Page 38 of Hell Bent
How did I feel driving home? I couldn’t even have told you.
All right, I could. It didn’t require too much introspection. I was aroused as hell, more sexually frustrated than that, smiling inside at so many things, looking forward to Sunday, and wondering if I should’ve asked her to go out with me sooner than that. Did a woman working ten hours a day at a physical job even want to go out to dinner, though? I had no idea, because I’d never gone out with anybody who worked as hard as that. Maybe I should …
The phone rang. Maybe she was about to answer that question. I glanced at the nav screen, though, and it saidSolange.Well, damn. Speak of the devil.
I thumbed the button and said, “Hey. Merry Christmas. I was just telling somebody about you. I should’ve called. Sorry. I?—”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, brisk as ever. Solange didn’t care for emotion. “You were busy.”
“OK,” I said, confused. I checked the time. “It’s almost midnight. Everything all right?”
“Not really,” she said. “Are you awake enough to talk about this?”
“I’m driving,” I said. “I can talk. What’s wrong? Is it Ben?” My nephew, who was … what? Twelve? Maybe thirteen?
“No,” she said. “Or yes and no. Look. Seb. The cancer’s back.”
It was like somebody’d dropped me in ice water. I said, “I’m sorry,” then, “What can I do?” Because that seemed like the only thingtosay.
“That’s why I’m calling you,” she said. “You can take my kid, that’s what.”
“Wait,” I said. “Hold on. Explain.” Now I knew what I felt. Panicked.
“Look,” she said. “I know you don’t want to. You don’t like commitment. I get that. But I’ve got no choice. Do you really want him to have to try to take care of me and watch me die? And then go to foster care? How hard was that for you?”
The words were out before I could call them back. “Why is this the first time you’ve ever asked me that?”
Silence, and I sighed and said, “Sorry,” even as she said, “I probably deserve that. I thought you’d understand, but if you can’t, you can’t. I’ll find someone. I’ll?—”
“Wait,” I said. “Tell me. What do you mean, watch you die?” My hands and feet had been steering me as we talked, and I was pulling into the condo’s garage. “I don’t want to talk to you in the car. Can I call you back in five minutes?”
“Not if it’s to tell me no,” she said. “I can’t handle waiting for a no. If it’s no, tell me now and get off the phone so I can find somebody else to raise my son.”
I felt the familiar exasperation. “Give me five minutes,” I said. “I’m calling you back.” I pushed the button to hang up, turned off the car, sat there holding the steering wheel for aminute, then shook my head as if that would clear it, got out of the car, and headed for the elevator.
The minuteI got to the door, I heard the jingle that was Lexi’s tags, and the moment I opened said door, I had her furry self all over me. She might be old, but she still had some dancing moves, and I was getting all of them. I was crouched down, my hands stroking over her body, the fur silkier and the ribs less prominent now. Almost normal looking, except for the shaved place and stitches near her right foreleg, and all the way changed from the quiet, sad, scared girl I’d taken from that rest area.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, girl.” She responded like those were the two best words ever spoken, by her favorite person ever, and I scritched her neck some more and knew this was why people loved dogs. I told her, “I need to make a hard call. Come help me do it,” stood up, and headed over to the couch with her following along, jumping up there with me, and putting her head in my lap as if she were saying, “I’m here for you.” It may have choked me up a little, which lets you know exactly how shaken up I was.
Not as shaken up as Solange, though. I pulled my phone from my pocket, took a breath, and thumbed the button again.
“Hi,” she said, then stopped talking.
“Listen.” I ran a hand through my hair and tried to figure out how to do this. When I couldn’t, I just said, “Tell me what’s going on. I want to know.”
She said, “That isn’t what I want to talk about.”
“Except that I need to know,” I said, “if I’m going to help you.”
“Oh. True.” A pause while she gathered her considerable forces. “You remember that I’ve had breast cancer.”
“Of course I remember.” It had been a bad one. Triple-negative, they called it. She’d had a bunch of treatments, I vaguely knew. Chemo, surgery, radiation. That had been two or three years ago, though, and she’d worked almost all the way through it. “I’m not going to desert my patients,” she’d said when I’d asked, and then had changed the subject, because she hated to discuss her illness. Which had been fine by me. Instead of talking, I’d sent food gifts. Smoked salmon, because she loved it. Fancy fruit. Wagyu steaks. Those nuts-and-cheese-and-dried-fruit packages. It wasn’t much, but I’d told myself it was what I could do, with my schedule and hers, and she hadn’t seemed like she wanted me visiting anyway. “So what happened?” I asked. “I thought you were clean.”
“What do you think?” she snapped, then sighed. “Sorry. I’m foggy. It’s annoying. It came back, that’s what. I started having headaches a few months ago. I thought it was migraines from stress, then I started having some blurred vision. Backaches. Major weight loss. Mood swings. Irritability. Well, you can probably hear that. It’s not just my bad personality. It’s because the cancer’s spread to my meninges.”
“Your what?”
“Tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Can’t exactly operate on those. The cancer’s microscopic, which is why they didn’t pick it up sooner.”
