As I slow-rolled my F-150 down HWY 49, the county road that runs through the center of Mariposa and serves as a shoddy mobile home park to its sparse commercial district, already dreading the graveside speech Grandma Alice, I could tell from her silence, was planning to give me and Buddy once we got to St. Joe’s, I found myself thinking again about our dead mother’s breasts.
Our mother had been famous in Mariposa for her breasts. They might not have been original, as her brother Levon liked to say, but they’d been lovingly restored. Immediately after Grandma Alice got diagnosed with breast cancer, Mom had went and gotten the BRCA test; and on the same day one week later she learned yes, she was indeed genetically predisposed to get that same cancer, she started down the road to her own elective bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction with Grandma Alice’s plastic surgeon in Sacramento and the results made more things happen than most small-town elections.
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