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When Joanne Hussey, 52, steps outside for her morning walk, the sky has lightened to cobalt along the eastern horizon. Orion’s belt shines high and bright above the eaves of her home on the east side of Naples Bay. It’s 6:30 a.m. and most of the world is just waking up.

At about the same time, Hussey’s friend Anna Marie Avola, 57, sets out from her front door, just a few blocks away.

Hussey and Avola met almost two decades ago, but in the last year or so something has pulled them closer. Ask them to talk about it and they break down a little. They’re strong and bubbly women, but this is hard to talk about.

Breast cancer. It’s a test, a gantlet that they’ve both been through.

It’s the reason they walk.

---

As she walks down her driveway, Hussey straps a GPS to her wrist. The device looks like a watch, but does much more than keep time — it uses satellites to calculate exactly how far and how fast she walks. Today, Hussey sets the watch to beep if she walks slower than 3 mph or faster than 5 mph. There are names for different pace settings, and this one’s called “squirrel.”

“So we’re little walking squirrels,” Hussey says, laughing. “We’re faster than snail and turtle pace, but not quite up to cheetah.”

Hussey starts off going north on Tarpon Road in Royal Harbor, and with each step the sky lightens a tiny bit more.

Frogs chirp in the bushes as her white walking sneakers hit the street rhythmically. A single car drives by, headlights shining.

A red blinking light bobs on the road ahead. A few more steps, and Hussey waves hello to Avola, who wears the light clipped onto a handkerchief around her neck. There aren’t many people driving around this residential neighborhood before 7 a.m., but Avola wears it just in case.

Her husband worries about her walking in the dark, she says. He’s protective of her, especially since she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.

Hussey and Avola fall into step together, easily matching their paces. They’ve been walking together about four times a week for about three months.

If you didn’t know them, this could just be a morning exercise walk. But it’s not. There’s a bigger purpose: Avola and Hussey are training to walk in the Susan G. Komen three-day, 60-mile breast cancer walk at the end of October in Tampa Bay.

They walk for Avola, who was diagnosed in the summer of 2007, and Avola’s sister-in-law who died 41/2 years after having a mastectomy. They walk for Hussey’s younger sister Sharon, who died in February.

No one should go through what they went through, they say.

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A Jeep drives by and Hussey waves. It’s her teenage son driving to Naples High School. A few minutes later, Avola’s son drives by, too. A little too fast for her liking, she says.

Then they go back to chatting, but Avola remembers she has news: She’s just $3 below the required $2,200 per walker for the breast cancer walk, and it’s still weeks until the event. As they talk about their fundraising, the friends’ voices rise in excitement, but their feet slow.

“Bebeeep, bebeeep,” the GPS watch sounds.

“Ooo,” says Hussey, who is the pace keeper. “We’ve got to move faster to keep up the squirrel pace.”

The sun continues to rise, and it’s getting hotter.

They’ve gone almost a mile and a half now — almost to the corner of Sandpiper Street and U.S. 41 East. There, they meet up with another walker, who is also training for the breast cancer walk.

They continue along, fanny packs bouncing and water bottles sloshing as their feet hit the pavement and their arms pump back and forth. Not too fast, but not too slow either — enough to break a sweat, especially as the sun and the temperature rise.

A few stoplights. They push the crosswalk button, wait for the white walking man and step into the crosswalk in front of lanes of idling rush-hour commuters. Soon, they reach Cambier Park in downtown Naples. Here they pause for a bathroom, water and stretching break. But only for a few minutes.

“OK squirrels, let’s move,” Avola says and they follow her lead.

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It’s about 7:30 a.m. and they’ve gone more than three miles in about an hour. After a brief peek at the waves at the end of Fifth Avenue South, they’re off again, back the way they came. Halfway done.

Avola leads the pack, and as she walks, she tells her cancer story.

There was no warning, she says. She went in for a routine mammogram and something wasn’t right.

It was a Wednesday, July 18. She was at work. When she talks about it, the details come out in pieces. But while she talks, her feet carry her steadily along the sidewalk beside U.S. 41 East. Cars rush by, stopping and starting fast before and after stoplights.

Avola called the doctor’s office to get her test results and the lady on the phone told her that it wasn’t good. She was supposed to teach that night — she’s a professor at Hodges University — but with that kind of news she couldn’t. She drove home, from Fort Myers to Naples, and when she saw her husband, she burst into tears.

“It’s a word you cannot say in the beginning,” she says, her voice quiet and just a tiny bit breathy from the walking. “You have to actually work up to saying ‘I have cancer.’ It’s very strange. Even the word ‘oncologist,’ it’s like, ‘Why am I going there?’ I’m not sick. I wasn’t sick, and they’re telling me I have this disease.”

