Page 88 of How to Walk Away

I glanced over at him. “It’s his job to fix me.”

“So?”

“So! A job is different.”

“That’s better?”

He was right there, listening, but I was hell-bent on making my point. “Yes! Because in less than three weeks, I will never see him again. He won’t think about me, he won’t worry about me, and he sure as hell won’t spend the rest of my life telling me to cheer up. He will feel a wash of relief as I roll out the door to go live my tragic life, and then he’ll be done.”

I was about to go on, but Ian stepped in closer. “That’s not true.”

Kitty and I both turned toward him. “What’s not true?” I asked.

“I will think about you after you’re gone. I expect I’ll think about you often.”

Was there more? Nope. A man of few words.

But just enough, as we stared at him, to stop the fight in its tracks.

“Want some Moroccan tagine?” Kitty asked after a bit, peeling the lid off a container and holding it out.

Ian said no.

“Maggie’s knitting a slug,” Kit said then. “Want to see?”

She got him to smile. I loved when he did that. “I’d love to see,” he said.

“Hey,” I said to Kit, “don’t—”

“Shh.”Kit held her finger out. “For a scarf, it’s terrible. For a knitted slug, it’s divine. Just go with ‘slug’ and be proud.” She thrust it at Ian.

He held it for a second, looked back and forth between us, and then said, “That’s a fine knitted slug.”

Kit turned to me. “Doeseverythingsound sexy in Scottish?” Then, back to Ian, “If you were a kid at the craft fair, wouldn’t you love to see that?”

He looked up. “The craft fair?”

“Yeah, they’re holding one for the kids, but Cranky McCrankypants doesn’t want to volunteer.”

I gave Kitty a look.

But I did have to give her credit. He seemed to like it when she teased me. His eyes crinkled up at the edges in an expression that was almost warm. And then, like just a normal, friendly, healthcare professional, he shook his head all wryly and said, “Now you make me think of my mother.”

Kit and I both frowned. “Your mother?”

“She always said, ‘When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for someone else.’”

***

WE WENT TOthe fair. What choice did we have? Neither of us had the guts to disobey Ian’s mother.

The fair turned out to be the most fun I’d had since my incarceration.

There, surrounded by kids of every variety, I felt more relaxed than I had been in all these weeks. In the rehab gym, the focus was on how we could fix what was broken about me. In my room, I was, well, in a hospital room. But in this rec room in the children’s wing, it was just bright colors and helium balloons and yarn animals and sing-alongs and face painting. Noisy? Yes. Chaotic? Totally. As I sat at my finger-knitting station with Kit, teaching kids what to do when they came up, and chatting with Kit in between, I felt noticeably peaceful.

“These are your people,” Kitty said.

“They do seem to get me,” I said.

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