Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In retrospect, Babe probably should have suspected something when Renee comes to bed in her winter pajamas, despite it being May.

The thing is, the winter pajamas are real cute. They give off a Christopher Robin kind of impression, over-big pant legs that pool at the feet and big floppy sleeves from a robe top that kind of swamps her all over. They’re sort of silky, too, one of those fabrics that isn’t silk but is doing a good job pretending to be it. So what if it’s supposed to be eighty degrees tonight, and he and Gene have opted for the minimum possible coverage in clothing? So nothing! So women wear what they want to, and they look good in it, and you say thank you!

So, it doesn’t occur to him to say anything as she putters around the bedroom, except the usual “lookin’ good, Reenie,” which takes her by surprise and makes her grin.

“They’re old,” she says, in that demure tone that women get when you compliment one of their more at-home outfits, “I’ve been meaning to make some new ones for ages, but I keep talking myself out of buying more fabric when these still fit.”

“Well, I think they look great,” Babe says. “You coming to bed, or walking around all night?”

“In a minute,” she says, and starts puttering back out of the room, “I have to go brush my teeth.”

It doesn’t even really occur to Babe that something’s wrong when it starts obviously occurring to Gene. He’s sitting in bed, right, reading his book like a good boy whose girlfriend has shyly requested he try out Claudine At School and who does not want to disappoint her (and besides which is finding that it’s a book that’s very much on the same page as him, yowza), which means he’s not really paying attention when he hears the two of them chatting outside the bedroom door. It’s not closed, or anything, he definitely could pay attention, it’s just that Claudine is rescuing Anais’ letters from getting burned at the moment and there might be some choice smut in them, so he’s a little preoccupied with the stakes of the situation, so he doesn’t really take any note of Gene asking if she’s been drinking water.

“Soda water,” Renee says, “at dinner.”

“Well, get another glass for your side of the bed,” Gene says, as Babe shakes his head in disappointment at the total lack of Anais’ imagination, “I don’t like the sound of that cough.”

“I never wake up to drink water at night,” Renee tells him, “I’ll only make a mess, I’m sure I’ll knock it over.”

“Just this once,” Gene says, “pour moi, huh?”

She sighs. “Oh-kay, oui,” she agrees, even Babe knows that. “Bonne nuit.”

Babe grins to himself as Renee goes out and Gene comes in. He’s picking up more and more of it these days, little bits and bobs of French that are actually turning into words, kind of, in his brain. Often, it’s still French-French-French, especially when they start really going at speed, but he knows a couple more things. The ‘hellos’ and ‘good-byes’ and things like that are becoming a part of the air in the apartment, a sound that’s there whether he notices it or not and doesn’t really call any attention to itself. It’s not that he’s learning it, mind you—it’s just there, and the usual stuff is starting to mean something, whether someone told him what it was or not.

“Lookin’ good, Genie,” he says, practically on instinct, as Gene sits on his side of the bed and tugs his shirt off. He gets a grin over the shoulder for his trouble.

“Talk all you want,” Gene says, “I’m still going straight to sleep, I’m up at six tomorrow.”

The bed was probably the biggest adjustment when they moved to a new apartment. You wouldn’t think it would be the biggest adjustment, given that they’d been shacking up and sleeping it off in a pile a couple nights a week for the better part of two years, and that in much smaller beds. But it turns out there’s no part of cohabitation that comes easy, and figuring out who’s going to sleep in the middle is surprisingly hard. Who wants to volunteer to always be hot, be in bed first and out of bed last, and to just hold it if he wakes up in the middle of the night needing to piss?

They’d all taken their turns, and they’d all had their own problems. Gene had seemed like the obvious choice, since he goes perfectly still when he sleeps and shivers through the winter without some additional body heat. But he gets up most nights—he’s done that since they got home from Europe in ‘46, and it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to stop—and gets out of bed, and has his Walk, which usually takes about twenty minutes. That’s just enough time for the person who let him up to fall back asleep, which means he’s got to wake them up when he gets back to bed, ready to get back in. 

Okay, maybe Babe should explain about the Walk. Not that there’s much to explain! It’s some kind of nervous habit, which Babe doesn’t mind, because if all Gene came back home with was a couple of nervous habits, he’ll keep thanking God until the day he dies. It’s not dangerous, and it’s not frightening. It’s barely even annoying.

He hasn’t always felt that way about it, of course—the first time he woke up, alone in bed, the sound of slow footsteps creeping down the hall, his mind had filled up pretty fast with an array of catastrophes that almost stopped his heart or unleashed his bladder.

But he’d gone out anyway, you know, in case there was an armed intruder who was trying to nick his everything away from him in the blink of an eye, and instead, he’d caught Gene out, startled and embarrassed in his pajamas and his coat, all the lights off and a pen flashlight gripped in his hand.

And when he’d asked what the hell Gene thought he was doing, I thought there was a burglar or something, Gene had sniffed and shrugged defensively and told him just to go back to bed, Heffron, don’t worry about it anymore. Why’d you have to go and get up anyway? You never got up before. And, like that, Babe had wanted to know what exactly they were doing up, and…

Well, it turns out there’s not much to it. Once a night, most nights, Gene gets up, and bundles up, and takes his little penlight to see with, and walks through every room of their home. He checks the windows and the doors while he’s there, but really, he just seems to be checking on the rooms. Making sure everything’s where it’s supposed to be. He walks slowly, and silently, and with a determinism that borders on devoutness, performing some ritual or responsibility beyond Babe’s ken. He looks at every room, at every corner, and goes in a particular route so that he never spends more time in one room than in any other. And at the end of it, he takes his coat (or robe, if it’s summer and the coats are all packed away somewhere) off and hangs it up, and crawls back into bed, and falls asleep in less than two minutes, apparently totally at peace.

“Why do you do it?” Babe had asked once, when Gene was tucking himself back in, and he’d gotten a strange look back in return.

“I don’t know,” Gene had replied. “I have to, I guess. Don’t remember how not to. Can’t sleep until it’s done.”

And then, well, 1950 had come along, and their bed situation had gotten shuffled up a bit, and for a while, they’d had a bit of a reprieve—Gene basically didn’t get up for the Walk any time Renee was in bed with them. And so, maybe, Babe had kind of figured that she was some sort of medicine, that if she moved in for real, Gene could start sleeping through the night on the regular again.

But that would be good luck, something the two of them never had much of to begin with, and they probably exhausted a five-year supply just by getting to keep her. It had come as something of a shock the first time Gene had grabbed him by the shoulder and shaken him awake at two in the morning, panicked because he couldn’t crawl over either of them and he needed to get up, right now, and Renee had come awake at that, and… 

Oh, but that hadn’t been so bad. She’d understood, when Babe explained, just like she always seems to understand everything, when you give her the time and the patience to. And she’d offered to take the middle of the bed that night, to let Gene get up and come back undisturbed when he needed to.

She’d never followed the same impulse Babe had, to climb out of bed and mince around tentatively behind him, watching Gene at a distance to make sure—well, just to make sure. She’d just shrugged when Babe asked her, you know, doesn’t it bother you, don’t you worry?, shrugged and settled in. “It’s his floor circuit, not mine,” she’d said, “I expect I’ll be the same way when I retire.”

Of course… Renee in the middle, that hadn’t worked either. Babe shuts his book and shifts slightly to let Gene settle against him, and thinks about ‘being up at six tomorrow’ as a reason to pass on sex at not-quite eleven in the evening. ‘Up at six’ is a strain on both Gene and Babe, a kind of just-too-early reality that gives you a gritty feeling on your teeth. Babe has spent much of his life after the war making sure that he never has to get out of bed a minute before seven-fifteen, and even that feels like the real early edge of his consciousness. You know how it is—the Babe Heffron who wakes up before seven is plucked too early, before peak ripeness, and he can’t develop off the vine as he ought to.

Gene does contract work, which means sometimes he does just live in an unfortunate reality where ‘up at six’ happens. As anyone really good and decent does, he avoids making this Babe’s problem where possible, and does the classic ‘slipping out of bed and dressing in the dark’ song and dance. And if Babe wakes up a little bit, which he does now and then, not from any noise or rustling but from the absence of the familiar warm body beside him, they both just pretend not to notice it. And Babe can lie there in the dark, eyes half-lidded, watching the silhouette of his husband move, stripping and dressing, in that place between waking and sleeping.

And then, critically, he can close his eyes and go right back to sleep, no harm, no foul. And it’s still a rarity, get that? But Renee…

Renee wakes up at six every single day. Doesn’t need an alarm clock or nothing. This is another thing their courtship in separate apartments had not really prepared Babe for, because when she stayed the night in the past, she made it a mission to lie in with them as long as she could, and to make the most of her time, and… you know what, actually, this isn’t really relevant, and he hates to say certain things about polite women. Suffice to say, she was not hopping up out of bed to have coffee and shower and watch the sun rise any time she was at their place, or vice versa.

