The Spare They Came Begging For novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Clearance

"A kitchen," I repeated.

"A kitchen."

"Whose kitchen?"

"You'll see when you're cleared." He pulled out into traffic. "I'm not saying another word. I'm going to talk to this red light instead."

He talked to every red light from Pemberton Square to Savin Hill.

He didn't say another word about the kitchen for seventeen days.

I was cleared on a Friday, the twentieth of February, six weeks to the day.

The partner saw me in his clinic at Harbor at four o'clock.

He pressed on my belly and my side and looked at my scars, the three small ones on the left and the longer one low across my stomach.

They were pink and flat and closing fine.

"Your numbers are perfect," he said, in his quiet voice. "Your remaining kidney is doing the work of two. You can go back to your unit on Monday."

"And everything else?"

He looked at me over his glasses.

"Everything else," he said, "is also cleared."

He signed the form.

I went downstairs and found Conor in the cafeteria, pretending to read a journal.

I put the form face up on top of it.

He read it twice.

He looked up at me, and his whole big face went pink to the ears.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Kitchen."

He drove me home to Savin Hill.

He didn't park in front of Moira's.

He parked one house down, in front of the triple-decker next door.

It had been empty since October.

The old woman who'd lived on the first floor for fifty years had died in the fall, and her son in Florida had put a FOR SALE sign on the little patch of lawn.

Moira had the key because she'd watered the old woman's plants.

Conor had borrowed it.

"You're breaking into a house," I said.

"I'm viewing a property. With permission. Moira's permission."

"Moira doesn't own it."

"Moira owns this whole street spiritually."

He unlocked the front door.

The first floor was cold and dim and smelled like dust and old radiator paint.

There was no furniture, just pale squares on the wallpaper where pictures had hung.

He took me through to the back.

The kitchen was big and old, with a cracked linoleum floor and a deep white sink under a window.

The window looked out over the backyards, down the hill, all the way to the water.

The last of the light was going pink over the harbor.

"That's it," he said. "That's the kitchen."

I stood in the middle of it with my coat on.

"It needs a lot of work."

"It does."

"The floor's coming up in the corner."

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