It didn’t take long. He didn’t really care what his couch or bed looked like. He looked for all of three minutes, chose a couch, a floor model that they could take. Then he picked out a bed that, for a chunky fee, would be delivered today. He agreed.
“How about some throw pillows? These ones that look like llama fur?” He looked at the tag. “Oh, my God, I’m half-right. They’re Mongolian lamb’s wool!”
“Sure,” Josh said. “Uh . . . you pick out the colors.”
“I think it’s important that you pick out the colors, Josh. This is a big step.”
He sighed. “Yellow?”
“Yellow is good.” Radley smiled. “How about a few other things, too? Something cheery, maybe? These vases are very cute. Oh! And these lacquer trays will make it so you look classy when you eat in front of the TV.”
Suddenly, Josh did want all new things. He wanted his place to look less like the place Lauren didn’t live anymore. “Yeah. Sure. The vases and trays. And . . . uh, how about these bookends?”
“No need to ask me. I’m just here to nod wisely at the right intervals. As one does when one is a therapist.”
Josh picked up a small lamp. A few shelves that seemed ugly but might be cool. A small sculpture that looked like a strand of DNA. A cluster of mirrors. As he staggered to the checkout, grabbing a basket (Lauren had loved baskets), it dawned on him that Radley might need something, too.
“Can I buy you something?” he asked, clutching an armful of boxes and items. “You’ve been great.”
“Oh, no, that’s nice of you, but unnecessary.”
“Please? As thanks?”
“Uh, sure. Here. This candle.” Radley grabbed a candle and sniffed it. “Lemon. Nice.”
“How about a chair? You’ve . . . you’ve helped me a lot and I feel guilty.”
“You do have resting guilt face.” He fondled a dark blue chair. “Is this velvet?”
“Take it.”
“We’ll have to ship it to you,” the clerk said.
“That’d be great,” Josh told her.
“Well, thank you, Joshua!” Radley said. “You’re so generous.”
Josh looked at his watch, as the day had been endless. Almost six. “I can buy you dinner, too.”
When they got home, the furniture guys were already there with the bed, and the mattress was waiting in the lobby. They carried up the boxes and mattress, then helped Radley and Josh with the couch. He tipped each guy a twenty, turning down their offer to assemble the bed. If there was one thing Josh was good at, it was putting pieces together, being an engineer and all. The mattress slid on top, a mattress Lauren had never slept on.
Josh opened the packet of new sheets he’d bought and remade the bed, not caring if he should wash them first. They were blue. His and Lauren’s sheets had been white. He opted not to replace the bed’s throw pillows. What was the point of useless pillows you just put on the bed, then took off the bed? It looked more . . . masculine this way. And since he had no woman in his life, masculine it was.
“Sorry,” he said to the dogwood tree/Lauren’s ashes. “This is what you get for dying.”
Radley was doing something he called zhoozhing in the living room. Josh wandered in, and the room looked different. Pebbles had already made herself at home on the couch, which was the color of sand, not red, like their old one. He felt a momentary stab of panic. What had he done? Lauren had loved that couch! He hated change! Then Pebbles wagged, her head resting on a fuzzy throw pillow, which would absorb her drool nicely. Radley had moved a chair, repositioned the coffee table and added the little touches. The new floor lamp looked cool. The ugly-ish shelf had gone up with the DNA thingy on it.
“Are you going to cry?” Radley asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. He wasn’t sure.
“Let’s watch something violent and uplifting,” Radley said. “Mad Max: Fury Road? What food goes with that?”
“Everything,” Josh said. “Should I get some beer?”
“That sounds great.”
“I appreciate you being nice to me.”
Radley tilted his head. “Josh, you’re easy to like. We’re friends, buddy.”
“Good. Good. I thought I was sort of like a test client for you.”
“There is that. But no! I mean, I like you. You’re decent. You have no agenda. You seem to like me.”
“I do. And that’s . . . that’s enough? To be friends?”
“It is for me.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Okay. It is for me, too. I just don’t want you to be here because you . . . pity me.”
Radley rolled his eyes. “Kid, we all have shit that rains down on us at different times. Your time is now. My time was getting beaten up in high school and having my parents tell me I was going to hell. Should we get Chinese? Korean? Thai? Italian?”
They ordered Thai food. Josh walked the two blocks to the nearest packie to pick up beer while Radley sat in a lounge chair in the rooftop garden and pretended to be Leonardo DiCaprio (in his own words).
When he came back, it was a little bit of a shock, seeing the not-Lauren things in the living room. His heart hurt.
But she would like Radley. Would have liked. She’d be glad he had a friend. That he was (oh, detested phrase) moving on.
Tomorrow, he would apologize to Sarah. For now, he tucked the six-pack under his arm and went up on the roof to join his buddy. Like a normal person, no matter how empty his soul felt.
18
Lauren
Twenty-one months left
May 19
Dear Dad,
I think this diagnosis is kind of wrong. I mean, I believe the doctors, but I doubt very much I’m like the other patients. I’m not even thirty, for God’s sake. I’m about to turn twenty-seven. They keep saying they don’t know how this will play out.
It’s really not that bad, to be honest. I’m fine. I’m really fine.
Just wanted you to know.
Love,
Lauren
She was fine. Until she wasn’t.
In June, six months after the diagnosis, she was doing great. IPF and its grim facts lurked in her closet like a childhood monster, amorphous and dark, waiting. But that monster had never eaten her, had it? So then. Everything made sense.
Because it didn’t seem possible that she had something incurable. She’d never even heard of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Some days, she felt perfectly normal. Better than normal, even. So how could her lungs be changing, huh? Hm? Hadn’t she given Sebastian a piggyback ride? Hadn’t she and Josh had marathon sex the other day?