“We’re not sure,” Frankie said. “But don’t worry. I’m taking her straight upstairs before she can toss her cookies again.”
Silas took a nimble step back, sidestepping puddles in his retreat. “Honey, I’m sorry. Ain’t no fun getting sick.”
“Thanks,” Mia said. She handed him a box of Lorna Doones from her stash of groceries. “Brought your favorites. Goodness knows I won’t be needing a visit with Miss Lorna this evening,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the thought.
Silas clucked and shook his head. “Your mama raised you right, girl. I thank God for you, Mia, and I know my dear Bonnie is happy to look down from glory and see me so well taken care of.” He patted her gloved hand. “I couldn’t ask for a better neighbor. You get better now, you hear?”
The girls took the steps slowly. When they reached the front door and waited for Mia to fish keys out of her bag, Frankie cleared her throat.
“So, um, what was that business at Gerry’s all about?”
Mia shook her head. She dug deeper in her purse. “This is one bizarre virus. I don’t even remember making the decision to go to sleep.”
“Yes, right. I didn’t mean the counter episode. I meant the eye-lock with Gerry’s son.”
“Found them,” Mia said and pushed her key into the lock. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“Hair-fixing, googly-eye thing with Fig Leaf.”
Mia tried to look disapproving. “You and your nicknames. I like the name Adam. I cringe to think of what you call me behind my back.”
“Hmm,” Frankie said. “Today would be a toss-up between Vomitronica and Queen of Feigned Emotional Distancing.”
“I’m not feigning anything, for those of us who’ve read too much Jane Austen,” Mia said. She led the way into the lobby elevator and pushed the button for the fourth floor. The door closed with a shudder and Mia shrugged. “It’s really nothing.”
Frankie crossed her arms and positioned her finger above the emergency stop button.
“All right.” Mia sighed. “When I first moved to my apartment, I was momentarily single and also in need of a neighborhood grocery. I found Gerry’s, and Adam was always there with his perfect smile and impeccable Persian manners.” She sighed and watched the numbers light up on their ascent.
“Oh, my gosh. This is so Rear Window.”
“Isn’t that the one where the woman is paralyzed?”
“No,” Frankie said with labored patience. “That’s An Affair to Remember. I’m hinting less at paralysis, more at love at first sight.”
Mia rolled her eyes as the elevator door opened. “I noticed him, he noticed me, we flirted, and then I was no longer single.” Mia stepped into the hallway. “It was nothing. Seriously. As you might remember, I’m happily in love with another man. End of story.” She led the way to her apartment door. “Sorry to disappoint. I was recovering from an episode, remember.”
“Exactly!” Frankie was triumphant. “Your defenses were down, you were caught off guard and didn’t have time to censor what was and wasn’t socially appropriate—”
“Shh. He might be home.” Mia paused at her apartment door and ignored Frankie’s dramatic jab of her finger down her throat.
“That would be so unusual,” Frankie said, sotto voce. “You can’t mean he would be eating your food and smashing organic potato chips under his rear as he watches Baywatch reruns on your couch?”
Mia called into the room, “Anybody here?”
Frankie muttered, “Because we wouldn’t expect you to be anywhere else.”
Mia pinched Frankie’s arm when she heard rustling in the living room. “Lars?”
He stepped into the entryway, blond hair tousled, mouth opened in a wide yawn. “Hey, babe,” he said around his yawn. “Hey, Frankie.”
“Hi, Lars,” Frankie said sweetly. Mia avoided eye contact with her friend and instead pulled her arms around Lars and gave him her cheek to kiss.
“Don’t exchange any of my germs,” she said. “I think I’m sick.”
Lars stepped back, nudging Mia out of the embrace. “Really?” He wrinkled his nose. “Like puking sick?”
Mia unbuttoned her coat. Frankie tugged her friend’s arms out of the sleeves and unwrapped her from a bulky crocheted scarf. “Like, totally puking sick,” she said, watching Lars for any recognition of her mocking tone. None detected, she rambled on. “She, like, ralphed after yoga and then at Gerry’s she totally fell asleep under the scanner.”
