He touched her shoulder again with his rubber-gloved fingers. “You have a little bit of dry skin here. That’s probably what’s causing the itching. You have a patch on the bottom of your chin as well. Has it been itching?”
She hadn’t really noticed it—she’d been so concentrating on the itchy cancer cells eating her shoulder—but now that she thought about it, yes.
“I’ll prescribe you some cream for the dry skin. And we can remove the mole if you wish. We can even biopsy it, I suppose. Or you can leave it be and keep an eye on it. If it changes, gets bigger, gets painful, irregularly shaped, that kind of thing, come on back. But I’ve seen a million moles, and I’m telling you this is no mole to be worried about.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to look at it again? Maybe a little closer this time?”
He gave her one of those I would humor you, but no head tilts. He scribbled onto a prescription pad and then ripped off the top page and handed it to her. “You can schedule a removal date at the front desk.”
She held the paper in her hand, staring at the door for a long moment after he left.
“Not a word,” she said to her mother, who snickered again.
“Oh, come on, don’t be so sore about it, Brenda. It’s good news. Don’t you feel so much better?”
She thought about all these months of worrying and hiding, scratching and contemplating what the world would be like after her death. All the stress, all the fear. And the man hadn’t even done much more than give it a cursory glance through a magnifying glass. It just didn’t seem right. It was too quick. If she’d had test results to wait for—maybe for a few days or even a few weeks—the relief would be bigger.
“I guess. Let’s go,” she said.
She didn’t even bother to make a removal appointment.
“I can’t believe he was so rude. Did he seem rude to you? He seemed rude. A quack. I should probably make an appointment for a second opinion,” Bren was saying as she and Joan walked across the parking lot. “From someone less rude. Someone who knows you can’t just tell something is cancer by looking at it; you have to—”
Had the dog not barked, she might not have even noticed it. But just as she was getting ready to open her car door, she heard a familiar yap, ringing out across the parking lot. She knew that bark well. She’d heard it in her nightmares. Nightmares where Aunt Cathy starts gagging on imagined allergies and someone gets a wad of fur lodged in their turducken skin.
“No way,” she said aloud, and hurried into the car. She slid down in the front seat, but not so far down that she couldn’t keep an eye on the old woman and her dachshund, who were just entering the parking lot from the sidewalk. “What the hell?”
“Just leave me behind, why don’t you,” Joan was saying, taking her sweet time lowering herself into the passenger seat.
Bren waved frantically for her mom to sit down. “Get in here. Don’t you see her?”
“See who? My goodness, you are strange today. I think you need a vacation. Maybe instead of a second opinion on that mole, you need to make an appointment with a psychiatrist.”
“Her,” Bren said, pointing through the window.
They both stared as Virginia Mash made her way across the parking lot, leaning heavily on her cane, Chuy barking up a storm as he lagged slightly behind her. In one hand, Virginia Mash carried the gift bag Bren had left on her doorstep.
“Good Lord, is that the woman from the cooking class?”
“Yes,” Bren said, realizing she was whispering, but not knowing exactly why. It wasn’t like Virginia Mash could hear her even if she was speaking full voice. “She must have walked all this way.”
“And without a coat. She should be freezing. It has to be twenty degrees outside. Didn’t we give her a coat?”
“Yes,” Bren said again, seething. Really, did the old woman hate them so much that she couldn’t even accept a gift from them? Was she so ugly, inside and out, that a gesture of kindness would be rebuked? “I ought to ask her to give it back, the ungrateful old jerk.”
But no more were the words out of her mouth than she saw Virginia Mash stop as a child came out of the building. The old woman bent and talked to the child and the child’s mother for a long time, and it didn’t look like she was ranting or yelling or being rude in any way. After a bit, she reached into her bag and pulled out the stocking cap that Rebecca had donated. The child pulled off her bandana to reveal a gleaming scalp beneath. Smiling, she allowed Virginia Mash to pull the cap over her head. They ended with a hug, and the child and her mother went to their car, happy looks on their faces.
“Did you see that?” Bren whispered.
“I did. I don’t believe what I saw, but I saw it,” her mother answered.
They sat there for a while longer—just long enough to see Virginia drape her new quilt over a man leaving the building in a wheelchair.
Bren could barely believe it. The woman wasn’t wearing her coat, but it wasn’t a spiteful thing. It was a pay-it-forward thing. And she looked like she was enjoying it.
What Bren couldn’t figure out was why.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gary looked like he would rather be just about anywhere else. The DMV? A prostate exam? Holding Bren’s purse outside the ladies’ fitting room at Macy’s? All of the above.
But Bren didn’t care. He’d promised for better or for worse, and if worse for him was a table for two at Olive Garden, so be it.
“Stop pulling on that thing,” she said, splitting a breadstick in half. She laid both halves on her plate and scooped up a huge portion of salad, making sure she took both black olives. Gary didn’t like olives. Didn’t even like them to be touching his plate. It was one of the unspoken understandings of their marriage that Bren would always eat the olives. Sacrifice.
