Page 11 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"Tired of people asking me how I'm feeling."

"That's fair." Sophie smiles, then glances at me. "Morning, Grant."

"Morning." It comes out lower than I mean it to. She notices and something satisfied and entirely inappropriate moves through me at having gotten a reaction out of her before eight in the morning.

We walk to the check-in desk together. Sophie knows the receptionist, who;s eyes brighten when she sees us.

"Sophie! Is this Patty's son?"

"This is Grant. He'll be taking over most of the appointment coordination."

"Most?" I say.

Sophie takes the clipboard from Diane before I can reach it. Our fingers almost touch on the handoff. She adjusts her grip half a second before it happens, which means she saw it coming too. "I'm still on Patty's contact list. Backup."

Like I'm a new contractor who needs supervision. I start to bristle — and then don't, because she's been doing this alone, I got here yesterday and backup is just practical. Also because I'm too busy watching the line of her throat as she signs her name on the form to hold onto the irritation properly.

"Why don't you help Patty get settled," Sophie says, already filling out the form.

I help Mom find seats near the window. The waiting room is half full — other patients at various stages of treatment, all of them fighting the same fight. Mom watches them with the particular solidarity of someone who knows exactly what they're going through.

"Sophie knows what she's doing," Mom says quietly.

"I can see that." I can see a lot of things about Sophie today that I'm choosing not to say out loud in a hospital waiting room.

"You don't have to prove anything. It's okay to let her help."

I don't respond to that either.

Sophie joins us after a few minutes. She pulls her chair close to Mom's that’s close enough that mine ends up close to hers too, the three of us tucked into a triangle in the corner of the room and they fall into easy conversation. Appointment logistics, medication adjustments, how the nausea has been tracked.

Sophie asks specific questions. Mom gives specific answers. I take notes on my phone and watch, out of the corner of my eye, the way Sophie tucks one leg under herself in the chair, unselfconscious, like she's done this exact motion in this exact spot a hundred times before. She probably has.

At some point during the infusion, Mom falls asleep. The anti-nausea meds kick in within about twenty minutes, according to Sophie's notes.

Sophie and I sit on either side of her in the quiet bay. The room's dim, machines humming low, and every so often Sophie shifts in her chair and her knee brushes mine under the narrow gap between us, and neither of us moves away, and neither of us says anything about it, and I spend a solid ten minutes tracking the exact temperature of that single point of contact instead of the readout on my mother's IV pump like a functioning adult.

"The cafeteria's not terrible," Sophie says eventually. "If you need coffee."

I do need coffee. The five AM attempt was functional, not good. I also need approximately six feet of distance and I'm about to get the opposite.

She glances down at Mom, who is breathing steadily and clearly not going anywhere. "Twenty minutes. One of the nurses will text me if anything changes."

The cafeteria is half empty. We get coffee from the machine — it is, in fact, terrible, the kind that suggests it's been sitting since Tuesday — and find a table by the windows.

For a minute we just sit. Don't talk. The silence doesn't need filling and we both seem to know it, though I notice she's not quite looking at me and I'm not quite looking at anything else.

Sophie dumps three sugar packets into her cup and stirs. The spoon clinks against the ceramic. She's focused on the coffee like it owes her something, and I'm focused on her hands doing it, which is not information I need to be gathering.

"So," she says finally. "Baghdad?"

"What?"

"At the wedding. You said you were in Baghdad." She glances at me, then back down. "Infrastructure development."

"Right. That was five years ago."

"I know." She's still not looking at me. "I just remember the dance. You said you had an early flight. Someone else said six AM. So you could've stayed."