Lars had turned and was heading for the fridge. Mia shot a pleading look at Frankie, who sighed and nodded a momentary truce.
“You should have called and told me you were going to the store. We’re almost out of soy milk,” he said, nose in the fridge. “And I ate the last Carob Joy after lunch.”
Mia filled a glass with water. Lars had piled his dishes in the sink, and it occurred to her to thank him, as this was a marked improvement from finding them all over the apartment, crusty, molding, and sometimes neglected until they smelled of rot. Determined not to conjure up any more detail of those images and too tired to explain to Frankie later why dirty dishes piled in the sink was a step upward, she sipped her water and shuffled toward the bedroom.
“Thanks, Frankie, for taking care of me,” she said. “I owe you. But I can’t think about it right now, okay?”
Frankie followed her into the bedroom. She turned the covers down as Mia undressed and placed a saucer of crackers on the bedside table. “You take care of yourself, do you hear me?” For a woman with blue hair, Frankie could command the maternal authority of Olivia Walton when summoned. “Call me tomorrow morning. Or before if you need me. Not that Lars isn’t the nurturing, restorative type …”
Mia moaned. She lowered herself into bed and curled up into a fetal position.
“All right, all right.” Frankie spoke softly. She turned out the light. “Sleep well, Mimi.” She waited a moment for an answer from under the down comforter but Mia was already drifting toward sleep.
2
The System
When Mia woke, inky black had settled in the room. She raised herself up on one elbow and made her eyes focus on the dresser clock. Nine twenty-four. She’d slept for two and a half hours. She kicked off the covers and was pleased the action didn’t make her want to run to the restroom. Her fuzzy slippers peeked out from under the bed. They murmured a soft-shoe on the wood as she padded out to the living room. Lars was reading in the papasan chair by the window. The open pages of his book shone unnaturally in the only light illuminating the room. He looked up.
“How’s your tummy?” he said, shutting his book. He stood and led her to the couch where they could sit together.
“Better,” Mia said. She yawned. “I’m still really tired, but I think I’m hungry.”
Lars pulled a soft green blanket from the back of the couch and draped it around Mia’s lap and legs. “How about some pho? I stopped at Hanoi Market for some noodles.”
Mia closed her eyes and smiled. “Perfect.”
She let her head rest on a pillow while Lars heated her dinner in the kitchen. See? she told an internal Frankie. This is how he is, not the mooch you think you see in him.
When Mia closed her eyes, she could see Lars when they’d first met. They’d registered for the same senior seminar their final semester of college, “Patriarchy, Famine, and Genocide in Twenty-First-Century Africa.” Seven students and one prof met weekly to discuss painfully long and depressing research articles on the state of African politics, economy, geography, and sociology. Mia had noticed Lars for his thoughtful comments, or at least that’s how she told the story now. She left out that she first was drawn to Lars because of his lips. They were full, always pink, and seemed to encourage mind-wandering. The thought still made her blush, as she was not typically one to objectify men, ce
rtainly not while intending to concentrate on the effects of tribal patriarchy on modern African elections. But the lips were what got her attention. The thoughtful comments were just an excuse to watch the lips move.
“Here we go,” Lars said. He set a steaming bowl of soup on the coffee table and tugged the table toward the couch. “Hold on,” he said and returned to the kitchen. Mia could hear him rummaging around in a paper bag. He turned slowly into the family room, brow furrowed with the task of holding a wide mug of tea, chopsticks, and a saucer dotted with slices of lime.
“Such great service in this place,” Mia said, laying her head on Lars’s shoulder when he settled into the couch. “I should definitely eat here more often.”
Lars kissed the top of Mia’s dark curls. “I’m happy you’re happy. My dad would so not believe how enlightened I am, male partner serving female and all that. You’re one lucky girl, you know?”
