I stared at the string of texts from my family that had been streaming in since lunchtime. Everyone but Dad. Lots of exclamation marks and heart- eye emojis. I dragged a hand down my mouth.
I was sitting at Mafi’s with Zander having the after-work drinks I’d promised him earlier. Briana was across the restaurant with the birthday crowd. I could see her laughing with Hector against the bar.
“This is so bad,” I muttered, putting my phone facedown and my palms to my eyeballs.
Jewel thought Briana was my girlfriend.
It didn’t even occur to me at the time how that whole thing had looked, me alone in a supply closet with a woman, Briana knowing my sister sight unseen, like a girlfriend would. No wonder Jewel’d been so smiley.
She told everyone she’d met my girlfriend. She’d even gone so far as to search the Royaume Northwestern website to get Briana’s bio and photo, which she then shared in the group text.
“What’s bad?” Zander asked.
I sat back in my seat and paused for a long moment. “I messed up,” I said finally.
“With what?”
“My family. I told them I have a girlfriend.”
He blinked at me. “Why the hell did you do that?”
I blew a breath through my lips. “They’re worried about me. Jeremiah and Amy getting married. I just wanted them to think I was okay.”
His smile moved into a low chuckle. “Damn. Your mom’s going to lose her shit when she finds out about this. You’re gonna get psychoanalyzed within an inch of your life.”
“I know,” I said. “But it gets worse. They think it’s Briana.”
“Our Briana? That Briana?” He nodded to her sitting at the bar with Hector.
“Jewel came to see me today and I was eating lunch with her in the supply closet by Gibson’s office. She assumed.”
“Well, what are they saying?” Zander asked.
I glanced at my phone. “That my girlfriend is beautiful. That they can’t wait to meet her. That we were making out in a supply closet.”
He practically howled.
“She is single, you know,” he said, still cracking up. “Check this out. The jackass she was married to? Cheated on her with her friend.” He shook his head. “Idiot. You should have seen what she did to him when she caught him.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “What did she do?”
“Not my place to tell you. You should ask her. Let’s just say he got what he had coming, and I hope I’m never on her bad side.” He laughed again.
I took a deep breath. “I’m calling my family.” I picked up my phone and went to dial, but he stopped me.
“Just hold up a second. Hold up,” he said. “Why don’t you just ask her?” “Ask her what?”
He shrugged. “Ask her to be your date to the wedding stuff.” “They think she’s my girlfriend. A date isn’t going to do it.” He shrugged again. “Well, ask her to be your girlfriend.”
I stared at him incredulously.
“Not for real. Ask her to help you out.”
When I didn’t reply, he leaned forward on the table. “Look, Briana is cool as hell. She’d probably do it. Especially if you’re her brother’s kidney donor—” He bounced his eyebrows and grinned.
I stared at him a second. “I was a match?”
He shook his head. “You didn’t just match. It was perfect—well, as perfect as it can get, outside of growing your own organs. I mean this kid’s not gonna find anything better, I’ll tell you that.”
A match.
In the last two weeks Zander had sent me for a physical and a mental health evaluation, in addition to the labs. I guess that should have been a good indication that things were lining up. Still, the news surprised me.
“Give me the broad strokes.”
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in the booth. “Well, all the standard surgical risks. Pain, infection, hernia. Bleeding, blood clots. General anesthesia, two- to three-hour surgery for a laparoscopic nephrectomy. Afterward, a couple of follow-up visits. No driving for two weeks, no lifting anything over ten pounds for a month. That’s it. Donors have the same life expectancy as non-donors. You’ll go on with your life.”
I sat back in my seat. “I need to think about this.” “Of course.”
“It’s not really a good time for me. I’ve got wedding stuff for the next few months.”
“We can schedule it when you want.”
“And I don’t know if Gibson will give me the time off—” “He will. I already asked him.”
I snorted.
“Look, I’m not trying to pressure you,” he said. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope you did it. This is the best possible scenario for this kid. And Briana’s a friend of mine, and I want to see her relax a little bit. It’s been hard on her.”
Briana. That was a bonus to doing this, if I was being honest. I liked her. Not that she’d know it was me if I did decide to do it. I wanted to donate anonymously.
