22. Brendan
Brendan
Nobody knew what I had planned. This was, in itself, an achievement.
Alan had texted four times in the past week with variations on the same question, which was essentially, “Why are you so calm?” delivered with different punctuation.
Tasha called Tuesday and said I sounded different. When I told her I was fine, she replied, “I know you’re fine. That’s what’s different,” which was the most Tasha sentence she had ever produced.
The group chat generated seventeen messages speculating about my general demeanor. Marcus had apparently added a new tab to the document. I read all of it and said nothing.
I had been planning for eight days.
The depth of my preparation began while driving home from the clinic, thinking about something Adrian had said weeks earlier, something about his abuela’s kitchen.
He’d mentioned the specific smell of sofrito and something sweet.
He’d told me about being eight years old and the way a place could hold him and make him feel safe even when everything else around him changed.
I’d been thinking about that, and somewhere on Dale Mabry Highway, I’d made a decision.
I called my mother on that Monday morning.
“Mom,” I said, “I need a favor.”
There was a pause.
My mother’s pauses were different from other people’s pauses. Sometimes, they were terrifying. Sometimes, they contained mountains of information.
“What kind of favor?”
“I’m bringing someone to Tarpon Springs. I’m not sure what day, but I’ll need a table at Stavros’s.”
Another pause, longer, with far more information woven throughout it.
“One day soon, but you don’t know when?”
“Right.”
“Stavros’s doesn’t take reservations on Saturdays. If it’s a Saturday—”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling you. I need a sort of floating reservation.”
She was quiet for another moment. I heard her set something down.
“Who is this person?”
“Someone I’d like you to meet eventually, though not when we do this dinner. This is for me to—” I stopped. “I’m . . . working on something.”
“You’re working on something,” she repeated in the tone of a mother who had raised this particular son for thirty-three years and was now receiving unexpected data. “Brendan?”
“Mom.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No.”
“Your voice does a thing when you’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“It gets very level, like you’re reading from a card.” She clucked her tongue, something she’d done since I was a boy. A clucking meant she didn’t believe a word I was telling her, and we both knew it.
“I’ll call Stavros myself—”
“I’ll call Stavros,” she said. “What time? And do you have any idea which day?”
“Seven-thirty and no, not yet, but soon.”
“I’ll tell him eight. You’ll be late.”
“I’m never late.”
“You’re always late when you’re nervous,” she said, hanging up before I could repeat my protest because, of course, my protest came too late.
The next day, a package arrived at the clinic. Marcus signed for it, brought it to my office, and set it on my desk.
“This is from a music shop in Ybor,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you, Marcus.”
He squinted, then cocked one brow, then vanished, closing my office door behind him.
I waited a full minute before opening the box.
Mofongo’s appointment was at four-thirty.
I had scheduled it myself, which in retrospect was the kind of thing a person did when they were planning something and wanted to control as many variables as possible.
Four-thirty meant it was my last appointment of the day. The last appointment meant no patients waiting. No patients waiting meant the clinic would be quiet when Adrian walked out, so I could do what I had decided on Sunday night I was going to do, assuming my courage held.
I finished the clinic’s weekly admin, updated three patient charts, and reorganized the medical supply cabinet (which didn’t need reorganizing and which I did anyway because standing still was not currently an available option and the cabinet had been bothering me since February and this seemed like the right Tuesday to address it).
Diane looked in at two-thirty.
“You reorganized the cabinet?” she asked while crossing her arms and leaning against my doorframe.
“It needed it.”
She scoffed. “It didn’t need it.”
“The gauze was in the wrong section.”
“The gauze has been in the same section for two years. Besides, since when do doctors tinker with the supplies? You tell us to fetch them. The cabinet belongs to the staff, not you ducks in your fancy white coats.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the cabinet in the hallway, then returned her owlish gaze to me.
“You also alphabetized the supply labels.”
“That’s standard practice.”
“That is not standard practice for anyone who actually has to find things. That, my good doctor, is the practice of a man who needed something to do with his hands at two in the afternoon.”
She crossed her arms.
I shrugged, unable to argue her airtight and frustratingly correct point.
“You have three patients before your four-thirty.”
“Yes.”
“Mofongo is your last appointment.”
“I know.”
The corner of her mouth twitched.
“And his owner will be here. He’s the one with the tight—”
“It’s a routine vaccination appointment, Diane,” I said, desperate to stop whatever imagery she hoped to invoke.
“Of course it is.” She looked back at the cabinet one more time. “You alphabetized it, Brendan. The gauze is now between ‘forceps’ and ‘gloves.’ That’s not even a medically useful order, which tells me you were thinking about something else entirely while you were doing it.”
I looked past her to the cabinet. She was right. The gauze was between the forceps and the gloves.
“I’ll fix it later,” I said.
“No, you won’t. I’ll fix it,” she said. “You do whatever it is you do to prepare for your routine vaccination appointment with a very cute patient and an even cuter owner.” She pushed off the doorframe. Diane’s cackle followed her down the hallway.
At four-fifteen, I washed my hands, checked my jacket pocket for the framed print, and went to wait for my four-thirty. The exam went well. Mofongo was healthy and growing and adorable.
