Not in this context. I moved my lips into a weak smile. My hands had become like ice and I pulled them into the sleeves of my turtleneck, a poor imitation of waif-ness.
He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers. “Five for a total is sort of intermediate. I’m your average guy, as we always knew.”
I loved him for sparing me his own anguish. I took a deep breath, calmed myself. It was his cancer, after all, and I should be at least as composed as he was.
“So, what’s next?” I asked, with a forced calmness. This was a problem, and we would solve it together, as we had so many others.
“Well, it’s a Stage-Two; then there’s another designation with Ts and letters.” Matt pulled a pile of literature out of his briefcase. “I have to digest this information on treatments and come to a decision.” He held the leaflets and notebook pages out halfway between us. “A project for us.”
I took them from his hands. We sat on the couch for a few more minutes, moved to the bedroom, and did not let go of each other for a long time.
Rose had been on my mind. Playing amateur psychologist, I’d decided that she was repressing feelings of anxiety about MC, whose student had been murdered, and not long after MC herself had felt threatened by a prowler. But I had a hard time concentrating on anything other than Matt’s Gleason score, and in the end she called me first, early Monday morning.
As soon as I heard her voice, I thought of MC and a date I hadn’t kept. I’d forgotten completely that I’d made a date to be at her apartment at six the night before.
“Jake Powers, MC’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by her apartment last night, Gloria,” Rose told me. Apparently, MC hadn’t missed me, I thought. “We wouldn’t even have known, except Robert was working late with Mr. Baroni, and he saw someone go upstairs. The guy was banging on her door, making a scene in the hallway. MC let him go in, but Robert waited around until he left, about two hours later.”
I pictured Robert, slightly taller than his father, and well-built. “It’s good that Robert was there,” I said, trying to maintain a neutral tone.
“I’m worried about her, Gloria. I hope she doesn’t take that guy back; I think he wasn’t nice to her in Texas.” Rose’s voice cracked as she told me, and, strangely, I was glad. Psych 101 again—better that she’s acknowledging her concern.
I thought I’d set a good example, and bare my own soul. “I feel so guilty and selfish, Rose. I meant to call you to talk about MC, and instead this … situation with Matt has consumed me.” I knew that Matt and Frank had talked the evening before, and that Rose would understand what the “situation” was.
“Well, I feel selfish, too, and useless. What you and Matt must be going through!”
So we had a deal, born of decades of friendship, that we would allow each other our momentary self-centeredness. Nothing a shared cannoli wouldn’t fix, I decided, and offered to take a box over to Prospect Avenue.
“Just come,” she said. “The cannoli are already here. That’s why I called.”
It felt like old times, except for the layer of worry that seemed always present since I’d heard Matt’s test results. I tucked him in for one of his naps, no longer rare since his illness, and headed over to Rose’s.
We sat on Rose’s porch, squinting at the first bit of sunlight in several days. Rose’s collection of glass vases caught the light and I traced the rays with an invisible protractor. Reflection, refraction, diffraction, diffusion—the beauty of geometric optics.
Rose always broke into a stream of stories when she was overwrought, and having her daughter under any kind of stress qualified for that condition. I let her tell me incidents I’d heard dozens of times, many of them from the early days of the Galigani business, when the whole family lived in the mortuary building. Their residence took up the top floor and the one below, which now housed offices for Rose and her assistant, Martha. Frank’s idea was to introduce all the children to the trade, but Rose set limits. She’d never let them see anyone they had known while the client was “being prepared” in the basement, as she called it.
“One time MC sneaked down to the prep room,” Rose said, “because she’d heard that her girlfriend Joanie Della Russo’s grandmother was a client. She was about five at the time.” At the last telling, MC had been closer to seven, but I didn’t correct her. “Frank was weighing something, uh, messy, for some reason, when he saw MC out of the corner of his eye. So he swooped down on MC and put her in the pan of the other scale. She laughed and laughed, swinging in that scale. Can you imagine? Any other kid would have been scared to death, but not MC.”