caused pain in her side.

The melanoma had metastisized to her kidneys and then her lungs. Had anyone bothered to check her chart going back to that mole on her arm, they would have caught it much sooner.

***

At 21: “Come on Sunday. Bobby and I are going sailing. Bring Ross too.”

“I have to work.”

“So? Take the day off.”

“We have plenty of time. I really can’t right now. I have bills.”

And I am so embarrassed to say that conversation happened at least a dozen times, sometimes with her BEGGING. “Please? I miss you. I want to spend time with you.”

We. Had. Plenty. Of. Time. God fucking damn it.

***

At 16, we were drunk as shit. Her boyfriend Kenny’s parents’ left town and we took over their cabin in Alpine for a kegger. Angie noticed me and drunkenly plopped down next to me on an old couch, spilling most of her beer on me in the process. She gave me that drunken ‘I’m seeing more than one of you right now’ kind of look, screwing her eyes up, trying to only see one of me and slurred out, “What are we going to do when we’re old?”

“We’re gonna…” I slurred out and thought about what we were going to do. “We’re gonna do the regular stuff—you’ll get married to someone and have kids and I’ll be their aunt and then when your husband is dead and your kids are grown, we’ll book it to the coolest retirement home we can find and laugh ourselves stupid riffing on everyone around us.”

Her blue eyes grew wide, and amusement took them over. “OH MY GOD! YOU HAVE THE BEST PLANS FOR US! That’s going to be SO fun!” She unsteadily got back up, tried to lean down and fell on me, giggling at her ineptitude and drunkenness. She kissed me on the cheek. “I loooooooooooove you.”

***

Steve, her brother, joins Angie, Connie, and I at the hospital. For the first time Steve and I have known each other, he hugs me and he hugs me tightly. “Let’s go have a cigarette and talk.”

I follow him. For all intents, he’s been a big brother to me for 14 years. He lights his cigarette and exhales out a plume of smoke. “I’m taking her to Bobby’s to die. It’s her birthday Thursday. Please come.”

“Of course.”

“Thanks.”

We smoke in thoughtful silence knowing that we’re losing her; the end is near and we don’t quite know what to do with that information other than silently consider it and do our best to hold it together, knowing that if one us starts crying, we’ll both be bawling our eyes out. I finally ask, “Why isn’t Mark here?” Mark was my first real world crush—Steve’s best friend and every bit the big brother to me and Angie that he is.

Steve lets out a resigned sigh. “Mark doesn’t want to see her like this; he wants to remember her how she really was.”

I’m mad at him at the time but then when I have nightmares and it takes over 5 years to remember what Angie looked like when she was healthy and not dying, I saw his point very clearly.

Her birthday, August 3, 1989, her 24^th, was of course a somber affair with the birthday girl herself confined to her bed and asleep with all the drugs in her system. But we aren’t there for her; we’re there for Steve. Steve needs us and that’s all we need to know about anything. Connie is conspicuously not there.

She died the next day, August 4^th, 1989. It was like she knew Steve needed one more birthday out of her and held in there until he got it and once he did, she felt free to go ahead and die.

***

I tell myself a lot of things.

I say that it’s rare for childhood friendships to last into adulthood and, uh, one of us would have done something to cause a rift or we wouldn’t have liked each other’s partners or something like that.

I say people grow apart all the time and would have happened eventually. We were already seeing each other maybe once a month because of life.

I say we wouldn't have made it anyway.

But mostly I say that we never were going to have plenty of time. Who of us does?