I want to be a good friend, but I don’t want to think about my eyes exploding. My anxiety starts building a week before every coffee date with Penny.

      Penny has diabetic retinopathy. She almost jokes about it. She may be in the car or in her bathrobe when a hemorrhage hits. Ordinary time ends, and spilt blood vessels streak her field of vision, naked as football hooligans. Yet just as she is about to head for humor, I see her take a sharp turn. When your eyes explode, the red road forks in four directions. You can curse the darkness. You can feel around for humor. You can lift your wick and wait to hear a match strike. Or you can claim that the room is still filled with light.

      “It’s God’s perfect plan.” Penny knows these directions. She could make it home in her sleep. “I am never outside the divine will.”

      Usually, I nod and squeeze her hand until I cut off the blood supply to my distress.       This is not about me. This is about Penny, the hospice worker who hugs the orphaned elderly. Their children could no longer bear to look. Penny does not judge. Penny can drive just fine if one eye blows, although she has to pull over if she loses the other.

      Penny sees theological thunderstorms behind my forehead. I try to cover them with my bangs, but Penny does not miss anything. She squeezes back.

      “Daisy. I know you believe that God is always working for our good.”

      If the coffee is hot enough, I will tell her: that’s precisely the problem. “Yes. And I can’t see retinopathy as good.”

      Penny smiles and wiggles like a child, as though I am setting up her knock-knock joke. “But think of all the blessings that have come from diabetes!” She drops my hand to throw her arms overhead, a magenta sun salutation that startles half the coffee shop. “You have me!”

      She’s cornered me, of course, and I drop my shoulders under her flashlight. We would never have made it past the pleasantries if not for diabetes. Fifteen years ago, we were assigned seats side-by-side at the Greater Philadelphia Geriatrics Conference. I was telling her I fundraise for an animal therapy program when her insulin pump began to caterwaul. I knew that siren, the WOO-woo-woo-woo-woo of glucose in descent. I gasped, she apologized, and I pulled my own pump out of my bra. We had the same pink neoprene case.

      Penny grabbed my hand, and both of our eyes filled with tears. We snickered like bad kids while she shielded me with her cardigan, so I could reposition my “third boob.” We played hooky the rest of the afternoon to talk about infusion sets, insurance villains, and the day we realized there’s no negotiating with cereal. It will send your blood glucose to Jupiter every time. Penny said it was still worth it, sometimes. I had not had a bowl in twenty-five years.

      We had so much in common, there was no need to focus on different forks. Only five percent of all diabetics have Type 1. Only fifty percent of well-meaning people can resist calling it “the bad kind.” Neither Penny nor I had ever encountered another of our type in the wild. The first years of our friendship were weighted by the words “you, too?”

      We had both been diagnosed before age ten and found creative places to hide our pumps ever since. There were endocrinologists as empathetic as eels and nurses whose wings poked out their turtlenecks. We’d learned to reassure other children that we were fine. Our parents bought us plastic ponies as consolation prizes for Halloween. Insulin pumps threw tantrums at funerals and first dates. Cats predicted hypoglycemia. Bosses had no idea when you white-knuckled through ketoacidosis. Neither of us used our sick time.

      “I wouldn’t trade you away for a cure.” I take Penny’s hands, which are back on the table after tickling any low-flying angels. “Of course, God brings good out of everything. But I can’t believe God hand-selects everything.”

      I can’t look in Penny’s eyes, blue as the Gulf where she had to leave a family vacation in a medevac, and agree that God crafted diabetes. The Great Mercy was not the sniper who picked off our beta cells. There is no way that Love – God’s own favorite nickname for God – laid the landmines behind Penny’s irises.

      When I pray for Penny, I pray for myself. God, work a miracle so Penny’s eyes never explode again. God, this is your Penny, the one that you love. God, I know you are not happy when her vision fills with blood. God, thank you that I have no complications yet. God, please don’t let me ever get complications, especially not retinopathy. I punctuate the tortured Psalm with disclaimers and apologies. God, I know you don’t love me more than you love Penny. God, I know this isn’t because Penny eats cereal. God, help. God, pray for me yourself, while I sleep, because I don’t know what to say.

Penny fixes on me the way her patients grip her wrists. Long after they lose the strength to lift a cup of cold water, even across the expanse of a coma, they may suddenly hold her in a vise. Penny is not at liberty to share what happens in those moments. Today she stares at me as though I am telling a story that has her rapt. She is the one doing the talking.

      “But God does.” She squeezes. “Everything. Everything, Daisy.”

      I can’t squeeze back. “I’ll go as far as saying that God allows it, for reasons we don’t understand, but not—”

      “—everything, Daisy.” She holds her palms against mine, bringing all four of our hands up together, as though we are across a looking glass. “We don’t have to understand yet.”

      Penny is beautiful, copper-curled and quick as an otter. I am clumsy, all elbows and knees, with eyes the color of algae. We are not the same. Penny’s fingertips press into mine. I wonder how many pinpricks we have tallied in sixty combined years of glucose tests, coaxing little beads who know whether or not we are okay. Penny lowers her arms and rubs my wrists. “Maybe we don’t have to understand, ever.”

      We will not solve this today. “I believe God wants you healed and whole.”

      “I believe that.” Penny takes a sip of her coffee, then makes a face. It is cold. “But in the meantime, can’t we have peace?”

      She releases my hand. I see her red taillights at the back of my eyes. She is deciding which way to turn. There may be a fifth fork in the road if we are willing to drive by feel. “We could have peace, Daisy.”