But there’s a difference between a date night and daily life, which becomes apparent when you move in together. And the first night they’d slept with Renee in the middle, Babe had not appreciated being shaken awake by her, quietly but urgently telling him he needed to get up. “It’s six fifteen,” she’d told him, “your alarm hasn’t gone off.”

“It won’t for another hour,” Babe had told her, groggy and bad-tempered and not in the mood to be perky, “what’s the big idea? Why don’t you roll over?”

“Because my shift starts in forty-five minutes, and I’m a fifteen minute walk away,” she’d said, also bad-tempered and apparently surprised. “What do you mean, an hour?”

They also discovered, together, that Renee has never had to consider how to dress quietly in the dark, and that her idea of subtlety is to turn on a small light and make no real adjustment to her noise level. Some old dogs can learn new tricks, but it turns out that moving quietly is just not one of the tricks that this dog can learn. 

But you compromise and you adjust, and they’ve got the little room they’d insisted on as a decoy, which is dressed up like a bedroom and mostly used for storage. Renee had the idea to keep her clothes and vanity in there, so she can change and do whatever a vanity is for, hair and makeup or something, at six in the morning, as loud as she wants. So, they mostly don’t get to see her strip (boo), but they do get to sleep quite soundly until seven or eight. You know, provided that she gets to sleep on the side of the bed. 

So, by process of elimination, it’s mostly Babe who ends up getting squished these days. He doesn’t mind too much—he’s got his own little reading light, so he can sit up if he wants to, reading his girlfriend-approved smut. Or, like now, he can settle in against his husband and see if there’s a handful somewhere for him.

Gene grunts and nudges him, which doesn’t persuade Babe to let go of his pectoral. “Six,” he mutters, “would you turn off the light, already?”

“When Reenie gets in,” Babe says, and kisses Gene’s neck unapologetically, feels his chest lift under his arm as he gasps. “How’s she supposed to make it to bed without a light, huh?”

“You can turn off the overhead one,” Gene says, turning his head to look back and falling into Babe’s trap, AKA: getting kissed immediately. He’s warm, and minty, because Babe has good timing about kissing post-toothbrushing, but he hums and pulls back before Babe can really get some groundwork in. “And you’d better hurry, because you’re close to being in trouble.”

“I’m always in trouble,” Babe says, grinning, and not moving even slightly to reach for the switch by the headboard that turns off the overhead light (a genius piece of furniture-arranging advice that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with Renee). “Maybe I like being in trouble.”

Gene grins at him, then glances at the door, where Renee is puttering back in. “There she is,” he says, “just in time to rescue me. You get that water?”

“Of course,” Renee says, sniffing. As if to demonstrate, she holds a tall glass of water just above the line of her head, looking to all the world like a statue of a general with a sword raised on horseback, except for the part that it’s not a cool saber, it’s a slightly foggy glass with a chip taken out of the bottom. “Je suis bien élevée, je fais ce qu'on me dit.”

Babe grins at her, mentally taking this apart as she shuffles over to her side of the bed, coughing into the sleeve of her robe. Je suis, he knows, bien he knows—I am a good something, good girl, maybe. The second half…

Well, she must be teasing Gene, because he laughs, says “alright, alright,” in that ‘leave me alone about it already’ tone he gets, “can you take this guy off my hands? He’s worked up about something.”

“Oh, about Claudine, I expect,” Renee says. Babe lifts the corner of the blankets on her side of the bed, and she crawls in quite easily. “Anyway, I do need him, I’m freezing.”

“Freezing?” Gene asks, frowning.

“The lady is freezing,” Babe tells him, and reaches over to pull her in, “and someone has got to do something about it! Say, what’s ‘say con may dee’ mean?”

Renee’s body doesn’t feel freezing, which is probably good. She seems mostly okay? She snuggles in real tight, though, and she’s shivering a little. This should be another clue for Babe, but he’s busy listening to her giggle and clear her throat.

“Je fais - ce qu’on - me dit,” she says, much more slowly for him, “I do as I’m told. You won’t need that much.”

“Of course I need it,” Babe says, and she laughs and reaches up for the light switch, “if I get caught, I gotta act indignant about my accusation somehow!”

Despite the evidence, Babe is still shocked, shocked, to be woken up just before six in the morning by a whispered conversation between his partners, who are clearly trying to argue without waking him up.

“It’s fine,” Renee is whispering, “it’s just a little cough, I’ve worked through much worse. I can wear a mask, like we did during the influenza.”

“You been up all night,” Gene is saying, “I don’t want to hear that it’s a little cough, I been hearing that cough. And you don’t feel right.”

“I feel fine,” she tells him, “I’m just warm because I’ve been in bed, I’ll be alright if you let me up to walk around a little.”

“Yeah, I bet that sweat’s normal, too,” Gene says. “Follow my finger, huh?”

“Oh, don’t do this,” she says, sighing. And then she starts coughing—real hard, actually, one of those wet racking coughs that just goes on longer than anybody wants to hear it. Babe grunts, coming fully into reality (despite his best efforts) and reaches over to pat her on the arm comfortingly.

“You drink all your water? Just nod,” Gene says. And then, “good. Stay here, I’m getting the thermometer. I’ll top you up.”

“I’m fine,” Renee says, but Gene is already moving through the dark room, and she sighs and collapses back onto her pillow. Babe gives her a rub on the shoulder.

“Good morning,” he says, “you sound like wet garbage.”

She clears her throat aggressively. “It’s nothing I haven’t had before,” she tells him, “it’s probably just hay fever and dehydration. Once I’m walking around, it’ll be fine.”

Babe hums encouragingly and takes a good look at her. He’s not a doctor, but it doesn’t look like hay fever—leastways, as far as he knows what hay fever looks like. It kind of looks like regular fever. You know, the kind that comes with a temperature and sweats and makes you kind of funny in the head.

Well, Renee doesn’t look like she’s funny in the head. But she looks real pale, and real damp. Makes you think.

“They give you sick days at the hospital?” Babe asks. “Paid, or anything?”

“I’ve never had to take a sick day,” Renee tells him, which isn’t really an answer to the question he asked, but she’s gearing up to be in a bad mood and is taking the Frustration Lane, where you’re allowed to go sixty, so he’s not going to get her arguing at this particular moment in time. “I can take an aspirin and an expectorant and wear a mask. It’s fine. It’s not like I can’t walk around.”

“Hm,” Babe says, as encouragingly as possible when he’s about to disagree with her. “You work at a hospital, though. Where coughing and sneezing may be discouraged, among staff.”

“I can wear a mask.”

“Hm,” Babe says again. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I was there, if I would want a sick nurse.”

“I’m not sick!” She snaps. “It’s hay fever. Anyway, I’m only coughing because I’m lying down,” she says, as though Babe will not notice her changing gears if she does it smoothly enough, “and the phlegm is irritating me. If I stand up–” she waves her hand– “no more cough. No big deal.”

“Uh-huh,” Babe says, and then looks to the door, where Gene is coming in with two full handfuls of stuff. He’s looking handsome and half-dressed (jeans, belt, undershirt, no proper top! Shoulders on display, thank you) and troubled. Kind of deeply stressed out, you know, in a cute way. “Hey, Genie, I’ve been informed that it’s hay fever, and this is a normal level of clammy for a woman to be.”

“I’m not clammy!”

“Okay, damp,” Babe amends. He gets elbowed for his trouble, but his point still stands.

Gene kneels by the bed, and Renee turns to give him a mournful look that he is completely ignoring in favor of wiping their thermometer down with an alcohol swab or something. Babe is remembering, belatedly, that any Easy man who was sick in the field but determined to stay on the front line would inevitably run into the reality check of a lifetime, vis: Doc Roe could out-stubborn a mule.

Actually, worse: Doc Roe could out-stubborn Joe Toye.

“Under your tongue,” he tells her, “sixty seconds.”

Renee says something in French that is, actually, too fast for Babe to parse, but it sounds quite sassy, if we’re just going by tone. She takes the thermometer and puts it in her own mouth, and turns to give Babe a defiant look, which would probably work if her eyes weren’t watering like poached eggs.

Babe sits up a little. “Well, I guess I’m awake now,” he says, “and I don’t want to be nearby when that number turns out to be prohibitive and the bombshell goes off. I’m gonna step out and use the phone.”

Renee groans a little in protest, but the reality is clearly starting to set in, and the fight is going out of her. Even as Babe gets himself upright and starts sliding out of bed, she’s rolling onto her back and settling back into her pillows. If she didn’t look so miserable, it would be kind of cute. Big winter pajamas, hair down in two braids, thermometer sticking straight up out of her mouth like a cartoon…

Which is nothing compared to the sound of Gene soothing her, which Babe can luckily enjoy even when he’s fumbling around in drawers looking for his drawers. “You’re doing good,” he’s murmuring, as Babe starts to kick his way into a pair of jeans, “I know, it sucks. You’re almost done.”

