The Krystals arrived yesterday, two dozen in a care package on dry ice, with a Ziploc of pickles and mustard packets included separately for garnishment after reheating. They were sent, with all her love, from my mother back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, home of the steamy, hot-off-the-grill burgers that everyone craves—especially my husband, who declared to me a week prior, straight-faced, without the slightest hint of irony, that he was “literally dying for some fucking Krystal.”

“Babe, we are at least six hours from the nearest restaurant,” I’d said. “It would make for one hell of a road trip.” Since your legs don’t work, I didn’t say. And your right eye doesn’t see. And you need hourly meds just for the pain.

“Don’t be part of the problem, wife—be the solution.” He’d gestured vaguely to the catheter drain bag hung from his bedrail, half-full of browning yellow liquid.  “Let’s ditch the bag and hit the road.”

“I’m not yanking that out of you. Let me see what else I can do,” I’d said, and as he passed out moments later, I formed the nascent plan that came to fruition yesterday when I used the suite’s microwave to reheat the interstate burgers. The first slider he welcomed like sweet sin to St. Augustine—“O, come to me, my greasy mistress,” he purred. Each bite taken required minutes to chew and swallow. He once could devour six sliders in a sitting; now he was done after two. He washed them down with Old Milwaukee NA—actual alcohol was prohibited in the hospice and would not have mixed well with his meds. Besides, he didn’t know the beer was nonalcoholic because literacy had escaped him. One by one, the switches were being flipped off by the tumor’s growth: equilibrium first, then continence, gross motor skills, vision. Now hunger had abandoned its grasp on Cam’s appetite. We were left with his humor and his heart, and those two remaining faculties raced to the bottom.

“Give the rest to my roommates.” He waved his good hand toward the door. “Cordially shared by local legend Cameron Macris of the penthouse suite.” His brother, Van, nuked and dressed the remaining burgers, then we placed them on an orderly’s tray and meandered around our hospice wing, sharing reheated Krystals with unfamiliar Northern Virginians, courtesy of self-proclaimed local legend Cam Macris.

Aside from the brothers’ parents, only Van and I remained of his original entourage. Three weeks ago, after his transfer from the hospital, Cam’s room had pealed with laughter from his retinue of friends, who arrived from every theater to support him and say their goodbyes. Cam and I had been the first of our friends to wed, straight out of college, and now we were the first to suffer catastrophe. Cam was therefore burdened with the humbling lesson of mortality to instill in us indestructibles all still under age thirty. He’d countered our friends’ grim smiles and tears flippantly, asking how his chest hair looked, or confiding that the nurses were all trying to take advantage of him.

“I’m not daisy-pushing yet,” he’d say. “These dames are spiking my OJ with vodka and going for the goods.”

Or: “I’ve still got several prime-time TV appearances in me. I’m People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in Perpetuity.”

Or: “These assholes don’t know it, but I’m about to start a jazzercise class up in this bitch.”

Or: “Quit your crying, Eeyore—not every channel has Bonanza. Stop worrying about me. I am infinite.”

His voice grew raspy as the last of our friends departed. They’d all retreated with their health and livelihoods, leaving only wilting flowers and well-intentioned excuses. I didn’t fault them. Cam just slept more and seemed not to notice. The quieter waking moments allowed tenderness to creep into his stoicism, and I’d lower the cot and position him to hold me as he once did, newlyweds abed for the news and late-night.

On this last night he hallucinated that I’d had the chance to become pregnant before the cancer and chemo rendered his sperm radioactive, and I pretended along with him.

“I hope it’s a girl,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

“Gentle and soft like you. Just as full of warmth, and goodness.” I began tearing up. “And juicy beef. We’ll name her Krystal.” I smacked him on the leg he couldn’t feel, mixing laughter and tears. “She’ll be delicious,” he croaked.

“God, how do you have it in you to be a crazy shit?”

“Who I am,” he breathed. “Come by it naturally.”

I kept crying, silently soaking his gown with forlorn, hopeless, doomed emotion. His labored breaths puffed into my hair.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “So, so very sorry.”

“No. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole. Sweetheart. Hope you know. I don’t mean it.”

“I know.” I wrapped myself in his paralyzed appendages, and placed my head atop his  slowing heartbeat. But I felt comforted somehow despite the encroaching darkness. “But you’re my asshole. In perpetuity.”

“That’s my girl,” he sighed, and just before his eyes fixed and one more switch flipped off, he whispered, “I’m a local legend, you know….”

James Swansbrough received his BA from Davidson College and MFA in Creative Writing from The University of the South. His work has appeared in catheXis northwest press, Cagibi, and The Write Launch. He resides in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, with his wife and two daughters. They tend an organic rainbow glitter farm.