…that you’re cancer-free.”
The woman’s name was Elena. She was an interior designer. She had a measuring tape around her neck and a very guilty expression.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh no, no. You weren’t supposed to see this for two more weeks.”
I stood in that beautiful living room, staring at my own face above the fireplace, and slowly understood.
Six months earlier, I had finished treatment for breast cancer. My final scans were scheduled for the end of the month. My husband, Frank, had been strange and secretive ever since. Late phone calls. Money moving out of our savings. His brother, Tony, had noticed too. Tony thought Frank was hiding an affair. He’d found the key in Frank’s car and the address in his GPS.
It wasn’t an affair. It was this house.
When we were newlyweds, forty years ago, we used to drive past this lake on Sunday afternoons. I always said I’d love to grow old in a house on the water. Frank had remembered. When I got sick, he started saving everything he could. He bought the house last spring, and he’d hired Elena to furnish it with things from my Pinterest boards, which he had apparently been studying for months.
The portrait had been painted from a photo of me on our honeymoon.
“He wanted to give you the keys the day the doctor said you were cancer-free,” Elena said. “He said that’s the day your new life starts. He was too scared to plan it before we knew.”
“Then why the vacuum?” I asked.
Elena actually laughed. “He said if he gave you something too nice on your anniversary, you’d get suspicious.”
I drove home and found Frank and Tony in the garage. Tony was in the middle of yelling at him. I walked in, held up the key and said, “Elena says hello.”
Frank went white. Tony went red. Then Frank started apologizing for ruining the surprise, and I started crying, and Tony said, “Well, I feel like an idiot.”
Two weeks later, the doctor called. My scans were clear.
We moved into the lake house that summer. The vacuum lives in the hall closet. Frank says it’s the most important gift he’s ever given me. It’s the reason I never saw the real one coming.
