“And you smell nice.” She wore Ma griffe. She always did. He bought her a bottle every birthday. It wasn’t easy to find, he had to haunt beauty product websites. He’d tried to get her interested in other perfumes, Chanel or Joy, but the lemony, gardenia scent was the perfume of her youth and she was as loyal to it as she was to everything that touched her life.
When her meal arrived he helped her eat it. Then collected her washing and tidied her room. He made sure her music player was charged and her radio was tuned properly to her favourite station, no static. She asked him to untangle some glass beads that’d knotted up so he did that while they waited for the tea trolley to come around.
He told her about the gas explosion and how he’d been at a friend’s house when the marathon bomber struck. She got twinkly eyed at the word friend, because she knew he didn’t mean Dillon.
“A woman from work, but it’s nothing serious.”
He’d never kept secrets from Buster, but there was stuff he didn’t tell her. And she could often tell from looking at him. She knew he didn’t do girlfriends; she was smart enough to have figured he slept around like one of the characters in the books she liked to read. She never judged, but she wanted something more, something better for him, you could see it in her eyes.
She leaned into his shoulder. “It’s a start.”
“I’m not sure I have time for it.”
She whispered, “Make time,” but he heard her as she’d sounded when she was well, when she was pushing him to take chances.
“We have the opportunity to present to an investor. If he likes our work, he might fund us. I could quit work. That’s more important.”
“No.” Buster shook her head and it was real disagreement, not the tremble from the Parkinson’s.
“We’ll get one shot, it won’t come again.”
She leant her head on his shoulder and he gave her a hug. “Later, I can do the romance thing later.”
“Won’t come when you want it to.”
He’d figured that. It didn’t come for his mother or for Buster. Dillon usually had a girlfriend, but they were interchangeable busty blondes, never on the scene longer than a year.
“You know what, it’s not my call. The woman, Jacinta...”
Buster smiled, thrilled the woman had a name.
“She’s a bigwig at work. She doesn’t have time for me.”
Her mouth opened in surprise.
“Told me exactly that.” He laughed. “Don’t call her, she’ll call me.” That made Buster cough, which was what happened when she tried to giggle.
The tea trolley arrived and he got her a cup of tea, a coffee for himself.
“She paints these amazing pictures.” He bumped her shoulder gently. “Not like your glittery ones, or the ones with the numbers. They’re...I don’t know how to describe them, but they’re memorable.”
“You like her.”
He nodded. “But don’t start getting it into your head it’s going to be anything.”
“I don’t want you to be alone.”
“I’m okay. I’ve got work, Ipseity and Dillon. And you. That’s more than enough.”
She shook her head side to side, an exaggerated motion; disapproval. He’d always been a loner and she thought it was a failing of hers that he wasn’t more social.
“I’m going to take a couple of sick days to work on Ipseity so I won’t be at work. If you need anything get them to ring me at home or on the mobile.”
“Don’t come tomorrow. I’ll be right.”
He lifted the pearls over her head, then took her earrings off and packed them away. He knelt to take her shoes and stocking socks off, getting her half ready for bed. The nursing staff would do the rest. “I’ll do your foot massage tomorrow, okay.”
She put shaky fingers to his hair. It’d had taken her a long while to accept his assistance with such personal things and she still wasn’t comfortable with him seeing her this way. She was the one who made the decision to move to the nursing home, and while it was easier, safer because there was twenty-four hour care on tap, they both hated it. Buster, because it was the end of her independence, and Mace because she wasn’t ever coming home for more than a weekend. He stood and kissed her cheek and put the TV remote near her hand.