Mia could hear the smile in Lars’s voice and tried her best to exude her luckiness. “Absolutely I do. Neither of my parents was very good at the partnership thing either, so we’re both renegades.” Her first slurp of broth sank, one pampering centimeter after another, down her throat and into her body. She hummed her approval.
“Good?” Lars said. He rose from the couch to snap up his cell phone, which was trumpeting a wild dance tune by his favorite world music group, HealPeace. He checked to see who was calling and shut the ringer off. “Bryan,” he said to himself.
“Really?” Mia squeezed a lime wedge over her soup. “That’s great. Does he need you for a job?” She cleared her throat after the question, regretting how eager she’d sounded.
“Probably,” Lars muttered. He scrolled through a text message. “I’m kind of busy, though, so I don’t know if it will work out.”
Mia kept her eyes on her noodles. When asked about his profession, Lars said he was a freelance writer. This translated mostly to the odd short piece here and there, usually contracted by Lars’s high-school buddy, Bryan, a magazine editor who was kind enough to pass along work when it was available. The relationship was tenuous, as Lars felt Bryan stifled his creative spirit with the extensive editing he did on each piece before publication. Mia had seen some of Lars’s rough work, however, and felt Bryan was a literary savior. Irregardless and satisfication, for example, were not the best ways to use the English language, try as Lars might to convince. Neither was opening a piece with a two-hundred-word quotation by Engels a foolproof device to engage the reader.
“You’re too busy?” Mia asked. “What are you so busy with?”
Lars looked up from his phone. “Did I pay half our rent this month?”
“Yes,” Mia said. She avoided his gaze by the tip of her mug.
“And the three months before that?”
“Yes, you did,” Mia said. She groaned into her tea, the voice of her mother admonishing her (again) for having a “live-in” outside the bounds of marriage.
“What’s to gain?” her mother would say in her best Dr. Laura voice. “Why should he propose when he has all the benefits without the risk?”
Not that Mia’s mom was one to talk about marital success, Mia tried to remind herself. But eighteen years of brainwashing had to have repercussions on a girl’s thought life.
“Okay, then,” Lars said, flipping his phone shut and tossing it onto the chair by the window. “You can feel confident that my decision not to work will not adversely affect our arrangement.” He strode back toward the kitchen and Mia let him go. She could barely keep her eyes open and was finding it increasingly difficult to enjoy the act of eating. This left little reserve for entering into an argument with Lars. Lars, who could crush an otherwise bright person in a debate. Lars, whose tenacity wearied Mia to the point that she was always the first to forget the original point of discussion and the first to give up and give in. Having witnessed many of these “conversations,” Frankie had developed a disgust for what she saw as Lars’s unwillingness to lose a battle.
“Stop letting him do that!” she would say to Mia later. “He is not always right.” Mia would shrug. “I know, and he probably does, too, on some level. But it’s so much easier to let those things go. I just don’t care enough and he does, so we both come out ahead, right?”
Mia shuffled to the kitchen. She covered her bowl with plastic wrap and put the leftovers in the fridge. On her way out of the room, she met Lars in the hallway near the front door. He was pulling on his coat.
“I’m meeting Dan at the Dive. He needs a little cheering up.”
Mia leaned against the door frame. “What’s wrong? Something with Avery?”
Lars snorted. “You could say that. She’s threatening to dump him if they don’t get engaged.”
Mia nodded slowly. “An interesting way to resolve the marriage question. Spend the rest of your lives together or dump each other. It seems like there should be some middle ground there, doesn’t it?”
Lars moved to her and enveloped her in his arms. “See? That’s exactly why I’m with you and not someone like Avery. You acknowledge the ridiculousness of convention. You see through marriage as an antiquated system left over from—”
“—the unequal and barbaric days of class wars, dowries, and institutionalized sexism.” Mia looked up and smiled. “I agree completely.”