He yanked on his tie once again, making a face. “I don’t see why I had to wear it. People are in jeans here.”
“People may be, but we’re not. It’s supposed to be a nice date, Gary. Can’t we just have one nice date? Gil went to The Nutcracker, for Pete’s sake. Ballet. Besides, you wear a tie to work every day. What’s the big deal? Here.” She scooped salad onto his plate.
He shook out his napkin angrily. “The big deal is that I wear one to work every day. At night I like to come home and relax, not come home and relive the workday.”
Bren bit into one of the breadstick halves, trying maintain her light attitude. “Well, hopefully having dinner with me isn’t that much work,” she said sweetly. She considered kicking off her pumps under the table and running a bare foot up his leg. Of course, she mostly wanted to kick them off because they hurt her feet. At least Gary was accustomed to wearing his getup. She was cramming sneaker feet into sex heels. It wasn’t a pretty picture. She tried changing the subject. Maybe life at the telecom farm, where Gary’d been working since Kelsey was in elementary school, would be a safer bet. Until recently, he’d seemed to be an endless font of corporate triumphs and complaints. Lately, though, mum had been the word. “How is work going, anyway? You hardly ever talk about it anymore.” Translation: you hardly ever talk to me at all anymore.
Gary set his fork on his plate of untouched salad. “That’s because I don’t want to talk about work. These are my twilight years, Bren. I want to have a little fun.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” she said, the sweetness in her voice getting an edge. “I want to have fun, too. Breadstick?” She turned the basket toward him. He angrily snatched a breadstick out of the paper.
“And getting all dressed up to eat pasta on a Wednesday night is fun?” He mumbled this to himself, almost as if he were cracking a joke that only he would think was funny.
“Well, for me it is,” she said. “I don’t see what’s so damn fun about murdering Christmas songs in your basement all night long. How about that?” As she’d predicted, he flinched, stunned. She raised her
eyebrows in a challenge. Want to be sour? We can both play at that game.
“We’re coming together just fine,” he said.
“I suppose,” Bren countered, biting into her breadstick again. “If you call making ‘Jingle Bells’ unrecognizable and forcing stray animals into hiding just fine.”
Gary’s eyebrows drew together and he bent forward over the table. “Well, it’s better than killing strays with the scraps from your failed food experiments.”
Bren’s mouth hung open. She really had no response for that. He may be deluded enough to think his band was good, but she couldn’t even pretend for a moment that her classes were going well. Not that he knew the first thing about her classes. He’d never even bothered to ask.
“It’s about more than cooking,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It’s about trying not to kill your students or burn the place down, I would guess.”
“Gary Stephen!” Bren practically shouted. The couple at the next table glanced over at them. Bren sat up straighter and smiled, fussing with the sleeves of her dress as if nothing had happened. When they finally looked away, she narrowed her eyes at her husband again. “I have been cooking for you for decades, and you have never once complained. I have raised two children off of my cooking, and never has there been a problem. Now, just because you want your so-called twilight years—which you can’t really claim until you’re at least retired, by the way—to be all about reliving your youth, you think anything refined is somehow bad. But I’m refined, Gary. Or at least I want to be. And if you want to be with me, well, then I guess you want to be refined, too.”
“At the moment, I want to be with my band. They understand what it’s like to be me. Which you clearly don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be making me wear this.” He stuck his fingers behind the knot of his tie, loosened it, and pulled it over his head, flinging it so it landed in the salad bowl of the table next to them. The same staring couple stared again.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Bren said.
“These breadsticks really make your hands slippery,” Gary added jovially, wiggling his fingers at them. They fished the tie out of their bowl and held it across the aisle until Bren sheepishly took it.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again.
The waiter arrived with their entrees, which created a stir of plate wrangling, since they had hardly touched their salads. He grated some cheese onto Bren’s plate and then left them to silently pick at their dinners.
After a while, Bren couldn’t take it anymore. “Kevin got married,” she said. She saw Gary stop chewing momentarily and glance up at her, surprise registering.
“What?”
She nodded. “And Kelsey knew about it. They kept us in the dark. But it happened in Rome. Maybe. And I’m not sure when.”
He seemed to consider this, his eyes taking on a faraway look. Finally, Bren could see him flick the surprise away. So easy. “I see.”
“That’s it? You see?”
He nodded. “He’s married. I see.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Bren asked. “You’re the boy’s father.”
He took another bite of lasagna and chewed it maddeningly slowly, then picked up his napkin and dabbed at his lips. “What can I do about it? He’s not a boy anymore. He’s halfway around the world. Am I supposed to storm to Thailand and ground him?” His shoulders had crept up around his ears. “What are you going to do? You’re the boy’s mother.”
“Aren’t you even curious who she is? Or what happened? Or when?”
He shrugged. “I’m assuming she’s someone I don’t know. And what does the rest even matter with him there and us here?”
