Shelter in Place by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

15

He decided to give Kathy the check on the day of her last chemo session. This was a Wednesday in late February. On this particular afternoon, he didn’t drive her but met her at the outpatient center, where she had gone by taxi after a consultation with her lawyer. To his surprise, Susie was there, as was Michael. It was the first time Bruce had met him. His green hair aside, he seemed a well-mannered boy, slim and neatly dressed, unlike his sister, with her tattoos and leggings and leather jacket. To mark the occasion, Bruce had ordered a bouquet to be delivered from Ode à la Rose, Eva’s preferred florist, but it was late arriving. Half an hour before the session was due to wrap up, it still hadn’t arrived.

He was about to step into the hall to call the shop and ask what was holding them up when the nurses and nurses’ aides gathered round Kathy in a circle. “We got this for you,” one of the nurses said, and handed Kathy a card that depicted a smiling stick figure in a pink robe throwing a pink mortarboard into the sky. CONGRATS, CHEMO GRAD! the card read.

“We all signed it,” the nurse added.

“Oh, how lovely,” Kathy said, tears coming into her eyes.

She was just opening the card and beginning to read the little messages written on it when the flowers were brought in—a Brobdingnagian arrangement of pink and peach roses and white lisianthus. At the mere sight of it, a hush descended. The expression in Kathy’s eyes, as she put down the card and looked at the flowers, was that of someone dazzled by a bright light.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

Bruce winced. I should have known better, he thought. I should have guessed that a moment this delicate could not withstand such a hammer blow of opulence.

“Never mind those, keep on reading your card,” he said, but it was too late; already the nurses were dispersing, already Kathy was drying her eyes. Only Michael seemed to take any real pleasure in the bouquet. “I knew it,” he said as he read the note pinned to it. “I knew it was Ode à la Rose. Gorgeous.” Cautiously he touched his fingertips to one of the stems, as if he feared damaging it. “The thing you need to understand, Mom, is that this isn’t just your typical floral arrangement. This is the haute couture of flower arrangement.”

“Is it?”

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said.

“Why?” Michael said.

“I couldn’t tell from the photo on the website that it was going to be this big.”

“Oh, but it’s fantastic,” Kathy said. “Picture me doing that thing that the Coyote does in the cartoon, where his jaw drops and lands on the ground and he has to pick it up and put it back on.”

“I got you something, too,” Susie said, rifling through her elephantine handbag. “Hold on, I know it’s in here somewhere.”

“She’ll never find it,” Michael said. “That bag is the black hole of Calcutta.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s the Roach Motel.

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