Family Matters by Kitty Burns Florey

there some kind of nurses’ code that forbade such excesses?
    â€œHere’s your breakfast”
    Ah. Strawberry preserves for the muffin, and an egg in a cup, and melon, cubed. She ate greedily and didn’t care, to fill the emptiness. It worked, too, with certain foods—candy and bread, especially. She had two muffins.
    Frank came in, just shaved and smelling good. A handsome old man, and picturesque since his hair had gone on top and left a thick white ruff around the sides. “How’s the bridge, Dad?”
    â€œIt’s going to be all right,” he said, moving his jaw left and right to test it. He kissed her head. “Feel up to some reading today? Maybe we could finish Three Men in a Boat .”
    They had read an article about a famous magazine editor who had cured a serious illness with vitamin C and Marx Brothers movies. Violet rejected the vitamin (“It’s all bull,” she said, “bull” being her strongest epithet), but she agreed to try the humor, and Frank read aloud to her most mornings after breakfast: P. G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain and Eudora Welty and James Thurber. Now they were in the middle of Jerome K. Jerome, at the part where Harris tries to sing a comic song. They both looked forward to it, as a way of spending time together without talking about what was on their minds. They had, in fact, forgotten the purpose of the readings, but her aunt asked, when she heard about them, “Does it make you feel any better?”
    â€œNot really,” said Violet. “But I’ll die laughing.” Her rare mortality jokes always embarrassed her aunt, who said, “Now, Violet.”
    â€œAnthony Trollope,” Betsy had said thoughtfully when Violet repeated the joke to her. “Trollope died laughing.”
    Violet always fell asleep after a chapter or two, and Frank closed the book and crept downstairs to make his daily call to Dr. Baird. Violet’s day sleep was sacred and precious because her nights were becoming so restless. Her illness had taken them all by surprise: it was real, and she didn’t complain. All her life she had exaggerated and lied, whined over imaginary illnesses, turned colds into pneumonia, missed school, carefully calculated the number of sick days she was entitled to at work and took them all. But a year ago when she began getting the pains in her joints, and the swellings, and the bouts of fatigue, and all the rest of it, it took her months (valuable months lost) before she told anyone, and another four weeks before she’d consent to see a doctor. She wanted to try dolomite, cranberry juice, deep breathing, until Frank and Betsy stormed at her. When all her ailments were taken seriously, and tests (three days in the hospital, with wires, tubes, and needles) showed advanced lymphogranuloma, a rare form of Hodgkin’s disease, and Dr. Baird gently told her there was little hope for a cure (in his eyes, she saw “no hope”), she took it placidly. Her last cold had aroused more passion and resentment than this, her last illness.
    â€œI’ll be with Will,” she said to her father soon after the diagnosis, and though tears came to his eyes he didn’t really believe in her remark, at once so romantic and so stoic. He thought she got it out of a book. Though they all noticed Violet had stopped complaining, no one noticed she had stopped lying.
    â€œIf only Betsy was settled,” she also said, meaning: Otherwise I die content, Judd’s name never came up in the family discussions of settling Betsy. There were sighs all around. “Settled” meant “married,” but it wasn’t so blunt.
    Violet had a fair amount of time to think and she thought about the thing that nagged at her, trying to identify it. It wasn’t only Betsy’s unsettledness that was bothering her. There was another “ If only … ” It was when she began to mull over the past, the years