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“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he answered. I could hear his crooked smile.
On Saturday, my parents and I went down to the farmers’ market in Broad Ripple. It was su
about summer. Mom and I sat next to each other on a bench across from a goat-soap maker, a man in overalls who had to explain to every
single person who walked by that yes, they were his goats, and no, goat soap does not smell like goats.
My phone rang. “Who is it?” Mom asked before I could even check.
“I don’t know,” I said. It was Gus, though.
“A re you currently at your house?” he asked.
“Um, no,” I said.
“That was a trick question. I knew the answer, because I am currently at your house.”
“Oh. Um. Well, we are on our way, I guess?”
“A wesome. See you soon.”
A ugustus Waters was sitting on the front step as we pulled into the driveway. He was holding a bouquet of bright orange tulips just begi
flowers.
My dad walked up behind me and shook Gus’s hand.
“Is that a Rik Smits jersey?” my dad asked.
“Indeed it is.”
“God, I loved that guy,” Dad said, and immediately they were engrossed in a basketball conversation I could not (and did not want to)
join, so I took my tulips inside.
“Do you want me to put those in a vase?” Mom asked as I walked in, a huge smile on her face.
“No, it’s okay,” I told her. If we’d put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone’s flowers. I wanted them to be
my flowers.
I went to my room but didn’t change. I brushed my hair and teeth and put on some lip gloss and the smallest possible dab of perfume. I
kept looking at the flowers. They were aggressively orange, almost too orange to be pretty. I didn’t have a vase or anything, so I took my
toothbrush out of my toothbrush holder and filled it halfway with water and left the flowers there in the bathroom.
When I reentered my room, I could hear people talking, so I sat on the edge of my bed for a while and listened through my hollow
bedroom door:
Dad: “So you met Hazel at Support Group.”
A ugustus: “Yes, sir. This is a lovely house you’ve got. I like your artwork.”
Mom: “Thank you, A ugustus.”
Dad: “You’re a survivor yourself, then?”
A ugustus: “I am. I didn’t cut this fella off for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, although it is an excellent weight-loss strategy. Legs are heavy!”
Dad: “A nd how’s your health now?”
A ugustus: “NEC for fourteen months.”
Mom: “That’s wonderful. The treatment options these days—it really is remarkable.”
A ugustus: “I know. I’m lucky.”
Dad: “You have to understand that Hazel is still sick, A ugustus, and will be for the rest of her life. She’ll want to keep up with you, but her lungs—”
A t which point I emerged, silencing him.
“So where are you going?” asked Mom. A ugustus stood up and leaned over to her, whispering the answer, and then held a finger to his
lips. “Shh,” he told her. “It’s a secret.”
Mom smiled. “You’ve got your phone?” she asked me. I held it up as evidence, tilted my oxygen cart onto its front wheels, and started
walking. A ugustus hustled over, offering me his arm, which I took. My fingers wrapped around his biceps.
Unfortunately, he insisted upon driving, so the surprise could be a surprise. A s we shuddered toward our destination, I said, “You nearly
charmed the pants off my mom.”
“Yeah, and your dad is a Smits fan, which helps. You think they liked me?”
“Sure they did. Who cares, though? They’re just parents.”
“They’re your parents,” he said, glancing over at me. “Plus, I like being liked. Is that crazy?”
“Well, you don’t have to rush to hold doors open or smother me in compliments for me to like you.” He slammed the brakes, and I flew
forward hard enough that my breathing felt weird and tight. I thought of the PET scan. Don’t worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway.
We burned rubber, roaring away from a stop sign before turning left onto the misnomered Grandview (there’s a view of a golf course, I
guess, but nothing grand). The only thing I could think of in this direction was the cemetery. A ugustus reached into the center console,
flipped open a full pack of cigarettes, and removed one.
“Do you ever throw them away?” I asked him.
“One of the many benefits of not smoking is that packs of cigarettes last forever,” he answered. “I’ve had this one for almost a year. A
few of them are broken near the filters, but I think this pack could easily get me to my eighteenth birthday.” He held the filter between his fingers, then put it in his mouth. “So, okay,” he said. “Okay. Name some things that you never see in Indianapolis.”
“Um. Ski
He laughed. “Good. Keep going.”
“Mmm, beaches. Family-owned restaurants. Topography.”
“A ll excellent examples of things we lack. A lso, culture.”
“Yeah, we are a bit short on culture,” I said, finally realizing where he was taking me. “A re we going to the museum?”
“In a ma
“Oh, are we going to that park or whatever?”
Gus looked a bit deflated. “Yes, we are going to that park or whatever,” he said. “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”
“Um, figured what out?”
“Nothing.”
There was this park behind the museum where a bunch of artists had made big sculptures. I’d heard about it but had never visited. We drove
past the museum and parked right next to this basketball court filled with huge blue and red steel arcs that imagined the path of a bouncing ball.
We walked down what passes for a hill in Indianapolis to this clearing where kids were climbing all over this huge oversize skeleton
sculpture. The bones were each about waist high, and the thighbone was longer than me. It looked like a child’s drawing of a skeleton rising up out of the ground.
My shoulder hurt. I worried the cancer had spread from my lungs. I imagined the tumor metastasizing into my own bones, boring holes
into my skeleton, a slithering eel of insidious intent. “Funky Bones,” A ugustus said. “Created by Joep Van Lieshout.”
“Sounds Dutch.”
“He is,” Gus said. “So is Rik Smits. So are tulips.” Gus stopped in the middle of the clearing with the bones right in front of us and slipped his backpack off one shoulder, then the other. He unzipped it, producing an orange blanket, a pint of orange juice, and some sandwiches
wrapped in plastic wrap with the crusts cut off.
“What’s with all the orange?” I asked, still not wanting to let myself imagine that all this would lead to A msterdam.
“National color of the Netherlands, of course. You remember William of Orange and everything?”
“He wasn’t on the GED test.” I smiled, trying to contain my excitement.
“Sandwich?” he asked.
“Let me guess,” I said.
“Dutch cheese. A nd tomato. The tomatoes are from Mexico. Sorry.”
“You’re always such a disappointment, A ugustus. Couldn’t you have at least gotten orange tomatoes?”
He laughed, and we ate our sandwiches in silence, watching the kids play on the sculpture. I couldn’t very well ask him about it, so I just sat there surrounded by Dutchness, feeling awkward and hopeful.
In the distance, soaked in the unblemished sunlight so rare and precious in our hometown, a gaggle of kids made a skeleton into a