Page 58 of Omega’s Fold

“Are you okay?”

The question is gentle. It is gentler than I am ready for. I open my mouth to say I am fine.

Instead, my stomach moves: a fast climbing move that comes up the back of my throat in a hot wet wave before I have any time to do anything about it.

My hands go off the hat and onto the arms of the chair and I am half-standing before I know it, and the only thing in the room that is below me and not the carpet is the small black wire wastebasket beside the corner of the desk.

I lean. I throw up into the wastebasket.

I throw up everything I have eaten this morning, which is not much, then I throw up again, and I hear Mrs. Holloway behind me saying oh my dear, oh my dear.

Suddenly, the sobs start coming. Mrs. Holloway puts a hand, very lightly, between my shoulder blades, and holds out a paper cup of water with the other.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Take a minute.”

I take a minute.

She gives me a tissue and I wipe my mouth. I wipe my face. I am breathing in shallow short bursts that I cannot make any longer.

“Sit down,” she says. “Sit down for a minute, Wyatt. There. There you go. Have you got your breath?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

She has filled the cup again. She gives it to me. I drink the water. The water is cold. My hands shake on the cup. I set it down on the desk because if I keep holding it I will spill it.

She has gone back round to her side of the desk. Not to give me distance, I think, but to give me the desk. She sits down. She does not look at the wastebasket as she puts a finger on her phone and presses a single button and says, “Linda, could you come in for a moment please, and bring the basket from the staff room. Thank you.”

She lets her finger off the phone.

She looks at me.

“You’re not well,” she says. “That has nothing to do with this meeting and that is none of my business. But I am not going to send you out onto the road in this state. I want you to sit here for as long as you need to, and I am going to get you a glass of water and a biscuit, and then when you are ready you are going to drive home. And we are going to talk again on Monday. Yes?”

“Yes.”

After a while, my breathing comes evenly, and the shaking in my hands has come down to a small fine tremor, and I stand.

She stands with me.

“Monday,” she says. “You don’t have to come back in. I’ll call you. We’ll talk over the phone. You think about the three options.”

I shake her hand. Her hand is dry and warm. She holds mine for one beat longer than a handshake takes, and she lets go.

The autumn wind hits me in the face in the lobby.

The drugstore is two doors up from the hardware store and four doors up from the bank. It has a window full of vitamins on offer and a small sign in the corner that says Flu shots available, ask inside.

I walk past it. I walk to the truck. I sit in the truck with my hands on the wheel.

The smell of vomit is on the cuff of my shirt, faint, where I caught it with my hand and did not have time to wash properly in the bank’s bathroom. The sun has come out. The light off the windshield is too bright.

I have known for a while.

I have known for, what, three weeks? Maybe a month.

I have known the way you know that a storm is coming before the cloud comes over the ridge.