Saturday Morning

LaVieEnRose

The third Friday night of October, I was in bed reading a review of Justin's latest show—okay, it barely mentioned him, but there fifty fucking artists there and he was one of them it, damn it—in Art in America (yeah, that's right. Art in America) when the guy himself leaned against the doorway between the bathroom and the bedroom and sneezed five times in a row.

I lowered the magazine and raised an eyebrow.

I have been doing that all fucking day, he said, pawing at his nose. I'm going to call the super tomorrow about getting our ducts cleaned. I don't think he did it this year.

He did it in September.

Justin looked skeptical.

Yes, you were here painting and you kept getting mad at him for walking on your drop cloth. You were doing that yellow painting with the triangles.

Oh, you hated that one.

Yes, I'm happy it sold so I never have to look at it again.

I hope it gets famous, Justin said. I hope it's on my Wikipedia page so you have to see it everyday when you sadness-Google me after I die.

Yeah, Kandinsky, speaking of? That's not allergies. You're getting sick.

He did some sort of stuffy-nose, sore-throat version of a scoff.

Keep up the skepticism as long as you can. It'll be nice entertainment for you when you're feeling like shit tomorrow.

It's just sneezing. It's allergies.

Five times.

Well, my allergies take sneezing very seriously. He covered his face with his arms and sneezed hard. Tada, he fingerspelled, as he wandered back into the bathroom.

Sure, in multiples of three.

He raised an eyebrow while he put lotion on his neck. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I sighed and put the magazine down. You sneeze in multiples of three for your allergies. Anything else means you're getting sick. You've seriously never noticed this?

He stared at me. “You're a freak.”

At least I don't have a cold. Unlike some people.

You are so obsessed with me, he said. It's really embarrassing for you.

I'm not obsessed with you. You just live here and, I don't know if you know this, but you're not exactly quiet.

I'm quiet as a mouse, he said, knocking a whole load of shit off the bathroom counter.

Jesus Christ. Come to bed, you sick piece of shit.

I can't be getting sick, Justin said. He stripped bare and crawled up the bed, dropping kisses on his way up my neck. I titled my head back. I have things to do, he said.

Oh yeah?

He nodded and ran a hand down my chest. Fuck all the dust out of me.

It's not dust.

Fuck me anyway.

I kissed him hard. Okay.

**

Guess who was sick as shit the next morning? Justin drank tea and winced when he swallowed and coughed into his elbow. He ran a low fever that made his hand act up, and he seemed unreasonably nervous about the whole thing, pacing back and forth and chewing on his thumbnail.

I sat on the couch answering a couple work emails. It's a cold, Sunshine, relax. Come sit.

“I'm supposed to do something today.”

Your next show's not for two weeks. You've got time.

“No, I...”

I looked up at him.

He blew out a mouthful of air and clapped his hands together, palm against claw. “Okay! So you're not going to get mad at me for not telling you this, because this was me respecting somebody else's privacy, not being sneaky. Right? Right. Great.”

Ha, yeah, no promises there. Spit it out.

He whined and shifted his weight between feet and otherwise tried my patience for thirty seconds before he finally said, I'm supposed to take Molly to the doctor today.

I stood up. Because you know how I love it when you keep stuff from me about Molly. Jesus Christ.

It's not like that.

What's wrong with Molly?

Nothing, she's fine.

So she needs you to take you to the doctor secretly why?

She's getting...a procedure, Justin said, and he looked at me meaningfully, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

Oh. Oh. Okay.

Yeah. She doesn't want to be alone. Can you take her?

Yeah, what time?

Eleven.

I checked my watch and nodded. How's she feeling, is she nervous?

No, I don't think so. But you know her. I don't think she'd tell me if she was.

Yeah, true.

Are you mad at me?

I sighed. No, you were right. It's her business.

He sat down at the counter, wheezing a little. “Okay. Good. That one was kind of a nail-biter in the 'is this lying to Brian' category.”

