4. Grant
Grant
Five AM. Body still on Kabul time.
Copper Falls.
Uneven grass where the ground dips near the shed. Fence leaning west. Porch railing I noticed at lunch, loose where the post connects. Dad would've had all of it done already.
That's not a useful line of thought. I drink my coffee.
I catch my reflection in the dark window over the sink — more gray at my temples than there was the last time I looked at myself somewhere with decent lighting, which tells you something about how much I've been avoiding mirrors.
Forty-three. I don't feel it most days, and then I catch a reflection like this one and do the math against a twenty-eight-year-old pediatric nurse and feel every single year of it at once.
And then, underneath the math, less disciplined and considerably less useful: the memory of her scent on that porch, vanilla and soap.
I notice Sophie's instructions specify the exact brand of anti-nausea medication, the dosing interval, the foods most likely to trigger nausea in the two hours after infusion, and the most effective distraction techniques for the waiting room.
She knows more about how to keep my mother comfortable than I do, and I've spent the last seventy-two hours reading oncology literature.
I should be annoyed by that. I'm not. I'm just grateful someone knew what to do when I wasn't here.
Seven-fifteen, Mom and I are in the truck. Her instructions — well, Sophie's instructions relayed by Mom — were to leave by seven-fifteen because the hospital parking fills fast on chemo days. I follow Sophie's instructions. I'm noticing I do this without thinking much about it.
The drive is quiet. Mom looks out the window at the town waking up.
"You nervous?" she asks.
"About a medical appointment?"
"About Sophie."
I keep my eyes on the road.
"You keep looking at the door," she says. "Last night at dinner. This morning while you were making toast. The door."
"I was watching for the mail."
"Grant. The mail doesn't come until noon."
I don't say anything.
"It's okay," she says. "I just want you to know — whatever's going on in your head, you can talk to me about it."
"There's nothing going on in my head."
"Mm-hmm." She adjusts her knit cap. "You've got that same look you had when you were eighteen and joined the Army without telling me until you'd already signed the papers."
"I don't have a look."
"You definitely have a look."
We pull into the hospital parking lot.
***
Third floor. Oncology and Infusion Center.
The elevator doors open and Sophie's there, standing near the nurses' station in jeans and a light sweater, hair up in a ponytail, a few loose strands at the back of her neck she hasn't bothered to fix.
She's talking to someone in scrubs, hip cocked, coffee in hand like it's just another Tuesday, and something about the ordinariness of her hits me harder than the porch did.
She turns when she hears the elevator, and her eyes find mine across the waiting room.
Something moves through the air between us.
Recognition. Weight. The same pull I've been trying to stay ahead of since I saw her on the porch, except twelve hours of sleep hasn't dulled it at all — if anything it's sharper, now that I've had a night to lie in my childhood bedroom doing absolutely nothing but think about her.
I'm not far enough ahead of it. I'm not sure there's a distance that exists where I would be.
"You came," Mom says, pleased.
"Of course I came." Sophie crosses to us, gives Mom a gentle hug. "How are you feeling this morning?"
"Tired of people asking me how I'm feeling."
"That's fair." Sophie smiles, then glances at me. "Morning, Grant."
"Morning." It comes out lower than I mean it to. She notices and something satisfied and entirely inappropriate moves through me at having gotten a reaction out of her before eight in the morning.
We walk to the check-in desk together. Sophie knows the receptionist, who;s eyes brighten when she sees us.
"Sophie! Is this Patty's son?"
"This is Grant. He'll be taking over most of the appointment coordination."
"Most?" I say.
Sophie takes the clipboard from Diane before I can reach it. Our fingers almost touch on the handoff. She adjusts her grip half a second before it happens, which means she saw it coming too. "I'm still on Patty's contact list. Backup."
Like I'm a new contractor who needs supervision.
I start to bristle — and then don't, because she's been doing this alone, I got here yesterday and backup is just practical.
Also because I'm too busy watching the line of her throat as she signs her name on the form to hold onto the irritation properly.
"Why don't you help Patty get settled," Sophie says, already filling out the form.
I help Mom find seats near the window. The waiting room is half full — other patients at various stages of treatment, all of them fighting the same fight. Mom watches them with the particular solidarity of someone who knows exactly what they're going through.
"Sophie knows what she's doing," Mom says quietly.
"I can see that." I can see a lot of things about Sophie today that I'm choosing not to say out loud in a hospital waiting room.
"You don't have to prove anything. It's okay to let her help."
I don't respond to that either.
Sophie joins us after a few minutes. She pulls her chair close to Mom's that’s close enough that mine ends up close to hers too, the three of us tucked into a triangle in the corner of the room and they fall into easy conversation.
Appointment logistics, medication adjustments, how the nausea has been tracked.
Sophie asks specific questions. Mom gives specific answers. I take notes on my phone and watch, out of the corner of my eye, the way Sophie tucks one leg under herself in the chair, unselfconscious, like she's done this exact motion in this exact spot a hundred times before. She probably has.
At some point during the infusion, Mom falls asleep. The anti-nausea meds kick in within about twenty minutes, according to Sophie's notes.
Sophie and I sit on either side of her in the quiet bay.
The room's dim, machines humming low, and every so often Sophie shifts in her chair and her knee brushes mine under the narrow gap between us, and neither of us moves away, and neither of us says anything about it, and I spend a solid ten minutes tracking the exact temperature of that single point of contact instead of the readout on my mother's IV pump like a functioning adult.
"The cafeteria's not terrible," Sophie says eventually. "If you need coffee."
I do need coffee. The five AM attempt was functional, not good. I also need approximately six feet of distance and I'm about to get the opposite.
