The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns

by Margaret Dilloway

  I blink at him. “I thought you had practice.”

  “Tonight.” He hefts Riley’s backpack as though it’s nothing. “You want to go?”

  I look toward my niece. I still can’t figure out why she doesn’t like Brad, except that he thinks she’s attractive. She is fifteen, after all; boys will like her. I trust him absolutely. Maybe she likes him, too, and that’s why her limbs collapse together like acute angles on a geometry proof gone wrong. It’s certainly basically how I’d always reacted to men I liked. By ignoring them. “Would you like to stay here, walk to the library, or get a ride from Brad?”

  Brad moves to reassure her, avoiding eye contact. “It’s all right. Samantha’s going, too. I am an excellent driver. Your aunt checked.”

  This is an exaggeration. I don’t check driving records of my household helpers. Just criminal records.

  There are six students waiting for my help. “Riley? Make a decision.”

  “I can’t.” She sounds like she’s three.

  “If you don’t learn to make decisions, they will be made for you. And you might not like the decision made. You have until zero.” I begin counting down from ten. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  She jerks her head toward Brad. “I’ll go with him.”

  I smile. “Wait for me at the library. I’ll pick you up when I’m done.”

  6

  MY TUTORING SESSION ENDS AFTER AN HOUR. THESE STUDENTS need review and repetition more than anything else. I get out microscopes and slides and have them make flash cards about the cell division stages we’ll be having on a test soon, drawing out mitosis and meiosis in color pencil, and telling them they will have to identify each stage on their own.

  The halls are deserted. Many of us stay after to prep or tutor, but a fair number also sprint out ahead of the students at the last bell. Unlike many schools in California, such as where I grew up, this one is enclosed and air-conditioned. Besides the heat that peaks in the fall, we also have occasional bad air-quality days.

  I am going to Mr. Morton’s room. Tomorrow the Science Olympiad team meets, and I will ask him to be the other coach. Though he is brand-new and he could be the worst teacher on the planet for all I know, I cannot handle the team alone anymore. Last month, I had to cancel two practices due to my own illness.

  Though I was fine moments before, I shiver and pull my cardigan closer around myself. It’s too cold in here with all the students gone. My heart rate increases. I realize I am nervous about asking him to help out.

  He is, thankfully, by himself. When I spring upon teachers who think they’re alone in the building, sometimes I see things I wish I hadn’t. I have seen Mr. Tang the history teacher trimming his nose hair, Ms. Schilling the math teacher sitting at her desk with her pants unbuttoned and soft belly poking out, and Brad’s father, the janitor, singing into his mop as he danced the hallways. I would have made a great cat burglar, because not one of these people knew I was coming, though I made no effort to disguise my footfalls.

  One of these late afternoons, I’m afraid I’ll come across a couple of teachers in flagrante delicto. I had half expected to see Mr. Morton in here with Dara.

  “Hey, there, Ms. Garner.” Mr. Morton runs a hand through his chestnut hair and stretches, his arms high in the air. Student papers are spread out before him. On the white board behind him are equations I’m happy to see make sense. His classroom looks neat and organized, bins holding worksheets and books not askew, all pencils in their jars.

  “Miss will do.” I sound prim, even to my own old-fashioned ears. “Call me Gal.”

  “Oh, really?” He gets up from behind his desk and comes around to stand in front of me. His gaze is warm. I mean, I think it’s literally warm, because my cold has evaporated. “Does that mean you’ll call me George?”

  “Not unless I slip up.” I clear my throat. “I have come bearing a proposition.”

  His brow wrinkles.

  “A good proposition, don’t worry.” I feel myself blush. “I want to ask you to be the other science team coach. One afternoon a week, a couple of Saturdays as we get closer to the tournament. Twenty-four or so kids. What do you think?”

  “I was going to volunteer if you didn’t ask.” He claps. “Hell, yeah, I’ll do it.”

  “Language, Mr. Morton.” I relax back into my teacher role. “This is a Catholic school. You can’t say the double hockey sticks word around here.”

