The Geranium Girls Read Online Free Page B

off, but during the time leading up to the operation. Pain killers weren’t very effective and, anyway, I didn’t want to end up in Winnipeg’s version of the Betty Ford Center.”
    He smiled at Beryl. “So I came to think of pain a little differently.”
    “I’m sorry about your toes,” Beryl said. “You seem very young to have rheumatoid arthritis.”
    “Yes, I am young,” Dhani said. “Just thirty-nine now and the operation was four years ago.” He held up both shoes this time. “I’m still getting used to my new feet.
    “Anyway, I decided to begin from scratch with the pain. Pretend I had just met it and treat it differently from the vantage point of this new start. It was a presence all right, one that couldn’t be ignored. But it didn’t have to be the boss like it seemed to have been for so long.
    “I didn’t call it pain anymore. I called it Roberta. Roberta was my powerful companion. I felt her presence but it wasn’t unpleasant anymore. It simply was.”
    Beryl wanted to ask why he gave the pain a woman’s name. Was all pain part of the same sisterhood that she and mosquitoes and maybe wasps belonged to? But she let him go on.
    “Roberta came and went as she always had. I started to miss her a little when she vanished completely and I greeted her heartily when she returned. She became a bit like a big unwieldy dog who’s more trouble than she’s worth but whom you love to pieces.”
    “You loved your pain to pieces?” Beryl asked.
    Her foot began to throb and she wanted to raise it and rest it on a pillow, or on Dhani’s knee. She wanted to sleep. The talk of his relationship with pain was all very well, but she knew she wasn’t the type of person who could pull off something like that.
    “I’m sure I wouldn’t have the patience,” she said. “I’d succumb, like I’m succumbing now.”
    Dhani leapt up.
    “I’m sorry,” he said and lurched over to a small freezer where he reached in and came back with a cold pack. He wrapped it in a towel and pressed it to the sting and then sat down again with her foot upon his knee.
    “The ice should help and I’ll give you a couple of Tylenols before you go.”
    “Is it the female of the species, do you know,” Beryl asked, “the female wasp that does the stinging?”
    “I don’t know,” Dhani said.
    She longed to talk to him about the thing that had happened to her left foot last Saturday, the other thing she’d stepped on. She would tell him, but not just now. For sure she would be seeing him again.
    He was thirty-nine. Was that too old for her? She was just twenty-nine last November. Ten years difference. When she was fifty-nine, he’d be sixty-nine. When she was eighty-nine, he’d be ninety-nine. Georges had been older too, but not by so much. That hadn’t turned out very well. But he was nothing like Dhani.
    “Call me later and let me know how your foot is,” Dhani said as she was leaving. “I’m here till nine.”
    On her way home Beryl realized she had forgotten to pick up the shampoo that she had been heading to the drugstore for in the first place. The coupon was folded inside the pocket of her shorts.
    Certain things inside her had begun changing since last Saturday. She couldn’t describe the changes or even be absolutely sure what they were, just that they were there. Or maybe the whole of her was shifting, not just things inside her. She didn’t know.
    And she was missing her dad for the first time in her life. She hadn’t even particularly liked him when he was alive, but now she wished she could ask him things and apologize for being the way she was.
    Plus, she was doing things she’d never done before, like cutting out coupons, for one: she’d never done that. And washing her hair twice a day. That’s why she needed more shampoo. She was counting on getting over that one. It was too much.
    Please, don’t let there be a message from Joe, Beryl prayed, as she unlocked the door and stuck her key back under