MRIs. Blood tests. Biopsies. Weeks filled with poking, prodding and strange decisions. A lumpectomy or a mastectomy? Breast reconstruction?

Losing any body part is horrifying. A leg or an arm are more important for movement than a breast. But there’s something about a woman’s breast. Intimate. Sexual. Maternal.

“There’s something about your sexuality that goes along with losing a breast,” Avola says. “You know, ‘What am I going to look like afterward? Is your husband going to want you? Do you want yourself?’

“It takes a long time to look in a mirror.”

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They’re nearing the home stretch. They walk on the sidewalk along U.S. 41 East, heading toward Sandpiper. Cars rush by. It’s not just warm anymore. It’s hot.

But Avola’s story isn’t done. She continues talking and walking, and the two other women fall behind a little.

She remembers sitting in the plastic surgeon’s office and looking at pictures of breasts. It felt strange. Like she was looking at dirty magazines, she says, laughing. Her face, already flushed from walking, turns a little pinker.

After the surgery, she was bandaged for weeks. That’s when Hussey stepped in, and became her angel, Avola says, looking over her shoulder at her friend, who walks along behind.

“You know who your friends are when you get cancer, because its those people who come day in and day out,” she says, voice cracking and pitching upward. “You learn quickly who is really important in your life.”

Hussey, a former nurse, came to Avola’s house every day, changing bandages and bringing little things: a pink back pillow and a pink exercise ball, bandages that didn’t irritate her skin. And, when she was ready, a bra that closed in the front.

Which breast was it?

“Oh, it’s the right,” she says, her right hand reaching up and cupping the breast. “It’s like a rock right now, you could bounce a ball off it because I just had (the implant) replaced and it takes awhile for the swelling to go down.” She claps her hand into a fist and knocks on it like you’d knock on a door.

She can’t feel that breast anymore. It might look like it’s there, but it’s gone. Doctors say it will always feel that way.

“It’s totally numb,” Avola says, and then pauses for a few steps. “I don’t know if it’s something you get used to. You lost the breast and now what’s there is numb.”

---

At the corner of Tarpon Road and Snook Drive, Hussey gives Avola a hug. They left their other walking partner behind a few blocks back.

Hussey continues along, back to her house. People are out in their front yards now, walking dogs and leaving mail in boxes. At one house, landscapers wield humming mowers, edgers and whackers. At another, a feisty cocker spaniel yips at her, and then comes over for a pet.

While she walks, Hussey tells her own breast cancer story. While Avola was coping with her cancer, Hussey’s younger sister was dying.

“She was diagnosed June 17, 2007,” Hussey begins. She says the date like it’s become a part of her, like a Social Security number. “But it wasn’t the usual type of cancer.”

There were no lumps, nothing on her 48-year-old sister Sharon’s mammograms, Hussey says. It was discovered when she went in worried about her blood pressure. She had a staff infection, swelling under her arm and high cancer markers — proteins in the blood that indicate the disease’s presence.

It was something called inflammatory breast cancer. Different from other kinds and more aggressive.

Hussey, a stay-at-home mom, travelled to upstate New York often to be with her sister and she was there through all the big moments, she says: losing hair, a mastectomy, finding out it had spread to her brain, getting fitted for a breast prosthesis.

“It was awful, awful,” she says, and she starts to cry. Her voice breaks, her feet slow and she sticks a handkerchief under her sunglasses to wipe her eyes.

“Bebeeep, bebeeep,” the GPS watch sounds. She’s below squirrel pace again, and automatically, she speeds up her feet. Her body is on walking auto pilot, even while her mind copes with a grief that will never fade.

At the beginning, her sister would look at other people, healthy people, and ask, “Why me?” Hussey remembers. But as she grew sicker, her outlook changed.

“She said she was glad it wasn’t me, or my mom,” she says. “She’d always turn it around. Something good will come of this. That’s why I like the Susan Komen foundation, because the whole premise of the organization was a sister promise. A sister promising to a sister that she would try to end this.”

A few minutes later, Hussey is home. One six-mile walk down, but many miles to go before the big weekend.

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When they take on the three-day, 60-mile Susan G. Komen trek, Avola and Hussey will walk their feet sore and cheer their throats dry. They will laugh and celebrate, weep and remember.

They’re walking for themselves, testing their bodies and showing their heart.

But more importantly, they’re walking for their sisters and daughters, they say. For their granddaughters and great-granddaughters.

For all women. In the hope that someday, there will be a cure.