Renee hums irritably at him.

“Yeah,” Gene says, and takes the thermometer out of her mouth. “One-oh-two. You staying in.”

There’s a great uprising then, some real Sodom and Gomorrah shit, so Babe starts tucking his undershirt into his waistband and skedaddles out the door, pronto. No socks, no shirt, nothing he really oughta have if he’s gonna go stand in the hallway at the phone, where anyone can see him. But, you know, he’s got everything that he’s legally got to have on, plus a belt. He can’t be doing that bad.

He didn’t get a good answer to the ‘do you have sick days’ question, but: Renee had said ‘I’ve never had to take a sick day’, emphasis on a sick day, so Babe’s got a good feeling that she probably gets at least a few. And he knows the number for the hospital, and he doesn’t sound like he’s trying to cough up an entire driveway’s worth of gravel, so he might as well make the call for her while she argues—futilely!—with his husband.

“Hey, I’m calling on behalf of Renee Lemaire,” he tells the woman who answers the phone, “works the first shift on the third floor, can you transfer me to her manager?”

“Renee?” She asks. “What for?”

“She’s not feeling well,” he tells her, “running a pretty bad fever. She’s got to stay home, get some rest.”

“Oh, no,” the woman on the other side of the line says, with a lot more passion than anyone has ever had when Babe has called in sick on his own behalf at work, “that poor thing. I’ll get you transferred up—you tell her Denise is thinking about her, alright?”

“Uh, sure,” Babe says, awkwardly, “I’ll pass it on. Thanks.”

“And tell her to have soup.”

“You got it,” Babe says, “soup.”

Babe is kind of expecting the third floor manager to be a real Doctor Hardass reporting for duty, especially with the way Renee’s been chomping at the bit to get in to work, and is surprised (and, let’s be frank, a little disappointed) to find that he seems like a pretty average medical type. He’s extremely suspicious of Babe on the usual basic principles, i.e. Renee not being married, so who the hell is this clown (Babe’s words, not his), and how exactly is Babe the one reporting that a young, single woman is down for the count, and not “her roommates” (details pending)? He’s suddenly very grateful that he (the champion cahoots-er!) is the one navigating these waters, not Gene.

“We live on the same floor,” he says (which is technically true!), “she looked real rough, but she was trying to go to work anyway. Normally, I don’t tell any woman what to do, but she was swaying on the spot, sir, I thought I better say something before she collapsed on the stairs. Anyway, her roommate was still in, and, uh, helped get her back into bed.”

Obviously, Babe doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with a pretty, young, unmarried woman keeping herself a pair of even prettier, even younger, married men to liven up the apartment. Some women get crusty little white dogs—Renee got him and Gene. No problem.

But the world’s kind of got a different idea about women than Babe does. No one would think, even once, about giving Babe a slap on the wrist at work for having a lady live-in with him (even if they might give him a side-eye and a cold shoulder and whatever adjective you describe a hip with), but Renee could lose her job in an instant. They could hit her with some kinda morality clause, and whap! She’s on the pavement, looking for work somewhere else.

Now, are they likely to? That’s a more complicated question. Renee’s not a seamstress or a sales clerk, which works for and against her. A nurse has got special school and special training, which makes her harder to replace—but it means she’s under a lot more scrutiny. So, it comes down to the individual manager, what he’ll put up with, what he’ll turn a blind eye to.

In any conversation about her work, Renee has never expressed anything even passing for confidence in her manager. She doesn’t even let Babe walk her home, on the days when they get out at kind of the same time and it would be easy to just pick her up and stroll along together. If they want to walk back, they have to meet at the grocers on the way home, where people from work are less likely to see them and totally unable to prove anything. And Babe’s not a fink, so he’ll go along with whatever will keep her out of trouble, no problem.

Of course, if they were married, there would be no problem. If she had a husband she lived with—him, Gene, whoever—there wouln’t even be gossip. She’d live with her husband and His Old War Buddy, who was a Confirmed Bachelor and of no interest to anybody, just a friend she’d picked up by proximity. A lot of folks live like that—well, some folks live like that, and it never really pings as strange to anybody, does it? Living in a city is expensive, living with your friends is cheap, and it’s nice to have another set of hands around the house, and…

And no one’s really looking at you.

That’s not how Renee sees it, of course, which is why they argue about it. Argue’s a strong word. They disagree on it, when it comes up, and Babe has started to bring it up with a little more intent because come on, you only get to live the one life and if you don’t have to sneak around in green grocers’, you oughtn’t. He gets what she means, not wanting to not marry one of them, but that’s just legal stuff and it doesn’t matter any to him. As far as he’s concerned, she could marry the two of them tonight, and they could flip a coin on who had to do all the paperwork.

Okay, not tonight tonight. Because she’s maybe the sickest Babe’s ever seen her in the five years he’s known her, and she’s so damp, just generally. But you get the picture.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that she’s not feeling well,” Not Doctor Hardass is telling him, in the middle of his whole contemplative dreamscape and really kind of wrecking it with that scratchy telephone voice in his ear, “I’ll put her down for today. Let her know that she should call tomorrow if she needs any additional time, and I’ll see if any of the girls can pick up her rotation.”

“Yes, sir, no problem,” Babe tells him. “Does she have any kind of, uh, sick time? You know, so she can take a few days if she needs them?”

“Oh, I’d assume so,” he says, “I can’t remember her using any since we started working together, they get one a month.”

“One a month?”

“Well, one a month that’s paid,” Not Doctor Hardass tells him casually, as the gears in Babe’s brain grind to a halt, “and they do expire at the end of the year, so they can’t have more than twelve at a time. I’ll take a look. Just let her know to call me herself, alright?”

“Alright,” Babe says, “thanks, doc.”

“And tell her to have some soup.”

“Sure, I’ll tell her to have some soup.”

As Babe’s hanging the receiver up on its hook and doing some mental math, their apartment door down the hall opens, and Gene sticks his head out before the rest of his body follows suit. He’s pretty much dressed (boo), including chambray and work boots, and closes the gap between the two of them pretty quick.

“How’s she doin’, doc?” Babe asks. He slings an elbow over the top of the telephone, which is one of those old-fashioned wood box ones with an updated receiver. It’s pretty short, so even kids can kinda use it, which makes it short enough for even Babe to flex his mighty 5’9” on it. It’s stupid, but it makes Gene grin and blow air out through his nose, so he does it every time. 

“I got her back in bed,” Gene tells him. “Touch and go there for a minute, though. Every time I turn around, she hops back up.” He blows his cheeks out. “I think she needs someone to keep an eye on her, I’m… well, I don’t know if she’s all there. Seems pretty out of it.”

“She seemed okay when I saw her.”

Gene shrugs and sighs. “I just don’t feel right about leaving her on her own,” he says. “My site doesn’t have a telephone line installed, so I got to get down there and tell them. Think you can stay an hour?”

Babe checks his watch. “Sure, I don’t need to be anywhere until nine,” he says. “But… look, if you’re gonna walk all that way, you might as well stay. I can call off.”

Gene hesitates, and gives him a skeptical look. “You sure?” He asks, and, well, no, of course Babe isn’t sure he’d like to lose a day of pay and have it down on his record that he’s missed his third shift this year. But…

Well, he’s thinking about Gene walking thirty minutes down to the site in the hot spring air just to call off to his team’s face, telling half of them or all of them that nobody’s getting paid that day because he can’t be there to direct them or talk with the client. All of them on contract, depending on that end-of-day pay that suddenly won’t be coming. And then him trudging all the way back, sweating through his shirt, so he can help a woman he can’t even explain to them is his wife to throw up in a mixing bowl or something.

And having to do the medical stuff that he never admits he hates, like one long bad memory he just has to survive. Taking temps, fighting with patients… Babe’s seen it a couple times, the agitation, the way it creeps up on him. He gets back into that place whenever Babe gets sick, dotes and manages and bullies him a little, and gets quiet, and doesn’t sleep well.

So… yeah, he’s done his time. Babe’s not gonna add to it.

“Would I have offered if I wasn’t sure?” He asks airily. “They can’t fire me for calling off, I got my union card and I know what I’m worth. Anyway, they got a telephone, and it means I don’t got to get dressed.”

Gene gives him one of those penetrating looks, which used to make Babe confess instantly, or at least look away in embarrassment, but now kind of just charms him. “Alright,” he says after a minute, “well… I’ll go, then. If you sure.”

He hesitates a little, and Babe realizes that they both want to kiss each other goodbye, as usual, but can’t, because they’re in the hallway. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, and waves a hand instead, “get out of here.”

Babe’s mood has not significantly improved by the time he gets back into the apartment, and has in fact only deteriorated through a typically antagonistic chat with his direct supervisor, which means he’s not likely to keep the lid on it when he kicks the door shut and hears Renee moving around in the kitchen. 

