“I’m getting a lot of solicitations to be part of clinical trials,” Matt told me. “I can be a subject for ultrasound surgery or hormone therapy.” He pounded his chest. “I’m classified as an OHM, otherwise healthy male.”
He smiled; I didn’t. Matt, subjected to experimental drugs? For one who loved empiricism, I was surprisingly against it in this case.
“How soon do we need to decide?” I asked him.
He pulled me closer. “See, it’s that ‘we’ that makes all the difference. If I could only get you to use that pronoun when you talk about our house.”
“You’re right. When do we leave our house and go to talk to our doctor?”
“By the end of the week. Which reminds me, Gloria. There’s something else you’re not going to want to hear.”
My heart sank. What next, Stage III? Had Matt been to the doctor without me? Had more symptoms crept in? The look on my face must have caused Matt to regret his facetiousness, and he rushed to clarify.
“Jean wants to come up over the weekend. She’s … worried, I guess, and would like to see me.”
A visit from Matt’s sister. That’s all it was. I was at once relieved that there was no bad medical news, and chagrined that Matt felt he had to apologize for having his own sister as our guest for a couple of days.
“Of course she should see you, Matt. I wish I’d thought of inviting her myself.”
I’d last seen Jean at a barbecue at her Cape Cod home over Labor Day weekend. She hadn’t bothered to tell me that about fifty clients from her thriving real estate business would also be there, and dressed as if for a wedding. I showed up in beach casual, with a windbreaker over my khakis, carrying a small casserole (for the party of five I expected) that could hardly compete with the catered crab cake dinner. Matt tucked the dish away in the refrigerator, and seemed comfortable in his beach clothes, even joking about the miscommunication. I was less inclined to give Jean the benefit of the doubt. Let’s embarrass that old girlfriend of my brother’s, I imagined her thinking.
None of this meant I shouldn’t have thought to invite Jean to visit her brother, and I apologized again to Matt.
He patted my hand. “Not a problem. She’ll be here for dinner on Friday, and stay over one night. Petey and Alysse won’t be coming; they’ll be staying with some friends in Dennisport.”
While I wasn’t crazy about Matt’s teenage niece and nephew, in some way, the children provided a buffer between their mother and me. They seemed to enjoy the science “toys” I gave them, bestowing an evaluation of cool, when I demonstrated both transverse and longitudinal wave propagation with a Slinky.
The children’s father had died in a boating accident soon after Matt lost his wife. I had to give Jean credit for successful parenting, and for not turning her offspring against me. Or maybe they were simply being teenagers, taking the opposite view of their mother toward their uncle’s girlfriend.
My second favorite Jean interaction was the time she and Alysse and Petey came for dinner in my old mortuary apartment. I’d cooked a leg of lamb, with all the trimmings my Betty Crocker cookbook suggested. Petey was allergic to nuts, I learned, including the almonds I’d liberally tossed into the green bean casserole; Alysse had become a vegetarian the day before; and Jean had started a diet that morning, partaking of only two lettuce leaves and a few carrot sticks.
“Whose turn to cook this weekend?” I asked Matt.
“Mine,” he said, quick as a cake mix.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MC stepped out of the shower, onto the newly re-tiled floor of the health club locker room. She rolled on deodorant, pulled on her sweats, fluffed out her hair, tried not to breathe the heavy hair spray residue in the air. She’d finally found a good personal trainer, Rick Gong, at the Windside Health Club in Winthrop, and she was making progress getting back in shape after a lazy, lazy month or two, letting her mother pamper her. Mom—Ma—was amused, reminding MC that she and her father managed to keep fit without spending a lot of money on monthly dues, or hours and hours on special machines.
“It’s a different era,” MC had told her parents.
“Yeah, yeah,” said her father.
“There was nothing wrong with the old era,” said her mother.
MC knew her mother was disappointed that she’d hooked up with Jake again, probably afraid MC would head back to Houston—not that MC had promised Jake anything the other night. Just not to shut him out completely. How her mother found out about Jake’s alcohol problem and his temper, she’d never know. She was sure Aunt G wouldn’t have told, if only not to upset her best friend. Mother’s intuition, she guessed, and wondered if she’d ever experience it. She rubbed her stomach, as if that were where the feeling would lie.