The kiss I planted on Adrian’s lips surprised us both. That had not been part of my plan. When we pulled back, he looked at me like a man who had misplaced every word he’d ever known, which was its own specific reward.
I told him I’d missed him.
That hadn’t been part of the plan either.
Then I asked if I could see him later that night.
He said yes in multiple languages, none of them in the right order, and I kissed him once more, soft and unhurried, savoring the taste of him on my tongue.
Then I followed Mofongo and Adrian to the waiting room.
Marcus was at the counter chatting with Diane.
The moment we appeared, their conversation stopped, and the pair looked our way.
“Have a good evening, Mr. Voss,” Diane said, in a voice that contained an entire document’s worth of information and released none of it.
When the door closed, there was approximately four seconds of blessed silence before Marcus picked up a pen and made a note on something. Diane looked at me standing in the hallway and said nothing, which was louder than anything she could have said. I stepped into an exam room and called my mom.
“Hello, dear,” she answered.
“It’s tonight,” I said without preamble. “I need to know if Stavros—”
“Already handled.”
I stopped. “What do you mean? How could it be already handled?”
“I called him Sunday.”
“Mom.”
“You decide things on Sundays, Brendan. You have decided things on Sundays your entire life. I called Stavros Sunday evening because I knew you’d call me one day this week in a panic. I didn’t want Stavros to be the reason this went sideways.”
She let the silence stretch, rich with maternal satisfaction.
“How did the kiss go?”
“I didn’t say anything about a kiss.”
“No, you didn’t.” She sounded enormously pleased with herself.
“You called me from the exam room before you’d even left the building, didn’t you?
I know that echo. The scent of sanitizer and dog fur is practically flowing through the phone line.
That tells me everything I need to know about how the kiss went. ”
“Mom . . . I . . . how . . . I just called you about Stavros.”
“You called me about Stavros because you needed something practical to focus on after something very impractical happened to you.” Another pause. “It was that good, was it?”
“Mom.”
“I’m just asking.”
“I’m not discussing it.”
“You don’t have to discuss it. I’m your mother. I know everything. Besides, your voice is doing the thing.”
I blew out a breath and banged my forehead against the nearest wall. “It’s not doing a thing.”
“Stop hitting your head. You’ll get a mark, and you don’t want that tonight.”
I covered my face with a palm.
“It went well, didn’t it? That’s good. You deserve all the happiness in the world,” she said with the serenity of a woman who had arrived at a conclusion and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
“Your table’s at eight. I expect to meet this man before your next date.
Call that my price for pulling strings.”
“I said seven-thirty and—”
“And I said eight because you always run late when you’re not thinking straight, and you are currently not thinking straight.” She barked a laugh. “Thinking straight, as if you could. My big ‘mo’ son.”
“Mom!”
“Oh, come on, that was funny.”
“I’m thinking perfectly straight.”
“Your thinking is wonderfully gay. That’s as far as I can go with you here.”
I stared at the ceiling and wondered why the gods had cursed me. My mom, the traitor, laughed quietly from her end of the line.
“Don’t wear the gray shirt,” she finally said.
“I wasn’t going to wear the gray shirt.”
“Wear the blue one, the one Alan gave you. It brings out your eyes and works with your skin.”
“How do you know about the blue shirt?”
“Again, I’m your mother. Why do you question the mysticism that is motherhood?
” The genuine glee in her voice frightened me a little.
“Besides, Alan texted me a photo of it in November. He said you’d never worn it and asked me to encourage you to wear it sometime because it does something nice for your eyes. ”
“I’m thirty-three years old, Mom.”
“And you have very nice eyes and the fashion sense of a blind beggar monk.” She paused again. “Trust your mother. He’ll notice.”
“Mom.”
One more pause, the warmest of all of them.
“Brendan.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I’m glad it went well. I love you.”
I leaned against the exam table for a moment and looked around the room, at my stethoscope back on its hook, at the paper on the exam table still slightly crinkled from where Mofongo had sat on it, at the empty pan dulce box in the trash bin.
Without thinking, my fingers reached up and found my lips where, moments before, Adrian had breathed my air.
I sighed . . . and smiled.
“Me, too, Mom. Me, too,” I said.
“Eight o’clock,” she said. “Go.”
I picked Adrian up at six-oh-four, which was four minutes later than I’d said and which I was not going to acknowledge.
He came out of his building and stopped on the sidewalk when he saw my car.
He wore dark jeans and a fitted black shirt.
As he opened the passenger door and got in, he looked at me with one cocked brow.
“You’re four minutes late,” he said.
I resisted the chuckle. “Traffic on Dale Mabry.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“There was a situation.”
“What situation?”
“A traffic-related one, very serious, lasted precisely four minutes,” I said, and pulled out of the parking lot.
Adrian settled into the passenger seat and looked out at the Tampa evening going gold around us. Neither of us said anything for a moment. The quiet was the comfortable kind, the kind that had taken the better part of a month to build and was now simply there, available, requiring nothing.
“Where are we going?” he said.
I reached across the seat and took his hand without looking away from the road.
“You’ll see.”