After the doctor’s appointment, where you say you’re not a drinker but you smoked in your 20s, after the blood pressure check, after your heart bumps against the cold black stethoscope, after the bloodwork and tinkling in a cup, after the screening for depression, which you don’t think you have but who wouldn’t be sad if they can’t remember the date, time, 18 minus 6 (actually you got the time right and who cares about a stupid Math problem, anyway), after you’re asked to recite a list of four words back and the nurse beams when you say microwave, after the MRI that shows your brain shrunk by half a walnut, they call it something else but it looks like a nut on the filmy black screen, after the PET scan of the gunk in your head, with a dumb sounding name, am-something, you think of eggs & ham, I do not like them, Sam-I-am in that book your daughter loved when she was three. It’s like plaque between your teeth, your daughter says now, after you try to rhyme for the doctor – a man with hair growing out of his nose and eyes that blink when he talks – the doctor who’ll send you someplace terrible if you don’t get the next question right, you can see it in his eyes, your daughter staring at you like she doesn’t know you, like you’re the monster in a scary movie you shouldn’t have taken her to see, you remember the orange cover of the book, the picture of the cat in a floppy hat bending over a plate of green meat, your daughter giggling on your lap as you read to her in the comfy chair by the window, the way the snow fell outside without ever touching her smile.