“Not sleeping,” he said.
“You can if you want,” I said.
“Dr. Ocean knows exactly how long I can go before I start towear out. Then she beats back the rising tide of white cells with her elixir.”
“She’s very good,” I said, and it was true. I, too, had become attached to Dr. Ocean, this place, our routine. I had become attached to Eddie’s life.
“I love her,” he said.
“Lucky Dr. Ocean.”
“I love you more,” he said.
“Then lucky me.”
“Tell me about your mother. Was she able to get a mushroom casket for Lucas?”
The casket, of course, was months ago. I had told Eddie the first half of the story, then failed to follow up. “She did! I don’t know who she paid off, but she did it. They told her it wasn’t going to be possible, and the next thing I knew, he was going into the ground in a hemp basket.”
Eddie nodded. “Every publicist should have the privilege of burying at least one of her authors.”
“Certainly the authors they marry. Oh! and she sold the house.”
“She told me that,” he said. “I asked her about the house. I didn’t think it was my place to ask her about the casket.”
“You’ve been talking to my mother?”
“We write each other notes, back and forth, back and forth. It’s like texting for people with large collections of stationery.”
“That’s awfully nice of you,” I said.
“Your mother and I both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret. This helps to pry it loose. All these years later, you can still pry something loose. There’s no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life.”
I assumed he was speaking metaphorically and so,metaphorically, I agreed.
“She says she might come to see me,” he said.
“Really?” My mother never came to see me.
Eddie, reading my mind, said she hadn’t been able to leave Lucas, not when he was well and not when he was in decline. “She has the flexibility now.”
“Meaning what, she would have been visiting you all these years if it hadn’t been for Lucas?”
“No. I think she’s feeling a little left out is all. If you and I are friends, then she thinks it might be nice if she and I were friends. After all, your mother was once a great friend of mine.”
I took a moment of interior assessment to see if this bothered me and found it did not.
We continued to wait. Chemo was running behind schedule. The people who were so much sicker, the ones who were already here when we arrived, they were waiting as well.
Eddie opened his eyes, checked his watch. “Late,” he said.
“They are.”
He smiled at me and closed his eyes again. “I appreciate the fact that you’re not going to the desk to tell them how long we’ve been here.”
I laughed. “Chemo takes as long as it takes. They can’t pull out one person’s line to get the next person in there faster.”
“Once upon a time, at my first chemo appointment, the friend who accompanied me, we need not say her name, lost her ever-loving mind when we were kept waiting. She marched back to the desk and told the woman that sheknewpeople,lotsof people, and they best see me right away.”
