When Amy hears what her father has

When Amy hears what her father has done, she thinks she is having
a heart attack.
“Are you sure?” she asks her mother, who is out of state in Amy’s
childhood home. Amy is talking loudly because of the din of the
lawnmower going at it next door.
Her mother screams “Goddamn it” and hangs up the phone on
Amy. That’s when Amy thinks she feels the heart attack give birth to
itself. Her whole left breast aches underneath where she suspects her
heart is. Amy tries calling her mother back but she will not answer
and the heart attack lightning-bolts her. It isn’t at all what she thinks
a heart attack will feel like.
“Let it be over quickly,” she says. When there is no response, Amy
answers herself: “Okay.”
Amy caresses her breast, since she can’t get to her heart, and it feels
good; no, it feels better, but good that she can take care of things
herself, with husband and children at school. She thinks about how
things could have been so different. She could have married that
rabbi, freshly ordained, he wanted to marry her, and then there was
that doctor, a heart doctor, now is that some shade of apropos or
what, but he dumped Amy for a famous actress person, thirty years
his senior. So Amy married Ralph instead and she hates him and
hates this marriage, and he is always screaming how he hates her, too,