“What the hell,” he snaps in her general direction, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, good, you’re home,” Renee replies, a little too lightly. Unlike the old apartment, their new place does not open directly into the kitchen, so Babe has to make his way around the living room to get a look at her. From here, he can just hear things banging around, like she’s moving at a particularly incompetent bustling pace. “I didn’t know when you’d be back, so I just went ahead and started some coffee. You don’t mind if I have some coffee?”

“Of course I mind,” Babe says, and rounds the corner of the doorway so he can cross his arms at her and look real grouchy and serious. “Gene told me he put you to bed, what the hell are you doing up?”

“Oh, that was ages ago,” Renee says, waving her hand, “he was so sweet, but I’m really feeling much better, so I think I’ll go in after all.”

Babe takes a second to get his first proper look at her. There’s a lot going on, which means it takes several full seconds to take it all in. Number one: she is still so sweaty. All of her typical flyaways are sticking to her forehead or her neck, the way they do in the dead humid heat of summer, when you never want to move around doing anything. Number two: she has put on makeup, which, combined with number one, means there is a ton of black stuff sitting in the crease under her eyes in a way he typically associates with a massive hangover. Maybe there is other makeup somewhere else on her face! But he is noticing the hangover-look.

Number three: she is in her work uniform (absolutely insane), which is inside out, and a cardigan, which is buttoned wrong and hanging lopsidedly across her chest with the hem sticking out on one side. This seems like bad news, especially combined with number four: she has walked into the counter about three times in the time he’s been watching her, like she’s not actually totally sure where it is.

Number five, “you are certifiable if you think you’re going anywhere like that,” Babe says out loud. “I just called in for you, and your floor manager says you need to drink soup.”

“I don’t want soup,” Renee says, and tries to pour herself a mug of coffee. She spills it all over the countertop in the process, but doesn’t react, as though she hasn’t noticed that she’s making a huge mess. “Anyway, I have to do what he tells me to when I’m on the clock, so of course I will not do what he asks me to when I’m on my own time. You ought to know that, you being a union man.”

“Uh-huh,” Babe says. His frustration is still present, obviously, but it’s filtering through a new reality and is cooling rapidly into an educated concern. There is now spilled coffee on Renee’s cardigan, which she has not noticed. It seems like there’s a lot that she’s not noticing. “You know, I just signed my union card, it’s not like I was out there marching when the boys were trying to get it. Anyway, if you won’t have soup for the boss, you should at least have it for, uh… for Dierdre, or somebody. She says you should have soup, too.”

“Dierdre?”

“Uh,” Babe says, his face wrinkling under the effort of concentration, “Denise, sorry. I think it was Denise. She says you need soup.”

“Oh, Denise,” Renee says, softening slightly, and has a sip of her coffee. The whole mug is a bit damp from her spilling it earlier, and something drips onto her blouse from the bottom rim. “She’s very sweet to worry. Why does she think I need soup?”

Babe decides it’s time to make his move, since her guard is down and he’s sure she’s properly listening to him as best as she can. “Because,” he tells her, and swoops forward to grab her by the shoulders before she can make a run for it, “I informed her that you are spending the rest of the day in bed, because you are deliriously sick and in no condition to do anything else. Come on,” he adds, as he starts to physically manhandle her back along the hall, “quit fighting me! You can’t treat me like this, I got a union card.”

Renee yelps, as though she’s being properly dragged around instead of being gently (but firmly) pushed. “You can’t do this to me,” she snaps, “I’m a grown person, like anyone else! Let go!”

“I am starting to feel like that fella who got turned into a tree,” Babe muses out loud, while Renee ineffectually struggles in his hands, “who wanted water or something, but couldn’t reach to get it, on account of him being a tree. Except instead of water, it’s a little bit of peace!”

“Tantalus,” Renee mutters. “Oh, you made me spill my coffee.”

“No, you spilled coffee on yourself,” Babe informs her, “several times, while I watched. And now, you are going to change–”

“Of course I’m going to change,” Renee snaps, “because you made me spill! Oh, and I like this cardigan, my sister made me this cardigan…”

“You are going to change into some pajamas,” Babe clarifies, as they re-enter the bedroom, “and I will wash your cardigan for you, while you stay in bed!”

“Oh, but I can’t,” Renee says, “because–”

“I called off for you,” Babe interrupts, “you understand? You are not going in. No one is expecting you. They are going to pay you to stay home, so you can get better, got it? You know,” he adds, pushing her gently but with the firmness of real frustration down onto the mattress, “I was not expecting you to be such a problem patient! When Gene gets sick, he’s pretty well-behaved. Takes his medicine, and like that.”

Renee scowls at him, which he ignores in favor of kneeling on the floor beside the bed where she’s sitting. He has learned, in the past several minutes, not to trust her with an inch, so he’s going to take her shoes off for her, and hold her by the ankle in case she decides to kick. “I was going to say that I can’t change into those pajamas,” she tells him churlishly. Babe loves this word: churlish. He’s learned it recently, and some dusty part of his brain is delighted by the opportunity to use it, on account of his girlfriend being fucking churlish at him. “They’re winter pajamas, and it’s much too hot, I’m terribly hot. Why did you let me wear them last night?”

“Because you had a fever,” Babe informs her, reaching up her skirt for her garters and not finding them. She must have forgotten to secure her stockings. Now that he looks, they are sitting funny, wrinkling and sagging on the thigh. He starts tugging them down. “You were freezing cold and shivering, and you were complaining about it, and usually when you complain, I just give you whatever you want. Serves me right.”

She blows her cheeks out and runs a hand over her forehead. “I’m certain that’s why I had a temperature,” she tells him, “if you took it again, now–”

“It would be hot from your coffee,” Babe says, though his bad mood is running away from the sheer absurdity of just how crabby she is. “Or from you putting on your uniform, or from the exercise I just gave you by forcing you—practically at gunpoint!—to sprint back in here. Look, have a heart, would you? Gene’s at work, and he told me to keep an eye on you, and it’s my first full shift nursing, and I’ll get in trouble if it doesn’t go well. Would you just behave, please?”

Renee sets the mug of coffee down on the bedside table, where it immediately begins pooling, and sighs heavily, and sprawls backwards across the unmade bed. “It’s too hot,” she whines miserably, as he strips her stockings off, “and my bra is too tight, and I’m not comfortable, and–”

“Alright, alright,” he tells her, and rubs her leg through her skirt. “Settle down for a minute, I’ll get you out of all of it, alright?”

It all goes pretty quick, once the fight has gone out of her. Babe’s a certified pervert, graduated top of his class and good about getting all his paperwork renewed every four years on the regular, so he knows how to get his girlfriend out of her clothes at speed. Everything takes longer than usual, because everything’s sticking to her and she’s being incredibly floppy and unhelpful, but at this point, he thinks he prefers her ragdolling to the now-proven alternative.

“It’s hot,” she says again, as Babe gets her bra off, and she’s getting real sad now, real soppy and miserable, and come on, he can’t help but feel bad for her. “It’s too hot, I can’t… je ne peut pas…”

“I’ll go get you a wet towel, alright?” He tells her, and man, the fight’s all gone out of him too. That’s what he gets, he guesses, for being a man on a chain for her. Her crusty little white dog, kind of a vanity pet if you could get a vanity pet that’s also a loudmouth who’s not too bad to keep up your skirt now and then. “Will you promise, please, that if I leave this room for under two minutes, I will not come back and find you wandering around?”

“And I’m hungry,” she moans, which is not an answer to the question he asked, something that’s becoming typical today, “and you made me leave the kitchen, and now I can’t eat anything…”

“I’ll make you breakfast, too,” he tells her. “What do you want?”

Renee sniffs, and sits up a little as Babe starts moving to put her properly back in bed. “I can’t have what I want,” she mumbles. And then, “can I have some eggs?”

“Yeah, I can cook eggs,” he tells her, and (unadvisedly) gives her a kiss on the forehead. It is very gross. She’s really unbelievably sweaty. “You are a terrible patient, did you know that?”

“I want sausage, too,” Renee says. “Do we have sausage?”

“I’ll look,” Babe says, and pulls the sheet over her for modesty. “Promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

She burbles, like a baby, and closes her eyes. Babe watches her for a second, deeply suspicious, and then slinks backwards out the door, like he’s casing the joint, and down the hall to the bathroom.

The bathroom is… nice. He’ll admit it! He’ll admit that the way he used to live in the bathroom was wrong. All three of them, when they decided to move to a new place together, had kind of quietly suspected that the bathroom was going to be a pain point, in no small part because Renee kept using generous finger quotes when she referred to the one they had in the old apartment as a “bachelor bathroom”. Further investigation into this phrase revealed that, apparently, the hand towels are supposed to get all the way dry at some point, not just less damp. Also, apparently, you’re supposed to wash your bathmat every month or something.