He kissed her. “I know. And knowing that makes me risk getting your plague by kissing your lips.” He kissed her again. “You rest. Don’t wait up.” He turned and locked the door on his way out.
He hadn’t apologized, but Mia thought there must be lots of ways to communicate one was sorry, and maybe not always with a penance of words.
A week later Mia sat with her head in her hands. Her desk phone was ringing and she was summoning the strength to answer it. “Urban Hope,” she said, resting her forehead in her palm.
“You sound horrible. Are you still feeling like excrement?” Frankie’s voice was inappropriately loud but there was no volume control on Mia’s ancient phone.
“I would appreciate you not mentioning anything remotely related to an unpleasant image, smell, or taste. I cannot be held accountable with what I might do with such information.” Mia swiveled in her chair and leaned her head against her office window. She told herself the cool of the glass was soothing.
“Have you gone to the doctor yet?”
“Not exactly.”
“Mia, this is your big chance to stick it to the Man, just like you and Lars connive to do. You work for the system, the system is broken, the system pays peanuts and keeps the downtrodden down while the wealthy thrive. But the system gives great insurance benefits, so get your rear to the doctor’s office and start cashing in, for once.”
“Are you chewing on something?” Mia watched a little girl cross the alley below, holding with a death grip to the fingers of her father. Even from two stories up, Mia could see the red patent leather shine on the girl’s shoes.
“Yep,” Frankie said, “and it is so stinking good. I’ve always wondered what those lamb things taste like. You know, those cute kabobs impaled on their little skewers at that place on Fullerton?”
Mia groaned. “All right. I’ll make an appointment with a doctor.”
“Excellent,” Frankie said, so loudly that Mia had to pull the phone away from her ear. “Tell them it’s an emergency and that you work for the government. Maybe they’ll squeeze you in this afternoon.”
“You have definitely inflated my job to mean something it doesn’t.”
“Love ya, kid. Call me later.”
Mia let the phone drop to its cradle. She lugged a phone book from her bottom desk drawer and set about searching for a board-certified answer to her problem.
3
Breaking News
The waiting room at Brookview Medical Clinic brimmed to overflowing with runny-nosed children, s
neezing elderly people, and harried staff. One by one, patients were called back by a nurse who looked young enough to be violating child labor laws. She wore purple scrubs with a cheerily decorated name tag reading “Carrie Lynn!” Care Bear stickers floated around her name and a big smiley face covered the a in Carrie. She flipped papers anchored into a clipboard and cleared her throat. “Mr. Hoffman,” she said and looked up hopefully from arms laden with identical folders.
Mia sat near the girl and was the only one who heard her announcement. She smiled at her encouragingly. “Maybe try it again.”
Carrie Lynn nodded and took a deep breath. “Mr. Hoffman?” The change in volume was incremental. “Sid Hoffman?”
Mia scanned the room and saw a bevy of older gentlemen chatting in the corner. She rose and walked to their group. “Excuse me, Mr. Hoffman?”
A man in a three-piece pinstriped suit looked up with sparkling eyes. “Yes, miss?”
Mia smiled. “The nurse is calling for you.” She nodded toward Carrie Lynn, who looked like she might kiss Mia out of gratitude.
“Thank you, dear.” Mr. Hoffman stood slowly and walked with Mia toward the nurse. “I’m afraid I didn’t hear you,” he said to Carrie Lynn and shuffled past her down the hall. Carrie Lynn sighed. “I still can’t get used to the yelling,” she said to Mia and rushed after her patient.
Mia settled back into her chair and paged through a year-old issue of InStyle. The room was spinning slowly after her sudden burst of physical activity. I won’t be able to be the megaphone again, she thought. That girl is on her own unless she wants to deal with a dramatic demonstration of the stomach flu in her waiting room.
Mia was the next to be summoned. Carrie Lynn had said only the first syllable of Mia’s last name before her patient was at her side. The nurse bit her lower lip and looked so grateful that Mia worried about the emotional stability of her caregiver.
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