Chapter 4: Six Hours in the Chair

"It won't take a week, Mom," I said through the bathroom door. "Go home. Sit down. I'll call you after my infusion."

I heard her breathe in and out on the other side of the wood.

Then her slippers went away across the kitchen, and the back door shut.

Roe did not say anything.

He just reached out of the cooling water and turned off the tap with his foot.

By Monday morning I could stand again, as long as I held the counter.

The infusion center in La Crosse is forty minutes from Pike Hollow.

Roe drove it with one hand on the wheel and the other on my knee.

He did not talk.

I loved him a little for that, and I was surprised by it.

The center is a long room with eight reclining chairs and a window onto a parking structure.

The infusion nurse knew me.

She had taken care of me for four years, and she called me "my girl."

She hooked the line into the inside of my elbow without looking.

"Who's this?" she said, with a nod at the man folding himself into the plastic visitor chair.

"Roe," I said. "He's mine."

It came out of my mouth before I could think.

Roe's ears went red.

"I'm Elke's boyfriend," he told the nurse, though neither of us had used that word.

"Mate" is what we say at home.

The nurse beamed at him.

"Good. She needs somebody who can stand six hours of me."

"I can stand it," Roe said.

The first hour I slept.

When I woke the bag on the pole was half empty.

Roe was reading the pamphlet about my medication with a pen in his hand, underlining.

He had a yellow notepad on his knee.

I read the top line upside down.

*Fever over 100.4: call. Flare signs: heavy legs, can't rise from chair, swelling in knuckles. Steroid mood. Get her salt.*

My throat closed.

"You don't have to learn all that."

"Yes, I do."

"It's the same speech every time. It's boring."

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