“It matters, Gary, because your eighteen-year-old son is now a husband to someone who may not even speak English. What if she wants to live in Europe? What if they have kids that we never meet? Or . . . or what if she breaks his heart? Gives him a disease? Robs him blind and leaves him for dead in Asia? Don’t you care about those things, Gary?”
“Of course I care about them. But you said it yourself. He’s eighteen. He’s eight thousand miles away. I’ll try to talk some sense into him when he calls next, but otherwise, my hands are just as tied as yours.”
Bren stared at her husband, everything about him suddenly becoming unfamiliar. The way he chewed. The calluses on his fingers. His thick fingernails and the gray hairs in his eyebrows. When did his lips become that color? When did he start parting his hair on that side? What happened to the man she married, the one she’d thought she knew from top to bottom and inside out?
“How can you say that? Any number of things can happen between now and the next time he calls. He’s your son, Gary. Your family. Have you forgotten about us entirely?”
“Of course not. You’re being dramatic now.”
There were a lot of things Bren hated, and being called dramatic was one of them. Gary knew this. He knew that words like dramatic and irrational and hysterical would trip her switch.
“Fine,” she said. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, even though she really hadn’t eaten anything. “I’m dramatic. But I’m also lonely, Gary, and that’s definitely your problem.”
“Then do something about it.”
“I’m trying to,” she cried, gesturing at the table. “What do you think this is about?” She could feel tears coming on again. “I almost died of cancer, and you didn’t even know.”
This got his attention. He froze, his forked poised over his plate. “What?”
“Well, it was technically just a mole, but I had to take my mother with me to the appointment, because you weren’t there for me.”
“A mole?” His temple pulsated as he ingested this news, working bits of food in his jaw. “Like, a melanoma?”
“No, it was just a regular mole, but that’s not the point.”
“You scared me to death. Dammit, Bren, that was low.”
She knew it was. She already regretted it, but a part of her was a little happy, too, to know that the thought of losing her was still scary to him. “I’m sorry,” she said, casting her eyes down toward the tablecloth. “But I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t feel like I needed to say or do something major to get your attention.”
“Well, you got my attention, all right.” The waiter wandered near the table and Gary gestured him over. “A couple of boxes and the check, please?” The waiter scurried off and Gary turned to Bren. “I’m done.”
“Wait. Done done? With us?”
The waiter set the check and a couple of mints in front of Gary. “Thank you. Done with this dinner. There you go, being dramatic again.”
Swiftly, the quickest Bren had seen him do anything for quite some time, Gary paid the check and boxed their leftovers. He did so wordlessly, then picked up his tie and stormed away from the table, not even waiting to see if Bren was following him.
The drive home was silent, a talk radio show babbling in the background. Bren cried softly as she stared out the window. It had been strange between the two of them for some time. That much she knew. But this was more than strange. This was more than strained. This was worrisome.
“Gary?” she asked when he pulled into the driveway.
He turned to her. She could see the anger still on his face.
“Are we going to make it?”
He stared at her for a long time. “Yes, of course we are. You’re being really unreasonable these days. I think it’s best if we just don’t try to talk tonight. I’m going to call the guys,” he said.
He started to get out of the car, but she stopped him, placing her hand over the keys. “Leave them,” she said. “I’m going to get dessert.”
• • •
If she was overdressed for Olive Garden, she was definitely overdressed for Ice Dreamery, a mom-and-pop ice-cream shop tucked on a side street two blocks off the square. A
team of elementary school–aged basketball players was tearing up three booths in the back, the noise deafening. Bren sat at a nearby table, smiling wistfully at them, missing the days of shushing her own kids in public. Man, in the moment it seemed like those days would never end, like she would never get a break. But now, what she would give to have those days back. They weren’t so bad, these kids. They were just being kids. Excited. Energetic.
She’d ordered the Three Heifer Dream, the biggest sundae on the menu. Three oversized scoops of ice cream, loaded with hot fudge, peanut butter sauce, caramel, chocolate chips, pecans, whipped cream, and a heavenly four maraschino cherries. If you were confident enough—or had given up on yourself enough—to step up and order a dessert with the word heifer right in it, the payoff was entirely worth it. Bren could make that sundae last half an hour, the bottom a soupy mixture of wonderful by the time she reached it. She sometimes walked away feeling as if she might need to lie down for a while, but it was a blissful misery.
Tonight she needed that bliss. She already had the misery. She wondered if she and Gary had maybe finally gone too far. If it was more than a cafeteria dinner for the holidays and more than dune buggies and lonely cheese toast dinners. She wondered if maybe they’d been broken for a long time now, and she’d just always been so focused on the kids that she hadn’t noticed it.
Don’t forget to have a life of your own, Bren, her mother had told her often when the kids were young. You need a job or a hobby or something, because these kids will be grown up before you know it, and if you’ve devoted your life only to them, you won’t even know where to start. Bren supposed her mother spoke from experience, but she’d always just assumed Gary would fill in those empty spaces once the kids were grown.
The Hundred Gifts Page 19