What We Choose novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Chair Fourteen

The text came the night before my first chemo.

This is Colter Gannon. You're listed as Nash's emergency contact in our HR file. I'm sorry for using it. I'd like to talk to you, if you're willing.

I read it on Kenna's pullout couch with an ice pack on my new port.

They'd put it in on Thursday. A little plastic bump under the skin below my right collarbone, with a tube that ran into a vein near my heart.

It looked like a bottle cap someone had shoved under me.

I typed back.

Tomorrow I'm in chair fourteen at the cancer center from nine to one. If you want to talk, that's where I'll be.

I figured that would end it.

He wrote back in under a minute.

I'll be there.

He was.

At nine forty, while a nurse was flushing my port and telling me I'd feel a cold taste in my mouth, Colter Gannon walked into the infusion room in jeans and a flannel shirt.

He looked too big for it.

The whole room was recliners and IV poles and quiet people under blankets, and he came in.

He was carrying a paper bag.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"They said I could sit here." He pointed at the plastic chair beside my recliner.

"That's what it's for."

He sat. The chair complained.

The nurse looked him over, then looked at me, and raised one eyebrow.

"Friend?"

"Colleague's husband," I said.

She took that in stride. She'd probably heard worse in this room.

The cold taste came.

Then the drip started.

Colter watched the bag on the pole.

"Does it hurt?"

"Not yet. Ask me in three weeks."

He nodded, and opened the paper bag.

"I didn't know what you're allowed to eat. So." He set things on my tray one at a time. "Saltines. Ginger ale. Those orange peanut butter crackers. A banana."

"Very balanced."

"And these." He held up a pair of fuzzy socks covered in cartoon hot dogs. "The gift shop downstairs had them or ones with sharks."

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