Chapter 6 #2
“Isn’t there something they can give you for the nausea?” he managed.
Lace twisted her mouth into what she hoped look like a grin. Because what else could she do?
“Yeah. There is. And they’ve tried just about everything, actually.
Unfortunately, I’ve had reactions to it all,” she informed him as he followed her back to the infusion area, enumerating deets he may or may not want to hear.
“First, the meds made me more likely to lose my lunch, not less, and second, they ended up giving me uncontrollable muscle spasms. Go figure. I’m just one of the lucky ones, I guess,” Lace ended sarcastically.
Vincent watched her settle in her chair, then pulled one up opposite to hers, continuing to offer his ear as he sat. “I’m no expert, Lace. Not at all. But what about…? Uh, isn’t marijuana supposed to help?”
She shook her head, regretfully. “I’ve tried the standard ones they normally prescribe; Dronabinol, Nabilone. But they cause dizziness and cognitive impairment, which doesn’t mix well with my job.”
Vincent seemed to give up that line of questioning, to settle in with a different tack. “What do you do for a living?”
“Besides this? Oh.” Sarcasm dripped from her words. “You meant for a living, not ‘in order to live’.”
It was a poor cancer joke, but if you couldn’t poke fun at it all, you might as well hang it up.
“I work for NOAA,” she offered. “But you probably already knew that.”
“I did. I do,” he admitted. “Buck told me. But that’s the extent of my intel,” he revealed. “I informed everyone in my nosy-ass family that I wanted to get to know you without their input. So you’re nearly a blank slate for me.”
Lace let that settle, and she felt pretty good about it.
“How about you?” he continued. “Have you, uh, asked any questions about me?”
“Nope,” she was able to say honestly. “All I know is that you’re one of the renowned Sothards, and that your brother Buck likes to give you shit.”
Vincent laughed. “That, he does. I guess he probably mentioned the bet he and my brothers all made on whether or not I’d dare to do the clown thing, and how he lost.”
“He did.” Lace returned. “But he was laughing so hard when he said it, I can almost imagine he still hasn’t come down off the high he got from knowing you took the bait.”
Vincent snorted. “Don’t worry about him. Bobbie will make sure he doesn’t spend too long patting his own back.”
“Bobbie’s the bomb,” she said.
“She sure is,” Vincent agreed.
There were a few beats of silence that actually felt comfortable.
“So…” Lace decided to press. “What are you doing here? With me, I mean.”
Now Vincent’s painted face contorted into something she couldn’t quite recognize under all the make-up.
“Honestly?” he asked.
“Always,” she nodded.
“I’m not exactly sure.” He fluttered his hands around in the air, ineffectually, which was pretty funny considering his outfit. She expected him to produce a rabbit from thin air.
Huh. Is that how it worked? Rabbits conjured from nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide?
But he was still speaking.
“To tell you the truth, between you and Inez…” He trailed off and paused.
Inez?
Lace blinked. She hadn’t been hearing things. He’d said, Inez.
Wow. Was Vincent seeing another woman at the hospital while he was…what? Flirting? Hitting on her? Was he hedging his bets between the two? It seemed out of character for who Lace knew the Sothards to be, but what did she actually know about this particular guy?
Nothing. But she was going to find out.
“Who’s Inez?” Lace asked, bracing herself for a let-down.
Vincent’s whole face lit up, bringing his clown-smile to a whole different level.
Damn. This Inez must really be something.
“She’s the sweetest little girl I met in the pediatric chemo room down the hall,” he said with a crack in his voice that had Lace’s insides melting. In a good way.
Well, shit. Didn’t Lace feel like a fucking loser, now? She’d immediately thought Vincent was a player, when in reality he’d taken an interest in a child. A child. Who was enduring the same kind of walloping as Lace.
“She’s really something special, huh?” Lace softened her tone, more than interested now. “How old is she?”
“Inez is six,” Vince told her, leaning forward in his excitement. “And from what I’ve observed so far, she’s sassy and smart.” He chuckled, then pointed at Lace. “Kind of like you.”
She’d take that as a compliment as he continued.
“Last time I was here, you and I talked about clown names, remember?”
Lace nodded, wondering where this was going.
“Well, I put the same question to Inez, and she scrunched up her nose over the two names I picked. Then using some very interesting and convoluted reasoning, she eventually dubbed me, Fluffo.”
“Fluffo.” Lace tried it out on her tongue. “I like it.”
Vince wasn’t finished. “On top of that, when I was making balloon creatures, she asked me to make her a blobfish. Not the normal cat, dog, or rabbit request I get all the time. A freaking blobfish.”
Lace snickered. For real. And that, while she was being pumped full of pragmatic-poisons.
“Nice,” she told him. “Inez sounds like a handful. I bet her parents are pretty proud of the way she’s handling things.”
Vincent’s face fell. And for a clown with a permanent smile affixed to his face, that hadn’t been easy.
“What?” Lace asked.
Damn. Was the little girl…dying, instead of getting better with her treatments?
“Inez doesn’t have a family,” Vincent finally ground out. “She’s a foster kid.” He continued with a bitter tone in his voice. “She has a social worker who drops her off in the morning, then picks her up when she’s through. Can you believe that?”
“How awful,” Lace commiserated, appalled.
Sure. Lace was alone. But she was an adult, and had been dealing with a lot of things, solo since her grandparents had died. And she’d had both of them around for a very long time. Certainly, their lives had revolved around her when she was six.
“Okay. What can we do about it?” Lace asked immediately, her own problems suddenly seeming insignificant compared to what little Inez must be experiencing.
Vincent looked at her. Really looked at her.
“You… You want to do something for her?”
“Of course.” Lace didn’t hesitate. “Is she here today? Maybe we can go visit her together. You can introduce me.”
Lace’s mind was going a million miles an hour.
If her infusion schedule and Inez’s meshed, or she could manipulate it somehow so they did, maybe the nurses would allow Lace to sit with the little girl in the peds unit while they both got their weekly dose of toxins.
Vincent seemed excited. “I haven’t seen her yet today, but according to what the charge nurse told me last week, she should be here right now. If you’re serious about seeing her?”
“Does a clown shit in the woods?” she quipped, getting a grin from Vincent. “Now, what the hell are we waiting for?” Lace asked, coming to her feet.
She was somehow able to thrust aside the nausea that always plagued her, concentrating for the present on someone other than herself.
It felt good.
“Let’s get moving.”