And Babe had kind of thought, whatever, right? And Gene had quietly confessed to him one night that he was not emotionally prepared to have a bathroom with a bunch of lotions and a container of cotton balls in it somewhere, covering every spare surface and falling over into the trash can.

But it’s actually really nice in there. The towels are soft (she made them buy a bunch of new towels, too), and it always smells good. Renee puts perfumey stuff in there on top of the toilet, like a potpourri bowl or something. And it turns out, it’s not that hard to just install shelves to put a bunch of lotions on, when you live with a construction contractor who installs stuff professionally. And, when all’s said and done, it’s kind of nice to put lotion on your hands after you wash them in the winter, even if the bottle takes up a ton of room next to the sink, and you were kind of mad that it got put there.

He grabs a clean hand towel out of the little bin that now lives under their sink, gets it soaked in cold water from the tap, and wrings it out. After a moment of hesitation, he grabs a spare pump bottle of lotion, too, something kind of floral and mild, and a box of tissues, and (from the mirror cabinet) a dark bottle of medical syrup. He observes his bounty, and sees that it is good, and decides that he’s ready to face the beast.

With some relief, he returns to the bedroom to discover that his worst fears have not yet been realized, and Renee has not managed to get back up and get dressed again. On the contrary, she’s dozing. As Babe gets close enough to cast a shadow on her, she sniffs and comes awake again, peering up at him.

“What time is it?” She asks, as he starts to lay his haul out on her side table. “My alarm didn’t go off.”

“It’s morning,” Babe tells her, and gets the wet rag in his hand, “and you’re home sick, kid.”

“Oh,” Renee says, and frowns, confused. “It’s so hot.”

“I know,” Babe says, and runs the rag over her neck.

The effect is immediate—she gasps and sighs in relief, slumping back against the pillows. He wipes down her shoulders, her neck, the open expanse of her chest. Tosses the sheet off her and gets the superheated skin between and under her tits, too, which makes her shudder in relief.

It’s nice. It’s a trick he learned from Gene, actually, something his family apparently used to do for fevers. Brings the body temperature back down, at least for a little while, so you can try and keep some water in the patient while helping them feel pretty clean besides. The first time Babe was running a fever, and Gene sat there wiping him down, talking to him quietly? Forget it. It’s heaven.

Now, though, Babe doesn’t know what to say, which is new for him because he’s usually incapable of shutting up. There’s something about bedside manner that just don’t come easy to him. He feels awkward in hospitals, and around sick people. He doesn’t know how Renee does it.

“You’re bad at being sick,” he tells her after a few minutes, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “I always figured doctors would be better at it than the rest of us, but you are real bad.”

Renee hums. “Médecin, guéris-toi toi-même,” she murmurs, more to herself.

“Sure,” Babe says, who has no idea what she means. He drapes the sheet back over her torso and pulls it away from her hips down, so he can do the unglamorous parts. She’s particularly sweaty behind the knees, and he wonders if it would’ve gotten so bad if she hadn’t put on those stockings while no one was looking. “Medicine. Guerilla warfare. ‘You’. Am I nailing this French stuff, or what?”

“It’s from the bible,” she tells him. “It’s like… before you can help others, you should help yourself. You know?”

“Like the mote and the beam,” Babe guesses. “Let me tell you something, Reenie, you’ve got the beam in your eye now.”

“Uh, I don’t think that’s it,” she says. “Eh, it’s like…”

“Don’t worry about it, I get the picture,” he tells her, and runs the washcloth down to her ankle. “Doctors don’t think they can get sick, is that right?”

“Maybe we just expect more from ourselves,” she says, meditatively. “Other people can rest, but…”

She trails off, and for a second, Babe wonders if she’s fallen asleep again. But when he glances up, she’s just staring at the assortment of random stuff he’s brought her laid out on the bedside table. Maybe she’s forgotten what she meant to say.

“I hate being sick,” she says, after a long pause.

“I can tell,” Babe says, and gets the sheet tucked down over her again.

“I mean,” she says, as he shifts up the bed to be closer to her face, because he’ll be damned if he isn’t getting that makeup off with the other (clean!) side of the towel, “it’s so lonely, isn’t it? Being sick. You just have to sleep alone in your room.”

“I’ll stay, if you want,” Babe tells her. “After I make you something to eat.”

She looks up at him, smiling fondly. “You will, won’t you?” She asks. “You poor thing. I’m being terrible, aren’t I?”

“No more than usual,” Babe lies, and she smiles and closes her eyes so he can wipe her face down for her. “But I will have my revenge, and I am going to make you drink something awful. Primarily out of malice.”

“It’s cough syrup, isn’t it,” she says, not really asking. “I hate cough syrup.”

“That’s so weird,” Babe says, “because everyone I know says they just love it. Highlight of their day, they tell me. Best part of being sick, they tell me.”

Renee sighs, and Babe sets her head back down on the pillow. “The best part of being sick, when I was a kid, was being with my father,” she tells him. “Any time I was sick, he would sit by my bed, or on Maggy’s bed, and read to me.”

“Not your ma?”

She shrugs. “She was busy,” she says, “she would cook for me, but I wouldn’t see her. She’d stay downstairs and work.”

Babe tosses the rag across the room into the hamper, which lands perfectly, because he’s an athlete who missed his calling. He goes for the horrible dark bottle of cough syrup. “What would he read?” He asks. “Not Claudine?”

She giggles. “Not Claudine,” she agrees. “Whatever he was reading, which was always very boring. He said it was a good way to know if we were faking it, because if we were only pretending to be sick, we would go crazy listening to him read… oh, packing slips, and grocery lists, and essays from the newspaper. But I never pretended to be sick.” She sits up, slightly, as he passes her the little dram of syrup. “So sometimes he would sneak in some Verne, or Hetzel. Just for me, very secretively.”

She tosses it back in one gulp, then goes through the fizzer of expressions most often associated with a hangover tonic, starting with the scrunch and ending with the extended tongue and gargling noises. Babe nods along sympathetically, and reaches for the forgotten glass of water that Gene brought her that morning.

“Alright, you’ve suffered enough,” he tells her, and watches as she drinks half the glass in a single go. “Verne, do I know Verne? I feel like I know Verne.”

She nods. “He wrote adventure stories,” she tells him, “adventurers digging in the earth, or visiting the moon. Things like that. Very fantastical. They were a bit outdated when I was a kid,” she adds, “but I didn’t know that yet. I just thought they were amazing.”

“Huh,” Babe says, hunting around in the recesses of his memory. Nothing’s springing to mind yet, but with his luck, his memory will jog at the exact moment he’s about to fall asleep, and jolt him awake tonight. “If I ask you how you’re feeling, will you tell me honestly?”

“I’m hungry,” she tells him, “weren’t you going to go cook for me?”

“Oh, that’s right,” he says, and grins. “Alright, fine. I’m going, and I’m taking my syrup with me!”

They do have sausage, as it turns out. Babe finds out later that Gene bought it specifically to make dirty rice with, and he probably would have been in trouble for cooking it if the circumstances hadn’t been what they are, vis: dire. As it is, a single ‘it’s all Renee wanted to eat’ suffices quite well, especially when paired with a promise to go get more tomorrow.

He cooks two, in his awful old cast iron pan, and uses the full centimeter of fat that seeps out of them to fry up four eggs in without the utter mayhem that eggs can wreak on an improperly-oiled griddle. When he loads it all up onto a plate, it doesn’t look like much, so he cuts up some slices of bread and pops them on the plate, too. The likelihood of Renee eating American bread in a non-sandwich scenario is always low, but never zero.

Despite the syrup, Babe can hear her coughing from down the hall throughout. It’s one of those racking, wet coughs that doctors call ‘productive’. Babe doesn’t feel very productive about it. He feels nervous.

Kids died from the flu when he was growing up, back in his neighborhood in Philly. Kids he knew, who would be scrapping with you on the yard one day, and then grey and pale, wandering through the world like ghosts the next. They’d be gone by the end of the month. Young kids, not the older kids. If you made it to twelve or thirteen, you’d probably make it to twenty, you know?

The world was different then, of course. There wasn’t good medicine, like they got now. And there wasn’t always good clean water, in the neighborhoods where people didn’t have as much as some other folks. But boy, he remembers being down for the count when he was eight or so, hot in the head and coughing like that, and his ma…

His brothers weren’t allowed to come around and see him until he got better, and his ma kicked his dad out of bed for a few nights so he could sleep there with her. At the time, it seemed like a luxury, a big bed all (mostly) to himself. And his ma, loading his concave chest up with VapoRub, and praying, sitting with him all the time. He had felt like the center of her whole universe, and through the pain, he had felt like the luckiest kid on the block. Just him, no brothers sharing and splitting her attention. Getting to sit with just her.

Well, with an adult’s hindsight, it’s different, isn’t it. That’s life.

