Excerpt from The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Death would mean new logistics-administrators and insurance people. Lyssa showered in the hospital room bathroom, using the stinging antibacterial soap in the dispenser. She plugged in her blow-dryer and styled her hair. She put on a change of clothes , a muted-berry lipstick, and a sweep of mascara. When the doctor in charge of rounds came back, he looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. He asked her if anyone had talked to her about her own preventative options. No one had. He wrote on a prescription pad the name and number of the doctor he wanted her to call.

Lyssa thought she would talk to her mother about it, and then she remembered. She had to keep remembering, even after she'd seen the body and signed the paperwork and arranged a funeral. Somehow she'd expected the dying to be the worst part, that after it was over she could go home and tell some healthy living version of her mother about the terrible thing that had just happened to her. Lyssa felt cheated: out of a mother, out of a textbook diagnosis where they could have lifted the bad thing out of her mother and sent her home to recover. She was not ready to be cheated out of anything else. It took her months to call the doctor on the referral slip. She went to the appointment as her regular self, washed and neat, but otherwise unadorned.

"I don't have any children," she told the doctor.

"Were you planning on them?" he asked.

"I wasn't not planning on them."

The doctor sighed. He leaned forward and made a facial expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace, a face that looked like he'd practiced it in the mirror after being lectured about his bedside manner.

"Look, if you were going to try to have a baby tomorrow, I'd say perhaps that was your risk to take. But if you're not planning on starting a family anytime soon, well, you're not getting any younger, and I'd do this sooner rather than later. Take care of your real future, not your imaginary one."

Lyssa tried to imagine her real future. She had lived with her mother until her mother wasn't living. She had inherited the house, or whatever of the house she could get out from underneath the second mortgage, which locked her here for now if nothing else did. She could not imagine choosing the way her mother died, given a choice. But her mother had chosen it, had chosen, with her little bit of time left, every painful intervention, every last-chance effort, every surgical and injected and intravenous possibility of survival over comfort. When her mother asked and Lyssa said this is not what I would do if it were me, sometimes she meant you are brave, and sometimes she meant you are reckless and foolish, and sometimes she meant I can't imagine what would be worth trying this hard to live for. The first time she thought about dying, Lyssa was fourteen. She told her mother about the feeling and her mother said, "You'd have to shoot me first."

 

While her mother was dying, Lyssa was dating a bartender named Travis. She had been dating Travis before her mother got sick, though not for very long before. They met on Halloween, he liked to say, though it didn 't really count as meeting in her mind-he had waved at her while she looked at him over the shoulder of a man in a pirate costume who was groping her and nibbling at her neck. Lyssa was trying to decide whether the pirate 's gold tooth was part of the costume or part of his mouth when she looked up and saw Travis watching. Her costume had involved fishnets and a dress that wouldn 't have made it out of her closet any other night, but she couldn 't remember now what cheap last-minute addition had made it a costume-cat ears or vampire teeth or some kind of ominous hat. It was almost the end of slutty Halloween; last year, even the local college kids had been bundled into cartoon character onesies or dressed as clever puns, covered up like nuns, the real kind. But this was two Halloweens ago, and Lyssa hadn 't known where things were headed, and wouldn 't have known what else to wear even if she had. Mackenzie had insisted she come out, and then she and her friends had promptly disappeared into the bar 's drunken throng, leaving Lyssa to her own devices. When Travis saw her with the pirate draped around her neck, her dress half off her shoulder and whatever costume accessory she 'd been wearing long gone, he raised an eyebrow, more a question than a judgment, and when he waved, it felt like Lyssa was snapped back into herself and had the answer. She extricated herself. The pirate pled with her as far as the bar door, but when he realized that following her out would mean he 'd have to wait in a line to get back in, he let her go.

Excerpted from The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans. Copyright © 2020 by Danielle Evans. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.