The Beginning of the End

Short Story by Martha Mackilin Blair + Interview

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“I need a bone marrow transplant,” he had said almost in a whisper, into the small quiet living room where I sat wrapped in a clean bathrobe, no longer smelling like vomit.

Having heard him come through the back door a moment earlier, I looked up from the half-asleep baby boy in my arms. Propped against the low arm of the sofa, one leg outstretched to keep his twin brother from slipping to the wood floor, I found the eyes of my ridiculously beautiful husband. Usually sparkling with playfulness, I saw calm in them. I also saw worry in them.

Eddie had come around the corner from our tiny narrow kitchen and sat down less than five feet away in a small dark blue chintz-covered club chair, it and its partner once in my grandmother’s Lake Forest home outside of Chicago. I had sat in them many times as a young child visiting her from Texas, in too-tight black patent leather Mary Janes, watching quietly, she and my parents sipping cocktails, usually gin and tonics. The pair of chairs were mine now, since that house was no longer in our family, our family that no longer included a living grandmother.

I smiled at him easily, “What does that mean?”