Sunshine's final exam.

“Yeah.”

Try to eat something while I'm gone. I'll be back in...how long does this take?

He shrugged.

All right. I'll be back.

**

Molly answered the door looking the same as always, wearing her ratty pink North Face jacket and earmuffs. Justin, you've grown.

He's sick.

Jesus, why bother asking him to do anything.

“Hey,” I said, and okay, maybe I was a bit snappy, but I hate that with a fucking passion. You include Justin in your plans, you give him responsibilities, and you have a backup plan if he needs to cancel and you tell him it's no big deal. This is 101 shit.

“Oh, don't tell me how to talk about Justin, I've been around a fuck of a lot longer than you have.” There was no fire behind it, though. “So he told you?”

“He did.”

“I'm not going to get a lecture, am I?”

“Who the fuck do you think I am?”

“A Catholic.”

“Ah, yes, and a devout one. Come on, I brought the car.”

“We're driving?”

I shrugged. I'd thought she might like the privacy, and I didn't know how she was going to feel after it was over. “We used to go for drives,” I said. The famed St. James Academy was just a hop skip from Liberty Avenue—they're fucking trying to turn these kids gay, I swear—and if she was there late for play rehearsal or lacrosse practice I used to pick her up after work, and we'd drive around and get ice cream and make fun of whatever annoying shit Justin had been doing lately. She was the only one who would let me bitch about him without taking it all seriously, and I was the only one who didn't nag her about cursing every second fucking word.“We don't do that anymore.”

“Maybe that's when I fell off the path of righteousness. Not enough drives.”

“Nah,” I said. “Like you said, you've been around a fuck of a lot longer than I have.”

She shoved me and snickered and we headed out to the car.

**

Molly gave me directions to Eastside Gynecology and messed with the stereo as we drove. It was only a handful of blocks, but Manhattan traffic meant there was plenty of time for Molly to switch between radio stations eighty-two times.

“You sure you didn't get Justin's disease?” I said. “Nobody who can hear should have this kind of taste in music.”

“It's not my fault I can't even tell what anything is with the bass up this high.”

“He likes it.”

“You are such a sucker.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, because what argument do I have left for that at this point.

She stretched and put her feet up on the dashboard. “He okay?”

“Yeah, he's fine. He just has a cold.”

“Been getting a lot of colds.”

“His immune system sucks shit. And he's been working hard, traveling a lot.”

“Weather's getting cold.”

“Yeah.”

She sighed and blew on her hands. “I hate the winter.”

“Eh, you get a break from school, at least.”

“Not for ages.”

“This is your senior year, right?”

“Sure is.”

“Christ. Time flies.” I stopped behind a cab driver screaming at the cab next to him. “So what's the plan when you're done, you gonna come work for me? I seem to be the Kinney home for wayward youth.”

“Emily is a mother with Balenciaga heels. She is not wayward.”

“All queers are wayward.”

“You have new pictures of Janie?”

I handed her my phone, and she opened up my pictures and groaned. “I don't know if I'm hoping that's my brother's dick or hoping it isn't.”

I glanced at the screen. “That's him.”

“Ugh. Congrats, Justin.”

“Congrats, me.”

She scrolled through and found the ones of Jane, fully recovered from her ER adventure. “Ohhh, come on. Look at that face.”

“Yeah, she's a looker.”

“Is she coming to brunch tomorrow?” Justin and I typically had brunch with Molly every Sunday, though I imagined he'd be sitting this one out.

“Fuck if I know, I don't do her schedule. I have no responsibilities where that kid is concerned. I'ts amazing. Ask Justin.” I looked at her. “You gonna be feeling up for it?”

“Yeah, they said I'd feel fine by the end of today.” She played with the zipper on her hoodie. “You ever done this before? Brought someone?”

“I don't have a lot of straight friends.”

“I don't know. Maybe your sister.”