  “Sorry.” He leans against the desk, chastised as a student. I feel a bit sorry for telling him to watch his mouth. I notice his shoulders are wide and firm, his belly slightly paunchy. He probably doesn’t worry about working out every second of the day. I wonder what he does like to do in his spare time.

  Before we can get into any other sort of conversation, the cell phone on his desk buzzes. Dara’s photo glows on the touch screen. He glances at it. He already has her picture in the phone.

  “I have to go. You should answer it.” I waggle my finger at him. “Dara doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He lifts a hand to me, reaching for his phone simultaneously. I am forgotten before I step out of the classroom.

  • • •

  THE LIBRARY IS NEARLY EMPTY when I look for Riley. Not only is it empty, it’s empty of my Riley. The librarian doesn’t think she’s seen her, but then so many kids from all the schools go there, I can’t possibly know if that’s true or not.

  I get back in the car and drive home. I am only ten minutes late for pickup, having stopped by the grocery store to stock up on frozen foods and vegetables for her, which now melt in the car. Where’s my niece? Maybe she went out for a walk. Maybe she got kidnapped. Maybe Brad convinced her to go out for a burger. Why am I too cheap to have a cell phone? No more. That will be priority one. Matching cell phones.

  This is why my mother has gray hair.

  Riley is fifteen. And with Becky for a mother, I’d wager Riley’s been taking care of herself for a long, long time. Neither of us is used to having someone around to be accountable to.

  Heck, did I even go over rules with her? Come to think of it, do I even have any rules? No, but she should have common sense. I did. Hopefully that got Darwinized through our genes.

  At home, I get a leftover burger patty out of the refrigerator and sit on the couch, too tired to get up and turn on the television. A couch spring sticks into my hip. Darn old furniture. The sun goes down on the other side of the house, so the living room is already dim.

  I fall asleep on the couch. I don’t know how much time passes before the front door opens and closes. “Aunt Gal? Why are you sitting here in the dark?” Riley flips on the light. Outside I hear a muffler roar and a car drive off. Brad.

  “You weren’t at the library. I couldn’t find you.” I mean to raise my voice, but I’m too tired. “Where were you?”

  “With friends from school.” She slinks toward her room.

  “With Brad?”

  Riley looks down. “We went to Samantha’s house. Then Brad gave me a ride home. We were studying.”

  “Were Samantha’s parents home?” I recall that they both work.

  She looks right at me. “Yes.”

  I look at the clock. Eight. I was supposed to pick her up at five. Her eyes are clear, the whites of her eyes white, not red. She doesn’t smell of anything illegal. Her steps are steady. Her clothing is not askew. I don’t think she’s telling the whole truth, but I decide to let this slide. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”

  “Mmm.” Riley retreats into her room.

  “Get your homework done?” I call.

  “Yeah.”

  Something else occurs to me, something I’ve never worried about, but should have. I have to be at the dialysis center at nine and won’t be home until morning. I go into her room. Othe
r than her suitcase, it doesn’t look like she’s living here. “I’m sleeping at the dialysis center, Riley. Will you be okay on your own? Otherwise, you can stay in the recliner in my room. Or possibly with Dara.” Not that I’ve asked Dara if this is all right. I feel panicky. I’ve overlooked too many important details.

  “As if my mother hasn’t left me home alone overnight.” Riley smiles tightly with her mouth only.

  I want to ask her when Becky began leaving her home alone overnight, but I don’t want to know the answer, because then I will be even more likely to strangle my sister the next time I see her.

  It’s almost time for me to go. “Do you want a burger?”

  “I ate.” Riley stretches out on the bed. “Don’t worry about me.”

  I feel like I’ll fall asleep if I try to drive anywhere, so I call Dara and ask for a ride.

  She hesitates. “Gosh, Gal, I wish I could, but I can’t. I have plans.”

  “It’ll only take a half hour.” My tone sounds a bit whiny, even to me. “I’ll buy you a burger.” Silly Gal. I sigh inwardly. I will have to call a cab.

