And whenever it got almost too bad to bear, all I had to do was hug him tighter, hearing him husk:
Ro, it hurts, it feels like I’m dyin’. Oh, Ro, it hurrrts. Ro, man, what’s happening to me?
At which point I’d whisper back:
I’m here, baby. I’m here, I’ll never leave. I’ll always take care of you, Rennie. Always.
But always, as it since turns out, is one long Goddamn time.
* * *
I put the sheets in to soak, turned one of the Loons back into quarters and made some calls from the back of the Laundromat, doing a little business. Scouted out some of Jos’ erstwhile friends, trying to line up future meals for Rennie; paid our overdue cable bill, using my Interac card and the Canada Trust Bankline. It was the second week of the month, and I had all the classic signs of impending menstruation: No appetite, lousy skin, a PMS headache that’d been building at the base of my skull since the very early morning, finally coming to full, pulsing bloom whenever I closed my eyes. It was like a sparkler going off behind my lids—open them again, and for a split second or two, the whole world rained light.
Then it was an hour later, and I looked up from folding to find Leo in the doorway, already headed my way.
“Rohise!”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Curran, burly ex-con Street Outreach worker-cum-superhero in his own private comic book—Leo the Lionheart, Understanding Guy, maybe; or: How I Saved the World, One Reluctant Convert at a Time!
He pulled out a nearby chair, settled his bulk into it. Looked at me over the rims of his sunglasses, all easy frankness—let’s you and me just have ourselves a little heart-to-heart and get our differences squared away right now, ‘kay?
“Nice to see you, Leo,” I said, rolling the sheets back into a conveniently baggable size. “Like always.”
You big fuckin’ freak.
“I knocked at your door, a little while back,” he said. “Your brother sent me over.”
“Oh yeah.”
“He wouldn’t let me in. Sounded like he was still in bed.”
I shrugged. “He’s sick.”
Leo just smiled, and shook his head in a sad, slight way, clearly meant to imply: Well, of course you’d say that—but we both know better, now, don’t we?
“Sick?” he repeated. “When people are sick, Rohise, they get better. Somebody’s been sick for eighteen months straight, what you do is you take ’em to the hospital—because there’s obviously something genuinely wrong with ’em—and you find out what the story really is. Or you cut ’em loose.”
“Uh huh.” I slung the bag over my shoulder. “Well, gotta go. Rennie’ll be waiting.”
“If he’s awake.”
I paused, squinting against the light. “Meaning?”
“Stop me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But if your brother wasn’t sick, you could go back to school, right? Get a job. Have a life.”
“True. But since he is sick—who cares?”
“I do.”
He was a nice guy, Leo. Meant well. But I had neither the time nor the energy, just right now, to fully appreciate his good intentions.
Not to mention that my head now felt as though it were rapidly approaching the point of cranial meltdown.
“You deserve better.”
“I’m doing fine, thanks anyways.”