“When my sister got pregnant she got married. In the grand tradition of Joan Kinney.”

Molly shook her head and looked out the window. “I can't imagine getting married.”

“Justin wasn't that much older than you,” I said, just to bait her.

“That doesn't count. Neither of you even wanted to get married.”

“Well.” Can't argue with that. “Most straight people do. Daphne used to say she'd never get married, now I'm her fiance's fucking best man.”

“Yeah, I'm a bridesmaid.”

Justin too.

She tightened her bootlace. “How do you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone?”

“Oh, Jesus. Did you think when I said we should take more drives I meant we should have more fucking heart-to-hearts? Because I did not. I meant we should make fun of your brother more.”

“I just don't feel like I'm ever going to feel that sure about someone,” she said. “By the time he was my age, you and him were all fucking settled. I feel like I'm just...waiting for my life to actually start. He was a fucking adult.”

“He wasn't supposed to be. You're not supposed to grow up that fast. That...wasn't supposed to happen.”

She looked skepitcal.

“I'm serious,” I said. “You're what, you're about to turn twenty-two?”

“Yeah.”

“All right, when I was twenty-two, I was fucking my way through Carnegie Mellon, spending money I definitely did not have on booze and shitty weekend trips with Michael and eating unseasoned ramen because I couldn't afford the kind that comes in the cups, living in this absolute shithole about half the size of your dorm room...and that was everybody. I threw away my bills because they scared the shit out of me and somehow also didn't fucking mean anything. That's twenty-two. It's not living the last fucking year of your life before you find out you're losing your hearing and wondering how the fuck you're going to afford your medications and realizing your best choice is to marry the guy you fell into bed with six years ago and never climbed out. That's not...we're not gonna strive to be like Justin, here.”

“Come on,” she said. “What does it feel like? The never climbing out part.”

I groaned as I took the car around a turn. “It's not like...God. I can't believe I'm doing this. Okay. It's not about knowing you want to spend the rest of your life with someone. It's just waking up and going...I want to spend today with him. And then you wake up the next day and you want to fucking spend that day with him too. And maybe you don't want him in your fucking face every minute but you always want...you want to know where he is. You want to know how he's doing. And you keep waking up and you keep wanting that every day and...I mean, enough days of that, your lives get all fucking tangled together and you're driving his sister to the clinic.”

“But you're going to be with him forever, right?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“So there must have been some point where that started. Where you looked at him and you thought, this is going to last. That's the part I can't wrap my head around.”

“Well yeah,” I said. “But that had nothing to do with getting married. Maybe for straight people.”

“No, I know,” she said. “So when was it?”

“When the fucker took a bat to the head and still wouldn't stop showing up at my door,” I said. “Figured if that didn't get rid of him, nothing was going to.”

She watched me. “You've known that long?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that's oddly romantic.”

“Yeah, that's my speciality.”

She said, “Jesus, how long ago even was that now?”

“I don't know. A million years.” I shrugged as I pulled us into a parking space at a lot by the clinic. “Look, Molly, okay, you want me to level with you?”

“Yes please.”

“At the end of the day...all that forever shit, all this fucking commitment, it's just finding someone who you fucking like. The rest of it's just a lot of bullshit. People fucking talk themselves in circles about it and make it sound like the most fucking horrifying goddamn thing you can imagine and they leave out the fact that what you're really doing is negotiating waking up next to your favorite person. It's not that fucking complex.”

“So love makes you dumb.”

“Well, a lot of people could stand to be a little dumber. God knows Taylors could.”

She chewed on her cheek, like Justin does. “What if I don't find that person?”

“Eh, then you hang out with us forever. It could be worse. You ready to go?”

She looked up at the clinic. “Yeah, let's be a grown-up.”

