“Aggie. Can I ask you something?”
“Go on, love.”
And she looked at my middle and did not pretend she was not looking at it.
“Have you talked to anybody about that?”
I laughed at her. “Soraya, I’m eighty. Nothing’s where it was.”
And that woman did not laugh back, which stopped me.
“Please get it looked at.”
I said I would. I did not.
Three nights after that I woke up at about two in the morning with a pressure in my middle that I had never had before.
And then something moved.
That is the only way I can put it. There was a shift, and then a sort of settling, and then a fullness that made it impossible to get comfortable on any side.
I put my hand flat on my stomach.
And it moved again. Under my own hand, through my own nightdress.
I lay in that bed in the dark at eighty years of age and I was properly frightened for the first time since my sister Noemi.