  “It takes an hour, Gal, you know that.” Her tone is dry. “Really, I can’t do it tonight. I’ve already had a glass of wine and you know what a lightweight I am. Maybe if you told me ahead of time . . .”

  “I hardly ever need a ride. I didn’t know ahead of time.” Who’s she drinking with? Dara is a social drinker. I have a twinge of the psychic and simultaneously my stomach lurches. It must be my need for dialysis. “Are you out with Mr. Morton?” I squeeze my eyes closed, afraid of the answer. She had called him earlier today. It must be him.

  “No. Pennebaker.” She whispers. Chad Pennebaker is the short-haired accountant.

  “I thought accountants were sticks in the mud.”

  “Not him. He’s less dry with a few drinks in him.” She giggles at her own joke. I actually roll my eyes. She is tipsy.

  “What about Mr. Morton?”

  “What about him?”

  “Don’t you like him?” I feel angry on Mr. Morton’s behalf. Such a nice guy, and here Dara is acting as though she doesn’t care.

  “Gal. I just met the man.” She sounds sober at once. Nothing can get Dara like righteous indignation. “We talked for five minutes, tops.”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll let you go.” I get off the phone. Dara, of course, has every right to casually date as many men as she wants until she has found The One. The Mr. Right. But it sure seems like her standards are impossibly high. One of these days, she is going to wake up and see strands of gray in her blond mane. All of these nice guys she finds reasons to reject are going to go away and not come back.

  I sigh. I can’t solve Dara’s problems for her. Also, it’s not like I do any better. At least Dara is having a good time. I need to call the cab.

  Riley comes out of her room, heading for the kitchen. I wave the phone toward her. “How about looking up Yellow Cab? The number’s on the bulletin board by the fridge.”

  “I can take you.” Riley’s mood shifts yet again, her face losing its anger and taking on an eager openness. Almost like she’s morphed from teen back to young child. It’s dizzying. “I just got my driver’s permit, you know.”

  My head has begun to ache. “And then you won’t be able to get home. Just get me the number and next time you can drive. I’ll let you drive me all over town.”

  “It will save you twenty bucks in cab fare, I bet.” Riley is banking on my cheapness and she’s right, because I am truly tempted for a second to let her drive me and just stay the night, but I don’t. Maybe I can rally and drive myself. It’s not too far. I’ve done it before. I take a couple of deep breaths and then stand up. “It’s all good. I’ll drive myself.”

  Riley steps forward. “Are you sure, Aunt Gal? You look kind of pale.”

  I don’t know what I look like, but I do know I feel kind of pale. And dizzy. I sit right back down again.

  Riley takes the car keys off the hook by the door. “Come on. I’ll get a cab home.”

  • • •

  IN THE EARLY MORNING I wait to be unhooked from the dialysis machine, watching the blinking lights of the machines and the blood pressure cuff inflate. The lights are still off in here, but the clinic is now brightly lit and coming to life with voices and laughter. I see Dr. Blankenship walk through the adjoining corridor. She has on sneakers that squeak on the ultraclean waxed floors, instead of her pumps, which means she’s prepping for surgery, not office hours. Her white lab coat is clean and pressed, over khakis and a cotton button-down.

  She and I had started off on the wrong foot right away when she first arrived here a year ago. The surgeon she’d replaced, Dr. McMillan, had been less concerned with blood flow, and set to move me to the top of the list. But he’d been abruptly transferred, and I wasn’t too happy about my new doctor. And she definitely wasn’t happy about a patient who voiced her opinions so stridently.

  Her gaze focuses straight ahead, so she doesn’t see when I wave. If I were a snake, I would have bit her. I know she is doing that on purpose. “Hey, Doc!” I yell. Today my voice carries extra force, now that I’ve gotten my new superhuman injection of regular, clean blood.

  She backtracks in the hallway to my door. “Oh, hi, Gal. Didn’t see you there.” She bats her eyes innocently, smooths down her red bob. Her pale skin looks greenish under the fluctuating fluorescent light. One of the bulbs flickers and hisses.

