Everyone's a Critic by Jennifer Weiner

Author:Jennifer Weiner [Weiner, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982148218
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

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Keep reading for a preview of

Mrs. Everything

by

Jennifer Weiner

2015

Jo

Her cell phone rang as they were on their way out of the movies. Jo let the crowd sweep her along, out of the dark theater and into the brighter lobby, smelling popcorn and the winter air on people’s coats, blinking in the late-afternoon sunshine. She pulled the phone out of her pocket. “Hello?”

“Jo?” Just from the sound of the doctor’s voice, just in that one word, Jo could hear her future. The Magic 8 Ball’s truth-telling triangle had flipped from REPLY HAZY or ASK AGAIN LATER to OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD or MY SOURCES SAY NO. Her chest tightened, and her mouth felt dry. Her wife looked up at her, eyebrows raised in a question. Jo tried to keep her face expressionless as she held up one finger and turned away.

The first time, nine years ago, she’d found the lump while in the shower, a pebble-like hardness underneath her olive-hued skin, once drum-taut, now age-spotted and soft. This time, they’d caught it on one of the mammograms she endured every six months on the breast that remained. See? the radiologist had said, tapping the tip of a pen against a shadow on the image. Jo had nodded. Yes. I see. It was a tiny concentration of white in the cloudy gray dimness, barely bigger than the head of a pin, but Jo knew, in her bones, the truth of what she was seeing; she understood that she was looking at her doom.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. Jo caught a glimpse of herself in the movie theater’s windows, her face slack, her expression stunned. Mom’s spacing out again! she imagined Lila cackling. Leave Mom alone, her oldest daughter, Kim, would say, and Missy, the even-tempered middle child, would ignore them both and pull a book out of her bag.

The doctor was still talking, her voice sympathetic in Jo’s ear. “You should come in so that we can discuss your options,” she was saying, but Jo knew that there weren’t any options left, at least, not any good ones. The first time around, she’d done the surgeries, the radiation, the chemotherapy. She’d lost her hair, lost her appetite and her energy, lost her left breast and six months of her life. After five years cancer-free, she was allowed to say that she was cured—a survivor, in the pink-tinted parlance of the time, as if cancer were an invading army and she’d managed to beat back the hordes. But Jo had never felt like a true survivor. She never believed that the cancer was really gone. She’d always thought it was in temporary retreat, those bad cells huddled deep inside her bones, lurking and plotting and biding their time, and every minute she’d lived, every minute since her fingers had come upon that lump under her wet skin, was borrowed. For nine years she had lived with the sound of a clock in her ears, ticking, louder and louder, its sound underlining everything she did.

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