Free Darling? by Heidi Jon Schmidt Page B

something you might do for a three-year-old, but he was trying to please her, so she kept laughing.
    “Will they grow?” she couldn’t help but ask.
    “Some flowers do better in poor soil,” he told her. “Portulacas, nasturtiums … the less they have, the more they bloom. You can eat the nasturtiums, they’re peppery—want to try one?”
    This seemed like taking candy from a stranger, and she shook her head but could hardly croak out the no —wouldn’t it be madness when someone was kind to you, to turn him away? He folded the flower and pushed it into her half-open mouth with a finger. It felt like velvet and tasted like perfume, but she chewed and swallowed it and smiled at him, thinking she might absorb something of him this way.
    “Here,” he said, picking three more—“Take some home. They’re good in a salad, too.”
    *   *   *
    Mama was sitting on her bed, holding a finger-stick blood-sample kit and crying.
    “Where were you?” she asked. She had that awful, familiar expression; the smallest thing could send her spiraling down—she was frightened, heartbroken, suspicious, and she needed to account for these feelings, to find some way to explain them. When she was mad even Casper felt it—now he lay with his chin on the rug, looking balefully up at Lanie as if he blamed her, too.
    “At the pharmacy.”
    “For forty-five minutes?”
    “I stayed after school to jump rope with Arlita and Sylvie.… We lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”
    “No you’re not, you’re not sorry!” Mama said. “You don’t care—you’re having a good time with your friends and you don’t care, that’s all. And I’m here all alone, and I can’t, I can’t…” She held the lancet poised over her finger but couldn’t bring herself to stab it.
    “Here, let me,” Lanie said. “I’m good at this, Ma, remember?” She took the hand tight so Mama couldn’t squirm away, and pricked it, caught the welling drop, folded the poor finger gently back into the hand. Why it had to be, that someone who so feared the needle should have diabetes … The Greeks would have thought it a punishment, and Mama let out a wild sob as if Lanie were Nemesis herself.
    “It’s way up, Ma,” she said, going for the insulin.
    “I try so hard, Lanie,” Mama said. This was the cruellest thing—she seemed to think Lane had the power to cure her, that if only she was good enough Lanie would take the curse away. Thank God for the needle gun—they’d got it with the Medicaid. It went so fast, at first Mama said it was painless, though after a few months she’d seemed to feel the shots again even worse than before.
    “Arm or leg?” Lanie asked.
    “Leg,” her mother said, resigning herself. Lanie grabbed her thigh hard to squeeze out the feeling, pressed the gun to the skin, pulled the trigger. Nothing ever sounded so fast, so certain as that needle. She didn’t suppose she would mind it as Ma did—she was not going to mind things, she was going to live a bold life. When she went for a shot at school the nurses always said how brave she was. And when the others mocked her she turned her face away—they were young, that was all, they didn’t know who they were talking to. Let them laugh—Uncle Bud knew people at NBC, he was going to get her a screen test for the soaps. The image of herself, dirty, her ear sticking out through her lank hair, pushed itself into her mind, but she slammed the door on it. They would soon be enlightened, her classmates, the people who should have been her friends—she would be leaving the likes of them behind.
    The ordeal over, Mama relaxed a little, though she was still wary. “I did go out,” she said, defending herself against the unspoken complaint. “I got you something … but now I suppose you had a snack on the way home.”
    There, set out on the table with a glass of milk, was a cupcake with an inch of sugar frosting piped out to look like pink and yellow roses. The note