Sharon eyes her as if Miranda might be putting her on. “Really? Is that true?”
Miranda nods, then finishes with her nose. Well, she finishes for this five minutes anyway. It keeps refilling at an alarming pace. It’s also tender and red, the skin painful to the touch, as if someone had gone after her nose with a scouring pad
“It’s true. They’re huge. I saw a scan of them once.”
“Really?” Sharon repeats, realizing she isn’t being made the butt of a joke. “I didn’t know sinuses came in different sizes.”
Bouncing a little across the bed, Miranda reaches for her bedside table drawer, pushes around the detritus that always collects there, then pulls out a tube of lip balm. As she dabs some around her nose, which only serves to make the redness shiny and even redder, she says, “They do! I kept having terrible toothaches when my sinuses acted up, so they scanned my head. Turns out the roots of my two biggest molars actually went all the way up into my sinuses.”
Sharon makes a face. “Your teeth are hooked up to your nose? I’m not sure whether I should be impressed or disgusted.”
“Disgusted,” Miranda says with certainty. “Definitely disgusted.”
Eyeing her a little, Sharon asks, “Does that mean snot is draining into your mouth?”
It’s Miranda’s turn to make a face. “Gross. No, not anymore anyway. I had those two teeth pulled. Now, I’ve got two lovely implants there and a nice wad of artificial bone closing the holes. All fixed.”
“Really?” Sharon has begun to sound like a broken record or a song stuck on repeat.
“Hand to God. Absolutely true.”
“I’m discovering the most disturbing things about you today.”
Miranda winks, then settles herself back under the duvet and adjusts her pillows. When she’s as comfortable as she’s likely to get, she holds out her hands and wiggles her fingers. “Give me that lovely soup you brought me.”
Smiling, Sharon carefully hands over the paper take-away container. She’d wrapped it in a clean washcloth so she could carry it. Paper is environmentally friendly but has no insulating capacity at all. She’d almost dropped it leaving the shop and had to hurriedly wad up a few napkins to get to the car.
“It’s hot. Use the washcloth or you’ll be wearing it.”
Miranda tries to sniff at the soup, but all that produces is a small squeak from her already filling sinuses. She makes a rueful face.
Passing Miranda a spoon, Sharon says, “Trust me, it smells delicious.”
After she slurps up one careful spoonful, Miranda sighs deeply. “Oh, that is lovely. Thank you.”
Her friend waves off the thanks and a teasing look crosses her features. “You know something? You’re starting to sound like us. You’ve been in London long enough to lose some of that American rudeness.”
The spoon stops on the way her to her lips. “What? I always say thank you. Americans love to say thank you.”
Sharon laughs. “No, I mean you called the soup lovely. Twice.”
“I did?”
Still smiling, Sharon nods. “You did.”
With a tiny shrug not big enough to disturb her soup, Miranda replies, “Ah well. I’ll have to stay on top of that. Girls can be lovely. Dresses can be lovely. Puppies and kittens can sometimes be lovely. But soup?”
Patting Miranda’s leg, Sharon gets up from the bed and looks around the room. It’s grown cluttered and untidy as the days of sickness piled on. “Well, lovely or not, you should eat it. And stay in bed. I’ll tidy up a bit so you can be more comfortable.”
“No, don’t do that. I’d feel awful if you did.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sharon says, bending to gather the discarded nightgowns piled onto and around a chair. “Medicine may not have discovered the reasons for it yet, but it’s a known fact that an orderly room is good for the convalescing patient.”
“You make it sound like I’m dying.”
“No, but you do look dreadful.”
“Thanks for the editorial.”
“What’s that thing you said? About Americans and rudeness?”
“We’re not rude, just direct.”
“Well, there you are. Perhaps you’re rubbing some of that colonist stink off on me. I was merely being very direct.”
Miranda sips another spoonful of broth, then considers taking a bite of the chunks of chicken and vegetables that have settled to the bottom. Not yet. Her tummy feels a little queasy. She suspects it’s the decongestants that don’t seem to be working as well as television commercials suggest.
“Well, a little less directness might make me feel better,” Miranda says. Sharon brings an armful of dirty things from the en suite bathroom and drops them into the basket on the floor. “Honestly, you don’t need to do that, Sharon. I feel bad about you handling my dirty laundry.”
With a little snort, Sharon picks up the basket filled with dirty clothes and leaves the room. The sound of the washing machine in the downstairs kitchen begins a few moments later. Miranda can’t help wrinkling her nose at that.
In some ways, she’ll always be an American. One of those ways involves the clothes washer. There’s something vaguely unsanitary about having dirty clothes in the kitchen, even if only briefly. And there’s definitely something wrong with having clean clothes come out of the washer when there’s food cooking.
One more year. That’s all she has left at her posting here. One more year and then back to New York. Or maybe not. Perhaps she’ll be sent somewhere else.
Or maybe she’ll stay here. Miranda has spent her adult life on the move, so the idea of settling down anywhere makes her a little twitchy. Yet, something has changed in the two years since being transferred to her company’s London office. She’s made friends she doesn’t think of as disposable and a life she doesn’t treat as a temporary break. It crept up on her before she understood what was happening.
She has a friend like Sharon, who even now rattles dishes in her kitchen, a friend who would spend a big part of her day off cleaning Miranda’s home, probably also absorbing germs that will make her sick later.
