“Vancouver Island, maybe,” Mel says. “But I don’t think Canada really grows coconuts.” She finishes up with Grandma’s hair, getting up from the bed and gently laying Grandma back down on her pillow. Grandma doesn’t open her eyes again and is asleep almost immediately. The usual ritual after Mel does her hair.
Mel watches her, hands on her hips, brush in her hand. “She won’t miss this when I leave. But that kind of makes me even sadder that I’ll have to stop.”
“I know,” I say, standing, getting ready to go.
“Not yet,” Mel says. I sit back down and she leans against the table by my grandma’s bed. For a few minutes, we just watch my grandma and Mrs Choi sleep, that empty bed in the middle seeming like a hole either of them could fall into at any moment.
Mel’s been spending a lot of time with Call Me Steve. She has also somehow managed not to tell our mother yet that Call Me Steve actually exists. She’s afraid he’ll become just another part of our mom’s schedule, an issue to be dealt with, a point on a memo for her advisors. She’s probably right.
Mom’s victory seems so assured, though, she’s getting hardly any press coverage. They’re concentrating on a nasty Senate race instead. My mom says this is the best thing that could happen, but I can also tell that the biggest deal in her life not being the biggest deal for everyone else is a little disappointing.
Mel picks up her bag and takes out a plastic container. She opens it.
I frown. “Is that your lunch?” We didn’t eat together today. Mel was at the dentist getting a check-up on the enamel treatments she’s been having to repair her teeth. But it wasn’t a Novocaine-type thing and she could have eaten, should have eaten afterwards.
“Don’t freak out,” she says, but I’m already standing, already kind of freaking out.
“Mel–”
“Mikey, please–”
“You can’t start again. It’s bad enough me doing it. I couldn’t take losing you, Mel, I couldn’t–”
She puts her hand on my mouth, rolling her eyes to our grandma, still sleeping.
“Mel,” I whisper. And I’m nearly crying. I know what it’s like to lose her, even for three or four minutes. It makes you live afraid every minute of every day that it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. You can be happy. You can have fun. But it’s always there. Always.
“I have moments, Mikey,” she says. “You have ’em, too, I know, and mine aren’t as bad as yours.
But with everything that’s been going on–”
“Is it Steve?” I say, suddenly ready to break him in half with my hands.
“No,” she says, firmly. “He’s nothing like that at all.” She sighs. “Though I did think about it.
Like you would with anybody. Like you’d want to be sure you looked attractive enough for someone you really like, even if he doesn’t care about that stuff.”
“Mel–”
“Like your scar.”
This stops me. She puts her hand up to it like Henna did, tracing it with her fingers. She drops her hand. “This is my scar. I carry it around. Most of the time, I don’t even think about it.”
“But sometimes you do.”
“The world’s uncertain, Mikey,” she says, and then she repeats the words from earlier. “Time is short.”
We look down at her lunch. It’s a wrap, Japanese-style, salmon, shoots, rice. There’s a fork tucked in next to it. Mel takes it out.