told too soon. Or too casually. Or didn’t prepare them for big news coming. Like everything else, she rushed into it.
“Okay. Um, thanks for telling me, I guess.” Levi leaned away from her, looking her over for a long minute. Then he nodded once with a finality that might as well have been a slap across the face and stood. Mina watched as he gathered the ice-cream bowls and walked into the kitchen. When he returned, she hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’m going to head home. If you need help building another raised bed—”
She braced herself for the final rejection.
“—give me a call.”
“Okay.” Her voice was barely audible to her own ears, even though she had no heartbeat to drown it out.
He nodded again. He shut the front door behind him, and the possibility of their relationship clicked closed, too.
LEVI’S BLINDS WERE still open when he got home. The lights were on in Mina’s house, and he could see right through from his kitchen into hers. The ice-cream bowls were on the counter where he’d put them.
Mina only had good ice cream in her freezer. Dinner had been delicious, even if there hadn’t been any meat. Levi pulled everything out of his pockets and plopped his keys and his phone on the table, before dropping into a chair facing her house. He’d enjoyed himself at Mina’s. She’d been funny and interesting, and her face moved when she talked, and he hadn’t wanted her to stop talking, because he hadn’t wanted to stop watching her face move.
But then he’d been leaning in to kiss her, and she’d told him about her HIV, and the animation in her face had turned into pill bottles on the bathroom counter and blinds that were always closed and doctor’s visits and the heavy weight of watching someone slowly withdraw until the day you came home, and they weren’t there at all.
Levi rested his forehead in his hand, feeling the weight of his head and the way it pressed his elbow into the table. He’d caught his skin on the table in a weird way and he should move his elbow, but the pinching kept him from disappearing into the past. Into what he should have done better, the times he should have reminded Kimmie to take her pills and the times he’d reminded her too much. Into the last day when she’d said, “Don’t go to work today. I feel like something bad is going to happen,” and he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t find his keys, and he’d said, “You always feel like something bad is going to happen.”
Only this time, Kimmie had been right.
He dropped his palm to the wood with a slap, his head bouncing once before he righted it and stared again at Mina’s house.
Knowing what he knew now, knowing how everything ended, he still wouldn’t go back and change anything about the day he’d walked up to Kimmie and asked for her phone number. He’d loved her more than he thought was possible—still did. Every minute they’d been together had been the best minute of his life.
A love like that was possible, and he believed lightning could strike twice.
But he didn’t know if he could go through the pain of loving someone who was slowly dying again. He had doubted he was strong enough for more heartbreak. Was he strong enough for worse?
The screen on his phone flashed on with his sister’s face, then vibrated on the table.
“Hey, sis,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to call you all day. Where have you been?”
“Yeah, sorry.” He’d felt the phone vibrate in his pocket but hadn’t wanted to interrupt Mina to even check who it was. “I was over at my neighbor’s, helping her build a raised garden bed. She made me dinner.”
“Oh? The neighbor Dennis mentioned?”
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he warned, hearing ideas she already had in the oh. If she got ideas, she’d call and text him nonstop to ask how the relationship was going. Eventually he’d turn off his phone just to get a break.
At some point when they were kids and she’d been stuck being Mom, she’d apparently gotten the idea that Moms smothered, and she hadn’t let go.
“Nothing is going to happen,” he said, before she could start planning his future wedding. “Mina is HIV positive.”
“Oh.” This oh was flat, not yet judgmental but edging that way. Brook was no longer getting any ideas. “I guess it’s best, then, that you’re not yet over Kimmie’s death.”
“What?” He regretted answering the phone, regretted saying anything. He especially regretted saying anything about Mina. Her disease was not his sister’s business, and it had not been his information to share, even if he’d thought Brook would understand his hesitation.
Which she clearly didn’t. “Maybe it’s not so bad if she’s one of those poor souls who’s had it since birth or got it from a blood transfusion or something. But what do you know about your neighbor? Maybe she got it from sharing a needle or she slept around in college or... I don’t know. How else do people get AIDS?”
“I think there’s a difference between HIV and AIDS,” he said slowly, realizing he didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know the answer to any of his sister’s questions. And the question of how Mina got HIV didn’t matter.
Did it?
“Well, you’re not going to be seeing her again to find out, are you?”
“Brook, less than a minute ago you were hopeful I was over Kimmie, would fall in love with Mina, get married and produce nieces and nephews for you to spoil.”
“All I said was ‘Oh.’”
“Yeah, but we both know where that oh was going.”
“Well,” she huffed, “you had always wanted to get married and have kids. Maybe you could marry someone with HIV, but you couldn’t have kids with them. It would be wrong to knowingly bring kids with AIDS into the world.”
I think HIV and AIDS are different. He didn’t bother repeating himself. She hadn’t listened the first time, and she wouldn’t listen a second. “I think someone with HIV can have children who don’t have the disease. Isn’t that part of what they talk about on the news when they talk about AIDS in Africa?”
“Honestly, Levi, you think a lot of things, but what do you know? About the disease or your neighbor?”
He bristled at her tone. She was his older sister, and her tone had likely been condescending since the day he was born.
At least, that was how he remembered it.
Most of the time he was able to remind himself that she was his sister, and she cared about him, and she fussed and bossed over everyone she cared about, from Dennis to her children to their aging father.
But tonight, he wasn’t in the mood. “Look, Brook, I get that you want me to get married again—”
“You liked being married,” she interrupted. “Even if...”
“Yes. Even if Kimmie had entire weeks where she didn’t leave the house, I did like being married. But I’m thirty-seven years old, and I get to pick the women I date.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he felt like her baby brother.
“And if you want to hear about any of them, you have to reserve judgment. At least until you meet them. And you have to pretend that I’m an adult and might pick out someone good. After all, I picked Kimmie.”
Silence reigned through the phone as Levi waited for Brook to point out that Kimmie’s clinical depression had eventually killed her. He could feel his phone shudder at the effort his sister was putting forth to keeping her mouth shut.
“Kimmie was great,” she said finally, her voice