“I need to think about it,” I said. It was a big decision.
He nodded. “Okay. But I’m just sayin’. This would definitely get you a wedding date.”
“If I do it, I don’t want anyone knowing it’s me.”
He looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Why not? Man, you’d be the hero of the whole ER. They’d probably throw you a damn parade—” “That is exactly why I don’t want anyone to know. I wouldn’t be doing it for the recognition. I’d be doing it to help him. I don’t like that kind of
attention.”
I didn’t even tell anyone it was my last day at Memorial West. I didn’t want anyone to make a big deal about it. I didn’t even like people singing “Happy Birthday” to me. Getting tearful thank-yous from Benny’s family and backslaps and handshakes from strangers was my idea of hell.
“If I do it, we’re doing it anonymously and we’re doing it at the transplant center down at the Mayo in Rochester, not here. I don’t want anyone poking their head into my recovery room.”
He let out a sigh. “All right, all right. It’s your thing, I will respect it. But I still think you should ask her.”
I rubbed my forehead tiredly. “I can’t ask her to do this,” I mumbled.
“Why? What’s the worst thing she can say? No?” He took a swallow of his old-fashioned. “Just tell her what you told me. Level with her. Plus your
family’s fucking hilarious. She’d probably have the time of her life over there.”
I let out a long breath. “She’d probably think we’re a bunch of weirdos.” The idea of her being submerged into that chaos was enough to give me heart palpitations. Grandpa trying to run people into the bushes in his electric wheelchair, Mom talking about sex toys and lubricants, while Jafar
squawked profanities. No. God, no.
Zander swayed his tumbler at me. “Your family is awesome. Hell, I’d be your date if I could. And I wanna see if you can pull this shit off.” He chuckled into his glass.
I looked at my phone and the string of texts. They didn’t even need me for this conversation, they were off to the races all on their own. They bought this hook, line, and sinker. And why wouldn’t they?
It felt like some strange self-fulfilling prophecy, like I’d created Briana by speaking the lie into the universe. She was exactly the kind of woman I would like to bring home to my family. Smart, successful, likable— beautiful. And she worked with me, just like I’d alluded to when I told them I was seeing someone. Absolutely nobody would feel sorry for me because my ex was marrying my brother if I showed up with this woman on my arm. She was, for all intents and purposes, perfect.
But I had no idea how to broach this subject with her. At all. And part of me worried that if I did, she’d be so turned off or weirded out by it that she’d stop talking to me altogether.
This new friendship was the only good thing happening to me at the moment. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.
Still, the idea of admitting to my family that there was no girlfriend…I couldn’t tell which scenario was worse: the one where I maybe scared off the only friend I’d made since coming here, or the one where I showed up
alone while Amy married Jeremiah and everyone watched to see if I’d die of a broken heart.
“How did I get myself into this situation?” I breathed.
Zander shook his head. “Just ask her. Trust me. She’s one of the coolest people I know.”
I glanced at my phone again. This time Dad had texted. Can’t wait to meet her.
Everyone wanted me to be okay. They were so happy because this was proof that I was okay, that I’d moved on, that I was whole. It was permission for them to let the Amy/Jeremiah thing go, to be excited for them, to accept this new reality. I could feel the elation coming through my phone, the collective sigh of relief that this was a real thing, a real woman
—real closure to what had happened.
If I’d had any doubts about how badly my family needed this, this was the answer.
I glanced at Briana across the restaurant. This time she was looking back. She waved, and leaned in and said something to Hector. He looked over at me and waved too. Then she jumped off her barstool and headed in our direction.
I got instantly nervous. Like she’d somehow know about the miscommunication with my family and demand an explanation. I felt myself clamming up the closer she got, like my ability to speak was being sucked into a vacuum.
“Hey,” she said as she got to the table. “You came.” She smiled at me in a way that made her whole face light up.
Luckily I didn’t have to answer, because Zander broke in. “Sit,” he said, scooting over.
She slid into the booth, set her purse next to her, and plucked one of Zander’s french fries off his plate and ate it. “What are you guys talking about over here?” she asked, chewing. “I can hear you laughing across the restaurant.”
