“Oh!” Sara almost knocked Irene backward down the rickety staircase.
“Yes?” he asked, as if nothing were odd at all, looking them up and down eagerly.
“We’re here to see the apartment?” Sara managed, eyes flitting from the wig to the open bottom of the robe, to the side of the doorframe.
“Come on in,” he said. “You know it’s only a one-bedroom, don’t you?”
Sara had to purse her lips to stop giggling as Irene slipped an arm around her waist.
“Oh, we’ll only need the one bed.”
The man laughed, and the gruffness gave away his masculinity even more than the powdered-over Adam’s apple.
“Let’s come back another time,” Sara said, trying to wriggle gently away from Irene.
“Come on,” Irene said, reaching up to brush some of Sara’s raven hair from her forehead. “I’m sure Ms….”
“Daphne.”
“I’m sure Ms. Daphne doesn’t have all day to show us around.”
But Irene took her sweet time poking around the closets and the kitchen, seeming to relish the way Sara kept close at all times. “Oh, your mother would hate this wallpaper. It’s so perfect!” Irene said as she ran a hand over the velvety-floral patterns in the living room.
“It’s all original,” Ms. Daphne explained. “At least since the sixties.”
“You’ve lived here that long?” Sara asked.
“Oh, honey,” he exclaimed. “You’re making me feel old now.”
Irene dragged Sara through the door into the bedroom, where an old armoire hung open, revealing an assortment of beautiful gowns. Sara’s eyes wandered instead toward the mirrored vanity, which was overflowing with heavy-duty makeup. Ms. Daphne blew into the room after them and then eased himself onto the low-slung bed, which rippled unnaturally as he stretched out on it.
Irene hooted. “There’s a water bed! Sara, come try this out.”
Sara stifled a laugh as Irene bounded toward a spot on the bed, then felt a pang. How could Irene have cancer and be goofing around like this? There she was, making herself comfortable on the water bed and wiggling her eyebrows suggestively at Sara.
Ms. Daphne clapped his hands together. “For another three hundred I’ll leave the bed. Don’t worry, it’s very sturdy!” This offer seemed to, finally, break Irene. She began giggling uncontrollably, which made Sara start to giggle as they excused themselves and rushed out, nearly tripping down the stairs. The girls didn’t stop running until they were back in the park, winded. For just a moment it felt like nothing had changed at all.
“I could kill you!” Sara shouted, as Irene leaned against a low rock wall for support. “He… was this close to getting us in the bed!”
Irene was practically crying, she was laughing so hard. Then she leaned over the wall and threw up what looked and smelled like a grapefruit that she’d had for breakfast. Sara rushed off to a nearby kebab truck for napkins. When she got back, Irene was cleaning herself with a fistful of snow she’d scraped off the wall. They each caught their breath.
Finally, Irene stood and threw one arm around Sara. “Totally worth it,” she declared.
• • •
Sometimes Sara called George without even realizing, on afternoons like that one when she was wandering through Times Square on her way back to the office after a late lunch. She just found her phone against her ear, ringing. Then when George picked up, she didn’t know what to say.
“What’s up, buttercup?” he asked brightly from the other end of the phone. In the background she could hear Allen playing a loud video game, blowing up aliens with rocket launchers. “Could you turn that down?” she heard George say.
“We’re taking Irene to France. I’ve decided.”
George laughed. “Did you also decide to rob a bank, because—”
“No,” Sara said. “I’m going to pay for it. I’ll call my mother after work and tell her I’m taking it out of my grandfather’s money.”
This was what she called it to George, and even to herself, though it wasn’t really her grandfather’s anymore and hadn’t been since she was fifteen and his great decline had begun. Slowly he had lost the ability to form cogent sentences, to walk, to lift a spoon to his mouth. Sara’s mother had set up the pool house for him and his nurse, and at night she’d sometimes heard him howling out there. Her parents and sisters never talked about it, then or now. Then one day Sara had come home from school to find a note on the refrigerator saying that they’d all be going to his funeral on Saturday. She had tried to tell George all of this, but he didn’t really understand. How could he? And so now it was just she who knew firsthand what happened when the human body began to come apart at the seams. Who knew there wasn’t time to waste. That illness cared nothing about money or fairness or the things you planned to do later.
George hummed over the phone. “You think Irene’s going to be comfortable with that?”
“People have done worse things to other people than buy them trips to France.”
He laughed and didn’t take it further. “Hey, did we ever think about the New York Public Library for the wedding?”
“They’re booked solid.” Sara was hovering under the low blue marquee for the Letterman show, a block from her office.
“For when?”
“Forever.”
“How about Disney World?” George offered.
“Don’t say that unless you’re serious.”
“I’m not serious.”
“Because you can’t joke with a girl about getting married in Cinderella’s castle, mister.”
“I’m not serious! I’m not serious!” George shouted.
“You can get the character of your choice to officiate.”
George thought a second. “I want Quasimodo then.”
“You would.”
“Hey, next to Quasimodo I’m going to look good.”
“You always look good,” Sara said, leaning into the receiver as if she could kiss him through the mouthpiece. The smell of the pizza at Angelo’s filled her nostrils as a street sweeper swarmed by, picking up the torn ticket stubs and the spilled salads of the afternoon’s tourists; the shows would be opening in only a few hours, but the sidewalks were already teeming with high school classes and church groups and seniors who’d been bused in from New Jersey. They were all clinging tightly to one another, looking overwhelmed, scared to walk too far in any direction. Everyone kept checking phones and wristwatches. How much time before dinner? Let’s not be late. How long will that line take? How many blocks is it? Let’s just stay here and stare at the American Eagle billboard. I heart New York.
“Gotta run,” George said. “Cokonis is calling on the other line.”
“See you at the end of time,” she said.
• • •
Back in the office she killed an hour Googling “osteosarcoma causes.” She always came up with nothing, even after going up to the thirty-eighth page of hits. She was amazed how many different ways there seemed to be to say it: unknown. Does not have a concrete cause. Little is known about the etiology. The causes are not known. Scientists have not found the exact causes. The cause is not yet established. There are no known or apparent causes. One time she found, “While the causes are still unclear, doctors believe that his type of cancer starts with a DNA error in the body’s cells.” She’d thought she was on to something until she looked up “DNA error” and was met again with unknown. The causes are not known. Etc., etc.