She glances down at Mom, who is breathing steadily and clearly not going anywhere. "Twenty minutes. One of the nurses will text me if anything changes."
The cafeteria is half empty. We get coffee from the machine — it is, in fact, terrible, the kind that suggests it's been sitting since Tuesday — and find a table by the windows.
For a minute we just sit. Don't talk. The silence doesn't need filling and we both seem to know it, though I notice she's not quite looking at me and I'm not quite looking at anything else.
Sophie dumps three sugar packets into her cup and stirs. The spoon clinks against the ceramic. She's focused on the coffee like it owes her something, and I'm focused on her hands doing it, which is not information I need to be gathering.
"So," she says finally. "Baghdad?"
"What?"
"At the wedding. You said you were in Baghdad." She glances at me, then back down. "Infrastructure development."
"Right. That was five years ago."
"I know." She's still not looking at me. "I just remember the dance. You said you had an early flight. Someone else said six AM. So you could've stayed."
I hold my coffee. "You're asking why I left?"
"You don't have to answer."
"You were married to my brother," I say. "That's why I left."
Sophie goes very still. Then, slowly, she turns to face me. "And now I'm not."
The air shifts. Something settles between us with a weight that neither of us is going to pretend isn't there.
She's close enough across the small table that I can see the exact shade of her eyes change with the light through the window, and I have the distinct, physical urge to reach across and tuck one of those loose strands of hair behind her ear, and I don't, and it costs me something to not do it.
"Sophie."
"I'm not asking for anything." She's steady. Direct. Her voice doesn't waver but her hand around the coffee cup tightens. "I just spent five years married to the wrong Guilligan, and I'm done pretending I don't notice the right one."
I look at her.
She looks back. Doesn't flinch.
"I'm fifteen years older than you," I say, because somebody has to say it out loud, and it might as well be me before some stranger in a waiting room says it worse.
"I can do math."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know what you mean." She turns her cup a quarter turn on the table, precise, the way she does everything.
"You think I haven't noticed the gray at your temples?
Or the way you look at a room like you're clearing it before you sit down?
I noticed all of it, Grant. I noticed it on the porch yesterday before you'd said four words to me.
It's not a deterrent. If anything it's the opposite of one, which is probably a whole separate conversation I'm not having in a hospital cafeteria at eight-thirty in the morning. "
"I'm here for three months," I say. "Then I'm gone."
"I know."
"You're here. You have a life here. The clinic, my mom. It doesn't make sense."
"A lot of things don't make sense." She holds my eyes when she says it, doesn't look away, and I understand, with total clarity, that we're not really talking about logistics anymore.
This is a bad idea. This entire conversation is a bad idea. We're in a hospital cafeteria while my mother gets chemotherapy and I've been back in this town for thirty-six hours and I am sitting here wanting things I have no right to want this fast.
I say none of that.
"We should get back," Sophie says finally.
"Yeah."
But neither of us moves right away.
The elevator ride back up is six floors and too short.
We're the only ones in the car. I can see her reflection in the steel doors and the careful space she's keeping between us, six inches that feel like six miles and also like nothing at all, the way she's looking at the floor numbers instead of at me, which tells me exactly how hard she's working not to look at me.
We're almost to three when it happens.
Her hand brushes mine. Could be the elevator shifting.
Except her fingers catch on mine and hold, just for a moment.
Just long enough to feel the warmth of her skin, the intention of it, and every rational reason I have for keeping three months of distance between us evaporates for exactly as long as her hand stays where it is.
I don't pull away.
Neither does she.
Her thumb moves once, slow, along the side of mine and I turn my head before I've decided to, and she's already looking at me in the doors' reflection instead of the numbers, which means she's been watching this whole time too.
"Grant."
Just my name. It shouldn't do what it does.
I turn my hand over, thread my fingers properly through hers instead of letting them just rest there, and something in her breath changes, a small catch I feel more than hear in a steel box six floors above a parking lot.
She turns to face me. I turn to face her.
The three months, the brother, the whole careful architecture I've been building since the porch — none of it survives the half-step she takes toward me, or the half-step I take toward her, until there's maybe a foot of recycled hospital air between us and both of us have apparently stopped pretending we're doing anything but exactly this.
Her free hand comes up. Doesn't quite land on my chest. Hovers there like she's still deciding, and I want to tell her she doesn't have to decide anything, that I'll do all the deciding for both of us if that's what it takes, and I don't say any of it because my throat's gone tight in a way it hasn't since I was nineteen.
Her thumb stops moving. "If someone gets in this elevator right now—"
I dip my head, and I am about four inches from finding out exactly what she tastes like when her phone buzzes against her hip, sharp and rude and completely oblivious to the moment it's interrupting.
She flinches. I straighten. Both of us take a step back at the same time, like we'd rehearsed it, like some part of both our bodies has been waiting for permission to remember where we are.
Sophie fumbles the phone out of her pocket and reads the screen. "It's the floor nurse. Mom's awake, vitals are shifting a little — nothing bad, they just want someone up there." Her voice comes out steadier than her hands look. "I have to—"
"Go. I know."
The elevator dings. Third floor. Doors open on an empty hallway, fluorescent and ordinary, like it hasn't just watched something almost happen.
Mom is awake when we return, watching us approach with eyes that are sharp even through the medication fog.
"Long coffee break," she says.
"Big cafeteria," Sophie replies, settling back into her chair like nothing happened.
Like the world didn't just tilt very slightly.
"Mm-hmm." Mom is looking between us with the particular satisfaction of someone who set a scene and watched it play out exactly as she'd hoped.