He’d been lucky, probably, although there’s a part of him that’s always gonna feel healthsome when he gets a whiff of some Vick’s, and he superstitiously prepares himself a hot toddy every time he feels something sticking in his chest or his throat. It had never hit him hard enough, or he had a tougher immune system, or… or he was just lucky. He was one of the kids who got better.

You want there to be a reason it wasn’t you. Maybe you go on wanting there to be a reason all your life. And you never get one.

Idly, he checks the liquor cabinet to see if they’ve got any whiskey. They’ve got a bottle, half-full, of something dark and very cheap, pushed all the way to the back. He tips it backwards and forwards in his hand, sloshing the liquid up and down the glass, almost not thinking. With his other hand, he reaches out and turns on the burner under the kettle.

FOR THIS RECIPE, YOU WILL NEED:

1. One (1) dram of whatever whiskey you bought by accident at the grocers six weeks ago when you were trying to get some bourbon
2. One (1) tea bag (Renee’s)
3. Two (2) cinnamon sticks rolling around in the back of your spice drawer without a lot of aroma left, broken in half
4. However the fuck many (???) raw whole cloves, ditto spice drawer situation
5. Honey, whatever amount
6. One (1) bit (official measurement) of lemon, cut into whatever slice shape is leftover in your fridge from drinks this weekend (of course it’s still fine, it’s lemon! So what if it’s a little hard, and a little dry? They used to take it on ships for months and months in the old days, and put it in their rum so their arms and legs didn’t all fall off!)

METHOD:

1. Put it all in your girlfriend’s favorite mug, then pour boiling water over it. Stir. Let the tea bag steep. Hope she doesn’t burn the shit out of herself.

“What is that,” Renee asks, her eyes round, as Babe reappears triumphant in her bedroom. She has not tried to make another run for it, which he’s grateful for, because he just doesn’t want to struggle with her while he’s got a mug in one hand, a plate in the other, and their little lap bench tucked under his arm, held in place basically just by the grace of God. “I can smell it from here.”

“Old Heffron family recipe,” he informs her, “it’s tea, got it? It’s medicinal.”

“It doesn’t smell medicinal,” she tells him, grinning, as he starts rearranging so he can put the bench over her lap, “cough syrup smells medicinal. That smells like a good time.”

“Alright, so you can have a good time after you finish breakfast,” he tells her, “it needs time to steep. Think you can eat from here, or do I need to prop you up?”

Renee sticks her arms up at him, like when a little kid is asking you to carry them. “Up,” she says, and he grins. 

Wordlessly, he bends down and wraps his arms around her torso, so he can haul her up into a sitting position. The line of pillows that runs along the headboard of the bed gets snatched up, and stacked haphazardly behind her with one hand.

“You’re doing well,” she tells him, as he lowers her back against the impromptu seat. Unfortunately, Babe has an idiot pervert brain, and gets an embarrassed, zingy feeling when she praises him for good behavior, so it just makes him blush. “You’re going to put me out of a job soon.”

“Comfortable?”

She hums agreeably, and rests her head back against the headboard. “You’re very nice to me,” she tells him. “Don’t you ever worry I’ll become spoiled?”

Babe grins to himself as he puts the plate down on the lap bench. He thinks about Renee, forever on her feet, running from one patient to another all day, only to come home with ingredients for a casserole that has to be made for their downstairs neighbor because she’s just had a baby and won’t have any time to cook. Renee, who’s part of the telephone tree at church, so when there’s a death in the parish she can take an hour before work to make sure the chairs are set up in the reception room downstairs for the visitation, or that the flowers make it inside the sacristy, so the altar guild can place them properly before mass.

Renee, who won’t marry Eugene, because it would mean not marrying Babe. And vice versa.

“It’s too late to worry, you’re already a rotten brat,” he tells her, which makes her grin. “I might as well give you whatever you can take!”

She eats most of her eggs, both sausages, and about half a piece of white bread before giving in, and Babe eats the rest, sitting on the end of his bed and chewing slowly. He’d be hauling ass to work by now, if it were any other day. It’s almost nine in the morning. He would have left late, for no other reason than his sense of time goes a little funny when his docs aren’t around to keep him on pace, and he would’ve had to jog the better part of the way, panting and pretending he’s still in good aerobic shape…

Renee takes another tissue from the box and coughs into it. Distractedly, he rubs her leg through the blankets, then glances along the bed to see her starting to slump back into her pillows.

“One more thing,” Babe says, “before I lose you again.”

She squints at him, wiping vaguely at her eyes. “One more thing?” She asks. “Is it time for my ‘tea’?”

“Look, it is tea,” he informs her, reaching for the mug, “it’s just not just tea. I had to down a mug of this every time I got congestion, my whole growing-up, mother’s orders. Which are never to be questioned!”

“No, not your mother,” Renee agrees. She reaches out and takes the mug in both hands as he passes it to her. “I go out of my way never to disagree with her, unless I really have to. Why does it smell alcoholic?”

“Ah, that would be the alcohol,” he tells her. “Don’t give me that look, it is medically necessary! We had to do without, during the Prohibition, and I tell you what, a toddy without whiskey in it don’t open up anything.”

She leans over the top of the mug and breathes the steam in. “What’s it supposed to… ‘open up’?” She asks.

“Everything,” he tells her. “Chest, head, whatever. I swear by it, and my mother swears by it, and her mother swore by it, all the way up the family line, because there is nothing quite like it in the world! It really oughta be Irish whiskey,” he adds, as Renee takes her first tentative sip, “but I don’t usually splurge, so we didn’t have any.”

“Oh,” Renee says, wide-eyed. She takes a deep breath. “You’re not kidding.”

“Of course not,” Babe says, grinning. “Healthsome, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” she says again, and runs her hand over her eye, “you drank this when you were a child?”

“They make Irish children tougher than Belgian ones,” he informs her. “I have no doubt that if someone had given a little eight-year-old Reenie a full mug of this, she would have melted like ice in an oven! But baby Babe was tough as jerky. I probably had one of those per day, whenever I had the flu.”

She smiles, weakly, and has another sip. “Your mother took care of you?” She asks. “When you were sick?”

“Pretty much,” he says. “All of us got hit with a bug at some point, and she’d fuss about it, you know? All that temper would go out of her, and she’d baby us.”

She nods. “I think my mother was superstitious about us being sick,” she tells him. “She didn’t even want to be in a room with us, or see us, until we were doing better. When I was little, I thought she didn’t care.” She sniffs, and has another long, clarifying sip. “Now, I wonder if she was just scared.”

“My dad was like that,” Babe tells her. “Only he didn’t cook for us, neither.”

“Were you close with your father?”

Babe shrugs. “Not really,” he admits, without meaning to. It’s like a needle has plunged through his back, puncturing his lung, dragging a thread of truth through him and out his chest on the other side. “He worked a lot. Most nights, most holidays. Had to keep us in shirts and shoes, you know.”

And he was never good to his mother, he remembers. He was always irritated with her, and more irritated that she wouldn’t just take it when he snapped at her. Babe understands now, of course, that working like that can grind a man down to a fine mist, especially if he isn’t happy with what he comes home to. He also understands that he was part of that ‘what’, that something that his father was so tired with.

He’d gotten better, when his children had gotten older, about talking to them and remembering their birthdays and things like that. Babe can have a nice conversation with his father now. They can joke and laugh together, like he can with his brothers.

But, when his father had casually mentioned disliking Eugene when he’d first met him, Babe had not really cared. What his father thinks of Eugene or of Renee, or of Babe, or his town or his job or his whole life, is of no real consequence to him. He is not someone Babe cares about making proud.

When he had brought them home, he had brought them to meet his mother. He had wanted, desperately—he had needed —his mother to meet them, to examine them, to be hard on them, and to approve of them. His father had not been part of the equation.

“How about you?” He asks. “Were you close with your ma?”

Renee shrugs and shuts her eyes, slumping back into her pile of cushions. “I don’t know,” she says, and holds the mug out for Babe to take from her hands. “When I was a child, I loved my father much more. You know how children do that. He was warmer, and quieter, and he never asked anything of me.”

“Yeah,” Babe says.

“And then I went away,” she tells him, “I went to Brussels for school, and I was homesick all the time… and he never wrote to me.” She shrugs. “My mother wrote to me. She would reply to my letters to him, and then he would sign at the bottom next to her name, as though they wrote them together. But I knew he wasn’t dictating them, or anything like that. They didn’t sound like him.”

Babe sits there, not knowing what to say.

“It broke my heart,” she says, and shifts lower into her pillows, pulling her sheet back up over her chest. “I never really got over it. I always wondered… oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“You write to your family every two weeks, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” Renee says. “I write to my parents, and my mother writes back. And he sends little things along, and he always signs the letter as well.” She waves her hand. “He wants to love me, but I wonder if he knows how to do it, at a distance. It’s a hard thing to learn.”

Babe pinches his lips together, licks them inside his mouth. “I think you need some sleep,” he says, stupidly. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” she admits, finally. “Will you leave me propped up a little? It helps with the cough.”

