Poppyseed toasted with butter. Smelt on spelt with a schmear. It didn’t make any difference to her.
With one last glance at the girl with the heavy metal in her brow, I paid for my bagel and crammed a buck into the tip jar.
The girl didn’t know it, I thought, but she was auditioning to play the role of somebody’s wife after sixteen years of marriage.
Later, after I picked up a couple of things at Ideal and stopped back for a cup of decaf at Vic’s, I started walking home. I wasn’t ready to go home, really, but I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to avoid it. It was Sunday morning, and I’d gone every place but 7-Eleven that I could think of that was open. Except for church. But I couldn’t do that. Not that the spiritual solace of an hour at church wouldn’t have been welcome. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to see all the familiar faces and hear the litanies of “How’re you feeling?” and “Hey, where’s the family?” And I really, really didn’t want to hear another story about somebody’s relative’s heart attack and how they were dead in a week.
I didn’t want to hear how, oh, lucky I am.
I wasn’t feeling too damn lucky.
The walk wouldn’t take long-it was only a few blocks from North Broadway to the thousand square feet of siding-covered box that we called home-and I could feel the heave-and-ho of my chest as I made the gentle climb. Not chest pain; no pain exploding below my sternum. Not even a little twinge. The heave-ho was just the rise and fall of excess skin and the sway of my fat.
My man-boobs.
In sight of my house I stopped and watched a teenage girl shovel her sidewalk. Her outfit was more appropriate for an early summer day at Boulder Reservoir than the first real day of winter. Shorts. Sweatshirt that said-what? I couldn’t read her sweatshirt from thirty yards.
What was it with kids and clothes? I had to figure that out, had to. Simon was on his way. I had to get there first.
I made the decision to spend my forced medical leave of absence doing two things. I was going to begin to get rid of my man-boobs, and I was going to go looking for Sterling Storey.
I stopped and checked my pulse.
Eighty-four. That was good. Walking up the hill, holding an eighty-four? That was good. My cardiologist would be pleased. Those perfectly svelte physical medicine specialists who ran the rehab program would be pleased.
Or maybe they wouldn’t be pleased. Their mantra seemed to be “I think you can do better, Sam.” I had the sense that if you told them they’d won Powerball, they’d complain that the jackpot was only thirty million.
Sherry would like them. She thought I could do better, too.
What had Alan said to me?“You have plenty of more important things to worry about.”
He was right. And finding Sterling Storey was going to be my way of worrying about them.
My man-boobs? I’d never laid eyes on the guy, but I was betting that Sterling Storey didn’t have any.
THIRTY
“I’m having some trouble with my leg,” Lauren said.
I’d deduced that already. The walking stick in her right hand was a dead giveaway. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the thing emerge from the closet, but I couldn’t. I guessed that it had been years. I purchased it for her at a mountain equipment store in Ouray, on the Western Slope, during another health crisis. Or was it Telluride? I couldn’t remember.
I did remember that the circumstances were similar to these and that I’d seen the decline coming. It seemed disease exacerbations always arrived after a drumbeat of warning.
“Come, sit,” I said. I took her by the elbow and led her to a kitchen chair next to Grace’s high chair.
“It feels like it weighs a ton. I’m just dragging it around.” She was talking about her leg.
“Yeah.”
She bowed her head toward Grace and was immediately lost in the vernacular of baby talk that allowed her to reconnect with her daughter and forget about whatever was going on with her myelin sheath. Grace was oblivious to her mother’s malaise, but she was pretty interested in the walking stick. Were she developmentally able to stagger a few steps and simultaneously hold on to an object, I assumed I would see our daughter playing with a toddler-size version of the walking stick before the day was out.
I was examining Lauren for indications of other peripheral neuropathy. Her facial muscles were still unable to coordinate her blinks. Beyond that, my unskilled eyes found nothing anomalous.
“Any other weakness?” I asked. I wanted to hear her talk again, to taste the cadence for evidence of impairment in her speech.
She shook her head.
“Is that the same leg as before? You remember, that trip to help Teresa in Utah?”
“That was the other leg,” she said.
She sounded okay. “Should I call the neurologist?” Lauren’s neurologist, Larry Arbuthnot, liked to be aggressive with steroid treatment in the face of a fresh exacerbation that threatened serious consequences.
“I don’t want to start steroids,” she said.
Yeah, okay.“I know.”
She actually smiled. “I’m due for interferon today. I’ll take that and see how things develop.”
Ah, yes, interferon.
Lauren’s weekly interferon injection was preventive medicine; it was intended to protect her from waking up to mornings like this one. The IM injection that she plunged into her thigh once a week wasn’t intended as a treatment in the event that a morning like this one occurred anyway. Interferon was a toxic prophylaxis against a rare event, akin, I sometimes mused, to lighting particularly noxious incense in an effort to keep elephants out of the living room.
In the case of interferon, burning the incense usually seemed to be effective, but it was inherently hard to tell. Last time I checked, the living room was devoid of elephants. But then again, it usually was.
Was it the incense?
Answering that question was the rub.
Regardless, interferon wasn’t intended to deal with a rogue elephant that had snuck into our living room anyway. And that’s what we had right now: a rogue elephant in the living room.
“You sure that’s wise?” I tried hard not to say it in a tone that communicated that I thought her strategy unwise. I probably failed.
Lauren was almost totally focused on Grace. If it weren’t for the walking stick she had clamped between her knees, I could have convinced myself that it was any other Sunday morning.
She finally answered me. “No, not at all. I’m not at all sure. Will you bring me half a cup of coffee, please? Maybe some juice.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to take the damn disease she had by the throat and tighten my grip on it until it died.
“Lauren, we’re talking ambulation. It’s a big risk.”
She snapped back, “Don’t you think I know that? I hate steroids. I want to give it a few hours, okay?”
I retrieved her coffee and juice. Her request for a few hours was reasonable. But then, so was my alarm.
Her voice was much, much softer when she said, “Was that Sam before? On the phone?”
“Yeah, there’s a lot that’s going on.” I filled Lauren in on the events that had taken place outside Albany, Georgia, and Sterling Storey’s ironic demise on the Ochlockonee River.
“That’s convenient,” she said, almost devoid of sympathy. Death a time zone away was so much easier on the soul.
“That’s what Sam thinks, too. He said he wants them to render the body.”
She laughed. “I think you mean renderupthe body. Rendering has something to do with separating out fat, doesn’t it? It’s a cooking thing, I think. Adrienne does it to chickens sometimes around the Jewish holidays. Is Sam okay?”