Zander pushed his plate toward her and nodded at me. “Talking about the time Jacob carried an injured ATV driver out of the woods a few years ago.”
I blinked at him. That was not what we were talking about. It was a true story, but we hadn’t brought it up in years. What was he doing? Was he wingmanning me?
Briana arched an eyebrow at me. “Oh yeah? What happened?”
I cleared my throat. “He crashed it. Broke both feet. We couldn’t get a signal to call for help.”
“And you piggybacked him?” I nodded. “It took three hours.”
“And that was funny?” she asked, looking back and forth between us.
Zander didn’t skip a beat. “The guy threw up down his back on the hike out.”
Briana choked on her giggle. Well, so much for the wingmanning.
“That was nice of you, though,” she said, still cracking up. Then she leaned in a little. “Just so you know, I forbade Hector to come over here.” She nodded back to the bar. “That’s today’s drunk extrovert.”
I laughed a little.
Then she seemed to remember something, and she reached down next to her and started rummaging in her purse. “I forgot. Here’s the sticker for your car,” she said.
She slid it facedown across the table toward me. “Thanks for taking one.”
I put a hand on top of it. “Of course.”
“I have to get back over there,” she said, looking at her watch. “Hey, why don’t you tell me that family-story thing at lunch tomorrow? Supply closet? Noon?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“You guys have fun!” she said, plucking another french fry off Zander’s plate. Then she slid out of the booth and was gone, back to her side of the restaurant.
“See? She’s cool,” Zander said, taking his fries back. “I’m telling you, ask her.”
I watched her walk back to the bar and hop onto the barstool next to Hector.
I picked up the bumper sticker and looked at it a moment. It was white with blue letters. It said HELP BENNY FIND A KIDNEY. YOU COULD BE THE MATCH! There was a website under it.
It felt so futile. Like a shout into the void.
This kid was never going to find someone. It was going to take him years.
I’d never imagined donating a kidney to someone I didn’t know. I’d figured if I ever did it, it’d be for someone in my life, not a stranger. A part of me even thought I should hold off in case Mom needed another transplant—though I knew she had four other kids who would gladly step in. She didn’t need me to save mine.
I stared at the sticker.
I didn’t know Benny. But I did know his sister. If I did this, it wouldn’t just change his life. It would change hers.
I looked across the restaurant at Briana. She was laughing with some of the nurses. But I remembered the look on her face earlier when she talked
about her brother. I remembered the day he came into the ER and the panic in her voice when she was treating him. I remembered the way she cried in the supply closet that time I walked in on her…How despondent she was. How helpless she probably felt. It was how I would have felt if Mom hadn’t gotten a donor when she did.
She must have sensed me looking at her, because she peered up at me and smiled. A beautiful, genuine, friendly smile.
And in that instant I decided.
“I’m in,” I said, talking to Zander but looking at her.
There was a moment of silence next to me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.” I looked at him. “I’m in. I’ll do it. I’ll donate.”
He smacked a hand on the table. “All right! Yes!” Then he paused. “You’re sure?”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
He grinned. “I’ll tell him tonight. That kid’s gonna lose his shit. Seriously, man. You have no idea what this means to them. You’re doing a good thing.” He paused. “And you’re sure you wanna do this anonymously?”
I nodded. “I’m sure. Don’t tell anyone. No one. Not even my mom.” “You’re not telling your mom?”
“No. I’m not telling anyone.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want my family to know. It was that I didn’t want Briana to know. I didn’t want her to feel like she owed me anything or was obligated to be my friend because of this. I didn’t want strings or the recognition. I just wanted to help her, and I wanted to do it in secret, and my family knowing was too risky. Contact with her had already been breached. I couldn’t trust that Jewel wouldn’t show up at my work again and casually mention me donating a kidney to someone. And Mom too. She knew too
many people and there were too many opportunities for this to leak. I wanted it quiet and confidential, at least for now.
And then I had to laugh, because it occurred to me that it was easier for me to donate an entire organ than it was to ask a woman to pose as my girlfriend and come with me to a few family gatherings. My fear of rejection and judgment was that acute.
I guess I just had to decide what scared me the most. Showing up to this wedding alone, or making Briana Ortiz an indecent proposal.
