Chapter 14: Family Meeting

The transplant center at the Cleveland Clinic has a waiting room with fish tanks and eleven kinds of hand sanitizer.

My mother sat in a wheelchair beside the biggest tank, in her green headscarf, with her purse in her lap.

"I've never liked fish," she said. "They look at you like they know what you owe."

"Mom."

"Ewan, don't sit on my left. That's my good side."

Ewan sat on her right.

He had put on a clean button-down and a jacket that wasn't a chef's, and he kept tugging the left sleeve down over his wrist.

The coordinator came for us at ten.

She was a brisk woman in a lanyard.

She led us into a small office with a round table and a box of tissues in the exact center.

I noticed the tissues.

I decided not to look at them.

"Mrs. Hubbard," she said. "I'd like to explain what we've found, and I'd like to explain it to you first."

"Good," said my mother. "Everyone else can hush."

"Mr. Carberry's kidney isn't a match for yours."

"But it's a match for a stranger who needs one."

"That stranger has a donor of her own, who isn't a match for her."

"And hers is a match for me," said my mother.

"Not hers. Hers goes to someone else. The chain runs through four hospitals and ends with a kidney for you."

My mother's eyes went to Ewan.

"Four hospitals," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You'll be giving a kidney to a stranger, and I'll get one from a stranger, and neither of us will ever know who."

"That's how it works," said Ewan.

"Why on earth would you do that?"

He opened his mouth and shut it.

I'd learned that look.

It was the look he got when the true thing was too big for the room.

"Because you held my grandfather's hand when he died," he said finally.

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