“If you want,” he says, and reaches out to squeeze her hand, which is resting on the sheet. “You want me to stay in here with you?”

She smiles. “I’ll be alright,” she tells him. “Help me into a nightgown, so I don’t sweat all over the sheets, and then do me a favor and go clean the living room.”

“Alright.”

“I love him, you know,” she says suddenly, and squeezes Babe’s hand back, “my father. I wouldn’t have said any of it if I wasn’t sick. Please, forget about it.”

Her eyes open, and she looks up at him.

“He has moods,” she tells him. “Some men do. It’s no reason to love them less.”

Not knowing what else to do, Babe lifts her hand in his and kisses the back of it, and watches as her eyes fall shut again. “You’re not feeling well,” he tells her, as reassuringly as he can. “Fevers get you acting funny, that’s all. Just sleep it off.”

They get her into one of her plain summer nighties, and she’s asleep before Babe’s even finished taking the dishes out to the kitchen, and the stress all releases him at once. She’s properly down for the count now, wheezing and too staggered to do much else, if that rapid collapse was anything to go by. The likelihood of another escape attempt in the next four hours: mercifully low.

So, he does the dishes, and tidies up the living room, on account of being particularly asked to, and makes two sandwiches to keep in the fridge until Renee wakes up. Around noon, he takes a break to step outside to the telephone and call the library.

“You got any books by ‘Verne’?” He asks the librarian. “Adventure books?”

“Jules Verne, of course,” the librarian says. “Are you looking for a particular novel? I think we have a very nicely illustrated copy of 20,000 Leagues…”

“Sure, that’s fine,” he tells her. “Could you put it on hold for me?”

Around one, he takes a break from chores and has his sandwich. He peeks in on Renee, who’s still asleep, and, not wanting to wake her up with a thermometer, takes her temperature the old-fashioned way by pressing his cheek to her forehead. Still hot, and clammy. She moans a little when he gives her an abridged wipe-down, but doesn’t wake up, and he decides not to push it.

He’s picking up discarded laundry and chucking it into the bathroom hamper around two when the knock on the front door almost makes him leap out of his skin.

Mentally, he starts running the numbers: Gene’s not likely to be done on the site for another hour, so it’s not him. The milkman comes on Tuesdays and the ice guy on Fridays, so it’s not a scheduled delivery, and anyway it’d be pretty damn late in the day for either of them. The landlord…? Not likely. He’s pretty much okay about not bothering them unless they tell him something’s leaking, and when he does have to call on them, he waits until the evening, when they’re actually home.

So that leaves… no one. A mystery. Babe hates mysteries. What’s a guy got to do to get a day without one?

It’s just his luck, when he does open the door, that the woman on the other side is as startled by him as he is by her. He manages to keep his cool, at least. She actually yelps.

“Who,” she gasps, “are you?”

“What?” Babe asks, frowning. “Me? I’m the guy who lives here, lady, who are you?”

The woman stiffens, straightening up to her full height, which isn’t very tall. She’s older than him, somewhere in that vague middle aged bracket of life that could place her anywhere between forty and sixty without a lot of definite indicators to point one way or the other, and very formally dressed. Long skirt, cardigan, all her hair tucked up under a neat wool hat, the works. He wonders how she stays cool. “You don’t live here,” she says, with the cold clarity of a discipline-happy first grade teacher, “Renee Lemaire lives here. This is her address, I checked with the man downstairs, now who are you?”

Babe is lucky to have a brain that moves fast. Tiny little woman, prim clothes, and—now that he’s looking for it—a great big bag slung cross-body over her shoulder and sitting just above her hip. “Do you work with her?” He asks. “At the hospital?”

“Of course,” she snaps.

“Oh, well,” Babe says, softening, “that’s different. Sorry, I, uh… I’m a friend of Renee’s,” he says, which is technically true, “I’ve been here all day to make sure she’s doing alright. You know, bringing her water, not letting her try and go to work.”

She squints at him for a moment, like she’s trying to decipher his intent. “I see,” she says, suspiciously. “Why did you say you lived here?”

Babe shrugs. “I didn’t know you were here to see her,” he says. “I didn’t want her to get in trouble for having some boy in her apartment, you know?”

“Hm,” she says, still squinting, but her posture softens up a little. “Well, I guess I can understand that. You ought to tell people the truth, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Babe says, feeling for all the world like a chastised pupil again. The tiny little nurse is throwing shades of nunnery at him that feel distressingly familiar in this vulnerable moment of his life. “If I may ask, um, to whom am I speaking?”

“I’m Sadie,” she says, with the confidence of a woman who believes this is enough to clear everything up, as though Babe is about to go oh, Sadie, of course I know you, Renee talks about you all the time, “Sadie Lancaster. We work together on the third floor, and I heard she wasn’t feeling well. I’m here to see her.” She pats one hand on the bag on her hip. “I’ve brought some equipment.”

She continues to stand there, as though everything has been totally explained, and there’s no more to say. Babe decides, like all cowards, that a confidently respectable woman is not one worth arguing with.

“That’s good of you,” he says, “why don’t you come in? There’s some water boiling if you want tea, I was just going to bring her some.”

Babe’s expecting Renee to still be asleep when he knocks on the door to their room, but she’s roused enough to give him a little “come in” in return. She’s additionally, rapidly roused by the door opening, and someone other than Babe coming through.

“Sadie,” she gasps, delighted, “where did you come from?”

“I came to see you, of course,” Sadie says, bustling in. Babe watches from the door, arms across his chest, as the tiny nurse stands quite comfortably at Renee’s bedside, holding her hand and gazing fondly at her. “I heard you were too sick to come in, and I thought, ‘that doesn’t sound like Renee’, and then I thought, ‘it must be really terrible, if it’s stopping her’, and I came here just as soon as I could. Oh, how are you?”

“Apparently, I’m terrible,” Renee says, smiling broadly, and Babe realizes with a distant pang that she’s really delighted, that this is a complete and exciting surprise for her. That she’s very, very happy that Sadie (who Babe has never even heard of before today) has come to see her. “I did my best to make it to you, but I was stopped at every hurdle and put back in bed. I fought like a tiger. Didn’t I?” She asks, this time directed at Babe.

“You fought like something,” he agrees, as Sadie turns to glance back at him. “Why don’t I go get you a chair, Mrs. Lancaster? So you can make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you,” she says, curtly, which is fine by him because it means he gets to slip out of there pronto. He leaves the door ajar as he goes, so he can hear their conversation from down the hall as he heads for their little dining room.

“It’s been everything you’d expect,” Renee is saying, distantly. “I’ve had worse, you know, but it’s never any fun.”

“Have you been drinking water?”

“Not as much as I should,” she admits, as Babe picks a chair out, “but as much as I can. Whenever I wake up, as best as I can tell. Babe’s been keeping me stocked.”

“Aches anywhere?”

“Everywhere,” Renee says, which perks Babe’s ears up because she hasn’t said anything about that to him, “it’s especially bad in my back, but it’s all up and down my arms, too.”

“Have you taken anything for it?”

“Not since this morning,” she says. “I had aspirin around six, and, um… an expectorant around nine.”

“No paracetamol?”

“Not yet. You bring me any?”

Babe pokes his head back in, and then hauls the chair in after him. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “this is for you, ma’am. Renee, you want tea? I got hot water and nowhere to put it.”

“Sure, thank you.”

He closes the door on his way out, this time, because Renee deserves her privacy, and he’s earned the right to eavesdrop on a version of this conversation where they don’t think he can hear them.

He spends a minute or two pressed against the door, before realizing that there’s not much that’s actually interesting about a bedside chat in a hospital. This Sadie woman really did come to check up on Renee, you know, medical-like. She’s just taking measurements, diagnostics.

Right as he’s about to slide away and actually go make that tea, he hears Sadie say, “of course, you have nothing to worry about on the rotation, dear. All of the girls are so sympathetic, we were all worrying about you.”

“Oh, you don’t mean that. Really?”

“Of course, really,” Sadie says. “Judith was particularly distraught, you know she’s very fond of you and she was despondent all day. She didn’t have her big sister there!”

“Oh,” Renee sighs, sweetly as anything. Surprised, almost as surprised as Babe is.

Why don’t I know any of these girls? He wonders. And why is she so surprised to hear about them?

“So you mustn’t worry,” Sadie goes on, “because we’ve all had a look at the schedule, and it really won’t be any trouble at all to cover your rotation for the next few days if we each take another hour or two on. And we talked to Herman, and he said it was alright—of course, he didn’t like to say that, because he thinks it’ll start some kind of riot, he thinks everything will start some kind of labor walk-out, but he knew he’d get it if he didn’t make an exception this time. So rest up! Don’t worry about coming back in until that temperature’s down.”

