No Good Deed - Marie Sexton Page 0,10
make me interrogate you?”
Jonas’s crooked grin hadn’t changed a bit. “Depends on the interrogation techniques, I guess.”
Charlie laughed, but Jonas kept talking.
“I was in Seattle.”
“That explains the hipster glasses.”
“They’re adorable, right? I love them. Wish I’d realized I was near-sighted years ago.” He washed a piece of bacon down with some orange juice. “My sister lived up there and she let me stay with her the first few weeks, until I could get back on my feet.”
Charlie vaguely remembered Jonas talking about Shelly. They were half siblings. Jonas’s father, an assistant coach for the NFL, had changed teams and cities multiple times through the course of his career. He’d also changed wives. Shelly was the product of his first marriage. Jonas had been the product of his third and was fifteen years younger than his only sibling.
“I didn’t realize you guys were close.”
“We weren’t, at first. But I’d just left Gray, and she’d just divorced her husband. We were both pissed off and feeling sorry for ourselves. Plus we had the same worthless father.”
It wasn’t that Jonas’s father had been abusive in any way, but he’d been way too busy with work to deal with anything as inconsequential as children. He’d worked eighty-hour weeks for years, right up until he dropped dead of a coronary, right on the football field during practice. He’d made tons of money and should have been able to leave a hefty inheritance for his two kids, but between exorbitant spending, expensive taste, and alimony for four wives, there’d been less left over for the kids than anyone expected. He’d left Jonas with a small inheritance and a whole lot of resentment.
“What have you been up to?” Charlie asked. “Working?”
“I finally finished my degree.”
“Child development?”
He nodded. “I worked at a daycare up there. I loved it.”
“And I bet the kids love you.”
He grinned. “What’s not to love, right?” He sobered quickly, maybe thinking the comment came too close to the elephant in the room. “The gig economy’s been good for me.”
“Your art, you mean?”
“I have profiles on Fiverr and DeviantArt. I’ve had a decent amount of commission work over the past few years—enough that I was able to go part-time at the daycare. I have two projects I should be working on now, actually.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“It’s been great. Working with the kids and making money with my art. And Shelly and I were really close. She was my best friend up there. It was perfect, for a while.”
“So, what happened?”
Jonas sighed and pushed his plate aside. “She had polycystic kidney disease.”
Charlie knew the basics of the disease but had no personal experience with it. “It’s hereditary, right?”
Jonas nodded. “I don’t have it. But she did. She was diagnosed three years ago.” Charlie noted the past tense but waited for Jonas to tell the story. “She waited two years for a kidney.”
“But never got one?”
Jonas shook his head. “She was B-negative.”
One of the rarer blood types. “Damn. And I take it you’re not?”
“A-positive.” His voice trembled a bit as he fought tears. “I felt so helpless, sitting there watching her die, all because I don’t have the right kind of kidney.”
“When was this?”
“A year ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He winced. “I mean, it’s not okay. It sucks. I had to rebuild everything when I moved up there, and she was the cornerstone. Losing her…” He shook his head. “I can’t even tell you how much that hurt. But I’ve processed it. I read the books and went through the stages. Bargaining, anger, binge-eating. That’s the order, right? But at some point, I realized what I needed to do.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to donate a kidney.”
Charlie blinked, confused. “To who?”
Jonas shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” He picked up a pen off the table and began doodling on his napkin. “I know it sounds crazy. Donating a kidney to a complete stranger won’t bring my sister back. But I keep thinking about how Shelly died because she needed one. And here we are, all of us walking around with a spare. I couldn’t save her, but I can save somebody.”
“That’s—”
“Insane? Crazy? Completely illogical?”
“I was going to say ‘admirable.’ The procedure’s pretty safe, as far as surgeries go. It shouldn’t lessen your life expectancy any. You only need one, as long as you don’t end up damaging it somehow.”
“Right. They tell me no more Advil. No more skydiving or kickboxing. And my dreams of being an MMA fighter are right out. Just when I was ready to start training