**

Between the ER visit for Jane and now this, I was really expanding my resume for off-brand hospital visits. If I kept this up I was going to lose my reputation as an expert in the needs of exactly one person and one person only. Molly looks a lot like Justin when she's nervous, has a lot of the same mannerisms, so she was ticking some of my boxes, so to speak, while we were sitting in the waiting room listening for her name.

I said, “Mol?”

“Yeah.”

“This was your choice, right? No one's forcing you into this?”

She gave me a look.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I have to check.”

“I'm just scared it's gonna hurt,” she said, and just like that she wasn't really like Justin at all, because Justin...well, Justin and pain have reached a sort of peace treaty at this point. I'm pretty sure you could walk up to him and stab him and he'd figure out a way to incorporate it into his day.

“They'll give you something, right?”

“Yeah, they said they would.”

“Am I going to come in with you, or...”

She shook her head. “That's a little much.”

“Yeah, fair.”

“I'll be fine. It only takes like ten minutes after they start.”

They called her pretty soon after that, and I stayed out in the waiting room with a bunch of women and felt awkward as shit and texted Justin to see how he was holding up. He said he was mostly okay but that he couldn't stay awake, which could obviously have just been the cold or the fever but can be an epilepsy thing. I drummed my fingers on my thigh and tried to entertain myself guessing what all the people in here were in for, but that quickly got depressing as shit, so I ended up flipping through some magazine and reading about menopause symptoms. I'd determined pretty much definitively that Justin wasn't in menopause by the time Molly came back out to the waiting room. She looked the same as before. Maybe a little tired. I had a weird flashback to coming out of radiation to Justin waiting for me, scanning me up and down like he expected to be able to see the cancer coming out through my pores. I always felt fine immediately after. It didn't hit until later.

“Have you eaten?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I had oatmeal this morning.”

“Better than ramen, I guess.”

She smiled a little.

“Come back to the apartment,” I said. “Justin's just sleeping, it's quiet.”

“Yeah, okay.”

We walked out to the car and Molly put her feet back on the dashboard and fucked with the radio some more. I rolled my eyes and smacked her hand away.

“You should be nice to me,” she said.

“If I were nice to Justin after every doctor's appointment I'd never get anything done.”

“You really just see me as Justin with a lot of hair, huh?”

“I have a Taylor threshold.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“Yeah, none of us do.”

Molly leaned against the window on the way home, and I thought she was asleep until I saw her tighten her arm around her stomach and wince. I watched her sideways.

“You do look a lot like him,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Almost there.”

She nodded.

I brought the car back to the lot and hailed a cab to take us the three blocks back to the apartment, even though she said she didn't need it. We went up to the apartment, and I sat her on the couch and went to set up the pull-out in the office. I checked on Justin on the way, who was back in bed sleeping soundly. Good.

I nudged Molly into the office and gave her Justin's heating pad and a couple of Advil. “You want to talk or anything?” I said to her.

“I think I've put you through enough for one day.”

“Nah, I'm on a roll now.”

She smiled, her eyes already drooping. “I just want to sleep.”

“Good. I wasn't really on a roll.”

She stretched. “Sure you were.”

I kissed her forehead and wrapped the heating pad around her waist. “Yell if you need me.”

“Okay.”

I went back to the living room to get some work down but saw Justin sit up in bed out of the corner of my eye. Well hey, I said.

“How is she?” he croaked. His hand was cramped up and useless in his lap.

She's good. She's sleeping in the office. I nodded at his hand. You good?

“Yeah,” he said, and he sneezed into his elbow and coughed for a while.

No, you're hurting. Hang on. I changed my clothes and crawled into bed with him. His right arm was knotted up to the elbow. Yeah, look at this, I said.

“It's okay.” He swallowed painfully. “She's all right? Do you think she's sad or anything?”

I shook my head and massaged around his wrist. He made a small noise of pain and tangled up our legs, resting his head on my chest.

“You're a good brother,” he said hoarsely.

Yeah, well. I gave him a slow kiss. I like my family.