“Oh,” Renee sighs again, “I can’t believe it. You didn’t have to do that for me. Oh, I can’t—I just can’t believe it…”

“Now, now, don’t become emotional, dear,” Sadie says, “it isn’t sentimentality at all, it’s just good manners. You’ve covered for everyone, you know, we all owe you a favor or a dozen of them. And you not being married, and living so far from your family, we were worried you wouldn’t have anyone to keep an eye on you.”

“You’re terribly sweet, I don’t know what to say,” Renee says. “If I realized you were all worrying… I’m so sorry you had to come all this way.”

“Well, he seems well-tempered enough,” Sadie says reluctantly, and Babe grins reflexively as he realizes Renee’s probably gesturing at the door, right where his big head is. “But don’t you have anyone a little more solid? What about your roommates?”

“Babe’s my roommate,” Renee says, totally calm, and Babe’s whole body clenches like one big fist. Grin, goodbye. Rictus grin, hello! All of the muscles in his torso? Very present, suddenly, all lit up like anything!

“He’s not your roommate,” Sadie says, obviously flabbered and possibly ghasted, “he’s a man! Miss Lemaire, you are pulling my leg. For shame!”

“I have two roommates,” Renee tells her, with a little laugh, “one of them is a man! So what? What year is it, anyway, you know? Which Roosevelt is president?”

“Neither of them,” Sadie says, sternly, “they’re both dead.”

“You know what I mean,” Renee says. “Anyway, I live in a city, it’s not safe for me to live by myself. Remember, how Mary was telling us someone broke into her apartment last spring? Imagine if she had been there, by herself! How terrible!”

“What, so you’ve got to keep a man on retainer?”

“If you like,” Renee says. “I can hardly keep a guard dog, they need too much maintenance and my hours are too long.”

Sadie laughs at that, and Babe feels his chest unclench. “Alright, so you’ve got him for protection,” she says. “But, dear, what are you going to say if people talk?”

“I’ll just let them,” Renee says. “I’m thirty-nine, you know, I can’t go on worrying about gossip my whole life. One day, he’ll get married, and he’ll move out, and anyone who’s wasted their time talking will realize how absurd they’ve been. It won’t affect me,” she adds, slightly more pointedly, “as long as no one says anything to Herman about it.”

“Well, of course, no one is going to say anything to Herman about it,” Sadie says, haughtily, “and I will let the other girls know, because frankly, my dear, there’s not a girl on that rotation who isn’t already making plans to come see you some afternoon, and I shouldn’t like for young Judith to get a fright like I had. But you ought to know, if there was ever a whisper that he intended to let you go, he really would get that walk-out he lives in fear of.”

Babe grins. In his chest, his heart reminds him that he’s had a little too much excitement in the last few minutes, and he really ought to go make that tea.

He gets in trouble about it, when Sadie packs up to leave. He’s doing the dishes again, because somehow, when you’re an adult, additional dirty dishes manage to materialize everywhere in your apartment as soon as you finish doing the first load without fail, when she comes out of the bedroom.

She closes the door quietly, walks down the hall, and wheels on him.

“You,” she says, “I told you that you ought to tell the truth, didn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Babe says. “In my defense, I did try, but you wouldn’t have it.”

She scowls at him. She’s got a good scowl—there’s enough texture to her skin to really let those creases get in deep, when she wants them. He lets her really nail him with it, get it all out of her system, you know?

Then, she takes a deep breath and reaches into her bag. “I brought some soup,” she tells him, and pulls out one of those good-quality waterproof food containers. “You see that she gets it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you make sure to get it good and hot.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Most likely, ma’am,” he says, “unless Gene can stay instead.”

She sniffs. “Alright, well, if it ends up being Jean, you pass this along to her,” she says, producing a clipboard. She holds it out, and Babe finishes drying his hands and takes it from her. “I’ve just put her on an OTC trial, stuff you can get more of if it works. Tylenol once every six hours, expectorant and decongestant twice a day, and Barbital in the evening if she’s restless or having trouble sleeping. Just as-needed,” she adds, “it has some side-effects that no woman likes to deal with, so I don’t expect she’ll be particularly keen to take it if she doesn’t have to, anyway. Everything’s beside her bed right now, but it might be best to keep it out of sight, just in case. She said she was a little out of it this morning?”

“I don’t know what doctors classify as ‘a little’,” Babe tells her. “Didn’t know where she was, when she was, or how she was. I practically had to carry her to bed. She wouldn’t go just being asked nicely.”

“Hm,” Sadie says. “Definitely keep everything out of her reach, then. Fevers can cause really sensible people to do quite insensible things, you know.”

“You don’t say.”

“She should have as much water as possible,” Sadie continues on, ignoring this last comment, “and three meals, if you can get her to take them, of bland food. Soup is good, bread is fine. She’ll be losing salt in her sweat, so if you can get some salt into her, more’s the way. I think that’s–”

She stops, suddenly, and turns her head jerkily, like a bird. Babe realizes, too late, that she’s heard the door open and shut, and additionally realizes too late that he has no way to warn Gene, who is about one second from turning the corner, that there’s–

He appears, two big paper bags under his arms, and yelps. She yelps. Babe grins, awkwardly.

“You,” Sadie says, while Gene stares at her, frozen, like a deer one second before you hit it with your auto. “Who are you? Is this some kind of hotel?”

“Um,” Gene says, holding the bags up like the fixed bayonet of a last, desperate stand, “groceries.” And then, clearly sensing that more is expected of him, glances at Babe and adds “delivery… man?”

“Yes,” Babe agrees, quickly, “this is our groceries delivery man, a normal thing that everyone has in their building.”

“Heffron,” Gene snaps.

“He’s another friend of Renee’s,” Babe explains to Sadie, and steps forward to take one of the bags out of his arms, “you’re here early, though, aren’t you? Look, do you have another ten minutes? I got a hold at the library, if I give you my card, would you–”

“No problem,” Gene says, seizing on the opportunity to escape like a rip cord. “Why don’t you, uh—let me get out of your hair for a little bit. Uh,” he adds, glancing back at Sadie, who holds her palms up in obvious exhausted defeat, “I’m—sorry I startled you, ma’am, I didn’t think–”

“It’s fine,” she says, “I was just leaving, myself. Why don’t you walk me down?”

“Uh,” Gene says, “yes’m. Babe, can I get that card?”

Their bedroom is lovely and dark, remarkably cool given the time of year. Babe shuts the door behind him, and lies down on the bed beside Renee. She hums, her eyes shut, and reaches for him.

“Was that Eugene coming home?”

“He went out again,” Babe tells her. “He’s getting you something special.”

She smiles. “I have something special already,” she says. “I can’t believe Sadie came to see me. She gave me a real shock.”

“She gave both of us a shock.”

Renee shakes her head and opens her eyes slightly, turning to look blearily at him. “She says they’re all worried about me,” she tells him, “isn’t that strange?”

“It’s not strange at all,” he tells her. Affectionately, he reaches out and traces a finger over forehead, mimicking the curve of her eyebrow and hairline. “I’ve been worried about you all day. Gene’s worrying about you. Denise at the front desk is worrying about you. Anybody, with any sense, who knows there’s something to worry about, is using that sense to be worried.”

She goes on looking at him, and he doesn’t look away. He’s comfortable, you know, with her looking at him. He figures she’s one of two people who pretty much sees all there is to see, and doesn’t mind about any of it.

After a moment, she almost-smiles, her lips parting enough that he can see her neat line of front teeth. “You love me terribly, don’t you?” She asks.

“Pretty much,” he says.

“Oh, well,” she says, and smiles shyly, “I love you too. Why do you have to always go on being romantic, when I can’t do anything about it?”

“I have not spent much of today being romantic,” Babe says. “Most of it has been manhandling, and some of it has been very crass. I’m hoping that fever makes it hard for you to remember how bad I’ve been.”

“Don’t be silly,” she tells him. “Don’t you know women want a man who’s bad to them sometimes? It shows up in every romance book. If the hero doesn’t at least have a criminal record, I won’t even read it.”

“Yeah?” Babe perks up. “What’s Gene’s bad boy behavior?”

“He hasn’t exhibited any yet,” Renee admits, “but I believe he has room for improvement. With coaching, we can guide him.”

“I believe in the both of us,” Babe says, and holds out a hand for her to shake. “Together, we can make him a worse person.”

She giggles, and then looks away to clear her throat.

“You want something to eat?” Babe asks. “There’s a sandwich in the fridge for you.”

“Please,” she says. “And more water?”

“Sure,” he says, and reaches to take her glass. She goes on looking at him, as he gets up off the bed, and straightens himself out like a bent-up pipe cleaner finally getting its act together.

He’s at the door when she murmurs something he almost doesn’t catch. She says it quietly, like it’s not really for him, and in French, which she’s only recently started inviting him into, and he isn’t much good at.

He hears it anyway, though. “Tu es un ange.”

And he pauses, and smiles. And shuts the door behind him.