The Front Door on Maple Street

For eleven months, Marcus Thompson's front door stayed locked from the outside. His wife Denise kept it that way — not out of superstition, but because the last time Marcus walked through it, an ambulance had been idling in the driveway. Stage four, the oncologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis had said. Four months, maybe six. Marcus was forty-three, a high school shop teacher with two daughters who still needed help with long division.…