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A colorful throw her mother had sent her was draped over the beige and gray striped sofa. Whimsical dishes rested in a rack in the kitchen drainer, pretty hand towels hanging on the stove and fridge handles. The comforters and sheets in each of their bedrooms reflected their personal preferences. They didn’t have a lot of time for decorating, but touches like that made it their own space.
Les moved toward the steps to the second level. “Help yourself to anything in the kitchen, and there’s a remote on the coffee table if you want to channel surf. I shouldn’t be long.” She paused on the bottom step, her hand on the banister, and looked back at him. “Unless you’d like to see the upstairs.”
Brick ignored his surroundings and came to her. With her on the step, they were eye-to-eye. She could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. The quiet in the condo, punctuated by the faint hum of the heating and air unit, the click of the ice maker in the fridge, became more noticeable.
“I’d like to see your room, Les. Take me there.”
He offered her his hand, and she closed hers over it. Because of the condo’s narrow layout, the staircase was five steps to the landing, then did an about face to the next set of steps to the second floor. On the landing wall was a framed poster of a kitten lying on her back. Fuck it. It’s time to take a nap, was printed in pink letters beneath it.
“A dorm souvenir?” Brick’s gaze sparked with humor.
“The first thing Beulah and I bought together,” she confirmed. “It’s traveled with us ever since.”
They’d joked about fighting for custody over it when graduating. If she didn’t graduate…
Les reached the second floor, Brick a silent presence behind her. Her bedroom was on the left. Beulah’s was at the end of the hall. They had one guest bedroom, or room for a third roommate, but the rent was reasonable enough they’d decided to stick with two. Third year med school was difficult enough without having to break in the habits of a new permanent roommate.
Textbooks that hadn’t been uploaded to the university library system for digital access were on her desk. Next to them were old notebooks from her first two years. She liked to scribble things down, because that helped her remember them. A bookshelf held family photos and two or three figurines she’d brought from home, serving the same purpose as her mother’s throw.
As she moved to the closet to pull out her suitcase, intending to fill it with what she’d need for the Easter visit, Brick went to the bookshelf to study the pictures.
He’d see a photo of her family at one of the state parks, from when Les was in middle school. They were at a picnic table, cutting up watermelon. Dad was chuckling, Mom’s hand covering his.
Next to that picture was Rory and Daralyn at their wedding, right before Daralyn threw the bouquet. It hadn’t been a large event, because Daralyn still had problems with big groups, especially when she was the center of attention. Rory had his hand around her waist, and she was sitting on his lap in his chair. His attention was all about and on her, making sure she was okay. She had been. She’d radiated love and happiness that day.
Thomas had walked her down the aisle, as Les’s father would have done. When her mother’s eyes filled with tears, Les knew her thoughts had gone there, and to everything connected to them.
Marcus and Thomas’s wedding picture was next. Les had taken the photo, asking them to overlap their hands so she could get the two rings in the shot. As they’d done it, Thomas had looked at Marcus, and that was when Les clicked the image. The photo was almost too intimate, something more appropriate for them to have on their own shelf. They did have one, but she’d made herself a copy. She loved looking at the three pictures, all the romance and love in them. Proof that she and her siblings had been born from love, and confirmation her brothers had found their own, the right person to care for them, and who they could care for.
She also had pictures of herself and Beulah from their undergrad days, group photos with their dormmates. On the wall next to the shelf was a painting of the farm. It was one Thomas had done during her first year, as if he’d known how overwhelming the homesickness had been. When his star rose in the art world, Beulah joked they could sell it to pay a year’s rent.
He was most known for gay erotic subject material, haunting and layered pictures of male love, but this landscape held the same undeniable talent. She felt like she could step right into it, like the wardrobe to Narnia, and be home.
The other picture on the bedroom walls had come from Beulah, a birthday gift. She’d found an old window in a vintage store and used one of Les’s photos, enlarging and mounting the picture behind the divided lights. The picture was Les’s view from her bedroom window at home, the sprawling oak in the back yard she’d told Brick about, the tire swing and fields stretching beyond the lawn. The front corner had caught a section of her mother’s vegetable garden.
A window to home, literally.
“What’s this?” Brick drew her attention to an empty small peanut butter jar.
She put some jeans in the suitcase. “During my second year, I worked in a downtown clinic. Bugman, a homeless man, was a regular. He was a poorly managed diabetic, and was always coming in for things related to that, like leg ulcers. One day I found him pulling a peanut butter jar out of a dumpster.”
She straightened. “He had a plastic knife, and said he could usually get a couple peanut butter sandwiches out of a so-called ‘empty jar.’ The local grocer gives him out-of-date loaf bread. Bugman told me, ‘Laziness and waste can serve a purpose. Even assholes can do good, despite themselves.’”
Brick gave her a curious look. “So is this that jar?”
“No. It’s one I kept after Beulah and I finished it. I wanted the reminder. In the clinic, you make assumptions about people just because they’re dirty, or strung out. Especially when you’re busy or overworked, or frustrated by their unwillingness or inability to take better care of themselves. We’re always short on time, so we’re already making intuitive leaps that can…” She paused. “Result in the wrong conclusions.”
At his concerned expression, she shook her head. She refused to let every damn thought knock her off the seesaw. “‘Take a moment. Listen. Learn. Ask the right questions.’ One of my first-year professors had that on his wall. Said it applied to everything, not just medicine. Until Bugman, I hadn’t internalized it.”
“Do you feel like you forgot that with Llanzo?”
“No.” She gazed at the jar. “That’s what scares me so bad. That even if you think you’re doing everything right, listening, paying attention, you can still get it so very wrong.”
She returned to packing. “I take Bugman a jar of peanut butter every once in a while. And a bag of apples, so he doesn’t get constipated.”
“A practical woman.” Brick shifted his attention to her mission trip photos, taken at a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. They’d been doing medical screenings for the kids to help them qualify for pre-school. In the picture, she was squatting down and surrounded by several children, all of them grinning widely. One cradled a chicken in his arms.
“He was impressed I knew about their feeding and care,” she said.
