Georgia
Eight months into whatever she and Axel had stopped calling casual, the fatigue arrived first, the way most large things arrive, not as an event but as a gradual subtraction, each data point easy to explain away.
She was tired by four in the afternoon most days, a heaviness in her limbs she attributed, reasonably enough, to being forty-five and no longer twenty-five. Her cycle, always reliable, went erratic, then stopped showing up for months at a stretch, then returned with a vengeance she found almost funny. She woke some nights drenched, kicking off blankets Axel had to retrieve from the floor in the morning, and joked with him, more than once, that she was single-handedly keeping the local air conditioning company in business.
And there were the good days, more of them than the bad, which was part of what made the bad ones easy to dismiss. Sundays he made pancakes shaped like nothing in particular and she ate three. He learned that she hummed when she did the books, and stopped pretending not to listen. A toothbrush appeared at her house, then a drawer, then, without discussion, half a closet, and one evening she noticed that neither of them had said the word casual in weeks.
She had run a small architectural salvage business for twelve years: reclaimed doors, mantels, porch spindles, the brass hardware of houses that had been torn down. The divorce had made keeping it more expensive than selling it, so she had sold it, all but a stack of doors in the garage, and told everyone she didn’t miss it. Now she caught herself most afternoons thinking about the yard: the smell of old pine, the weight of a good door in both hands. She couldn’t have lifted one now. She told herself it was the age.
The fatigue had a texture. Some days it was simply heaviness. Other days it was a thin, persistent fog that made even the short walk from the kitchen to the living room feel like a negotiation. She began timing herself without meaning to—how long she could stand at the sink before needing to lean, how many pages she could read before the words slid. She filed each measurement under getting older and kept moving.
“You should see a doctor,” he said, more than once, in the mild, unpushy way he suggested most things.
“I have an appointment,” she’d say, which was even true, most of the time. She had gone, dutifully, to her regular doctor, who ran the standard tests, found the standard markers of a woman her age, and sent her home with the standard reassurances.
“It’s perimenopause, Georgia,” Dr. Halloway had told her, not unkindly, at the first visit. “Completely normal at your age. The fatigue, the irregular cycle, the night sweats, textbook. It’s uncomfortable, I know, but it’s not dangerous. Give it time.”
She wanted to believe this, and so she did, thoroughly. Every twinge of stomach discomfort was hormones. Every sleepless night was hormones. The weight coming off despite normal eating was stress, a delayed reckoning a full year after the divorce.
She did not tell Axel about the discomfort low in her abdomen, which came and went. That one she didn’t file under anything. She just didn’t mention it, the way you don’t mention a noise the car’s been making, on the theory that naming it out loud is what makes it real.
She told her sister, on the phone, in the same offhand register she used for describing weather. “I feel like a wrung-out dishrag most days. Apparently this is just what forty-five looks like.”
“Are you sure it’s not something else?”
“Marnie, I’m forty-five and recently divorced. It’s every symptom in the book at once. What else would it be?”
She said it with total confidence. If some small, animal part of her registered how tired she’d become, how the weight kept coming off, how the discomfort had started, some weeks, to feel less like a passing thing than a tenant with no plans to leave, she pushed it down every time.
Marnie did not let it go. Two weeks later she turned up on a Saturday, unannounced, after a six-hour drive, took one look at Georgia winded on the porch steps, and said, “Call Halloway. Or I will. You put his number in my phone yourself, for emergencies.”
“This isn’t an emergency.”
“Then it’ll be a very short call.”
She sat on the kitchen counter, swinging her heels, while Georgia dialed. When the receptionist offered a slot in five weeks, Marnie took the phone out of her hand and said, in a voice Georgia had not heard since their mother’s funeral, that her sister had lost twenty pounds without trying and would be seen this week. She was seen on Thursday. Dr. Halloway looked at her chart for a long while and ordered blood work he had not ordered before. Then a scan. Then a referral, and a parking garage Georgia had never been in.