The Key

We’d been besties since college. Now she needed me more than ever

- Melanie Shankle

I wanted to scream. right there in the middle of the mail store. I’d been guaranteed nextday delivery of my package. By 10:30 a.m. even. But here I was, 24 hours later, and the package I’d expressed was undelivered and unaccounted for. Unbelievable.

I tapped my foot and glared at the long line of people in front of me, many holding Christmas presents. I wasn’t much in the spirit of the season.

The package—a key to the vacation house my parents owned in Houston— had been meant for my friend Jen, who lived in Dallas. I lived in San Antonio. Jen and I had been besties ever since our freshman year at Texas A&M, some 20 years earlier. Tall, blonde and striking, Jen was amazing—a force of nature. Back then, she’d talked me into going to Bible study, where I met my husband. I’d never known any person who had a faith as strong as hers.

That’s why when, just shy of 40, she’d told me she had breast cancer, I was certain she’d beat it. Only months earlier, she’d given birth to her first child, a son. She’d been nursing him when she felt the lump. She’d done the treatments exactly as her doctors advised: lumpectomy, chemo, radiation. We’d all prayed for her. Almost a year from the date of her diagnosis, in August 2014, she’d gotten the all-clear. A miracle. Or so we believed.

Four months later, the first week of December, I was Christmas shopping when I got a text in the gift wrap aisle of Target. Jen’s cancer was back. The news took the breath right out of me.