  “That’s because you weren’t looking.” I smile, clutch the scratchy bleached sheet so hard it hurts. “When are you going to have a kidney for me?”

  “When you take the test again.” She presses her clipboard against her chest and doesn’t make eye contact, instead focusing on the closed blinds to the right of my head. It’s terrible to have your own surgeon not even like you. But I don’t care if we never exchange Christmas cards; I just want a working kidney. “We have to do it because of your leg graft. Otherwise, if we put a new kidney in, your blood flow may be compromised. The kidney will die. You know I can’t perform the transplant unless you get a good blood flow test.”

  She has delivered all this in a monotone, still not meeting my eyes. I’ve met plenty of doctors with a poor bedside manner, but Dr. Blankenship takes the cake. I spread my hands apart. “I’m giving you my permission to do it anyway. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “I know what you’re saying, and I know what the protocol tells me to do.”

  “So I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”

  She squishes her mouth into a smile, wrinkles deepening in her cheeks. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you when you’re on the IVP dye, unless you think it will.”

  I shut my eyes for a second.

  I know I am allergic to IVP dye, the same way you would know you were allergic to bees. The first time I had a reaction, I was twelve, and I didn’t even know what IVP dye was. My breathing slowed, my throat swelled, and I got a rash on my face. I don’t remember much of it, other than what my mother’s told me. Besides, my point is, how could I have a psychosomatic reaction to IVP dye when I wasn’t even aware they were pumping it into my veins?

  The doctor who used IVP dye then told my mother that if I was allergic, and if I had it again, I’d probably die.

  “What if the first time you got stung by a bee, you swelled up and your throat closed?” I asked Dr. Blankenship the last time we had this conversation. “Would you go around trying to get stung again on purpose?”

  She laughed me off. “This is entirely different. Apples and oranges.”

  “More like apples and apples,” I said. “Maybe Granny Smith versus Red Delicious. But they’re both apples!”

  Now, as I sit here with my eyes shut, this memory welling into me, Dr. Blankenship tries again. “We can try it and take you off right away if something goes wrong. I
am sure it’s not the dye. Nothing in our studies suggests that such an allergy is even possible.”

  The same old song. “This conversation feels oddly familiar, Doctor.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Walters.” Dr. Blankenship’s tone silkens. Walters walks by.

  Walters pauses. Today he’s in pressed white linen pants and a light blue T-shirt, carrying a Panama hat in his hands, looking like he’s off to vacation in the Bahamas instead of going to dialysis. “Surgery this morning, eh? Going to have one of those kidneys for me pretty soon, I hope?”

  “I bet within the next couple weeks.” She’s all smiles.

  He gives me a courtesy wave. “And how are we this morning?”

  “I don’t know about ‘we,’ but I am fine, thank you.” I speak through a clenched jaw.

  He walks on.

  Dr. Blankenship turns back to me. This time, she actually finds it in her to meet my eyes. Hers are a watered-down green, the charcoal circles underneath not quite covered by her concealer. “Gal, please. I want to get you a kidney as badly as you do. But I have to abide by the rules. If you’re in danger of rejecting it, then I can’t give it to you.”

  “What about him?” I nod toward Walters’s retreating back. “He could drink it to death. Stop taking his blood pressure meds. He did it before. Seems like I’m a better bet.”

  “I can’t discuss another patient’s case.” Her expression closes off. She steps back, done with the conversation. “I have to go.”

  I grimace. I feel myself being pushed down, down, down to the very bottom of the kidney list. I accept the fact that if I don’t do this test at all, I will not get a transplant. At least, not from this doctor.

  “Listen. I have never had a bad response when a patient is premedicated. We’ll put you on a Benadryl and Prednisone drip. We’ll use only a tiny amount of dye.” Dr. Blankenship studies my face.

  “And then I’ll get put on top of the list?” This is what I want, to not wait in dialysis purgatory forever.

  “You have my word.” Dr. Blankenship awkwardly puts her hand over mine. Her hand feels like it needs to be de-iced.