Broccoli Cheese Soup

The gift shop at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was the size of a generous walk-in closet, which made it feel less like retail and more like a secret—a place you could pass by without noticing until you needed it.

Jon stood just inside the threshold, letting the automatic door hush closed behind him. His jacket still held February’s bite, and the warmth inside began thawing him in the wrong places: his ears, his fingers, the thin skin at his throat.

The shop smelled like lilies, the dander of plush stuffed animals, and chocolate. It was bright in a way the rest of the hospital wasn’t. Overhead lights hit glossy displays and made everything shine as if it had been polished for someone important.

A spinner rack of greeting cards turned slowly in the draft. Plush animals sat in tidy rows, their stitched smiles fixed at a level of optimism that bordered on offensive. A narrow aisle led past bouquets, framed quotes about courage, and bracelets with tiny charms that clinked softly whenever someone brushed the display.

Jon approached the bracelets like they were rare artifacts.

There were hearts and angels and tiny silver footprints, a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover. A charm shaped like a lighthouse. A charm shaped like a wing. A charm shaped like a cup of tea, which made him blink as if he’d imagined it.

He touched it with one finger. Cold. Just metal. Still he stared, as if the right angle of looking might reveal the trick.

Hospitals were strange that way: buildings where people were cut open and stitched back together, where machines watched your heartbeat and measured your blood like weather, and yet someone decided what you might need—what might help—was a bracelet with a charm. A trinket. A talisman. Something to prove there was still a you to put jewelry on.

Jon picked up a bracelet with hearts spelling L-O-V-E, held it up, then set it down again. His palm was damp. His nails looked chewed, though he hadn’t noticed himself doing it.

“Looking for something special?” the shopkeeper asked.

She was in her late sixties with silver hair tucked behind one ear, reading glasses on a chain. She sat on a tall stool behind a counter where a cash register lived like an afterthought. Next to it was a bowl of mints and a sign: Please don’t take flowers into ICU.

Jon forced a smile he didn’t feel. “Yeah. Something… small.”

“Small can still be meaningful,” she said, like a line she’d practiced.

Jon nodded, then looked back at the display. “I don’t know how you pick this stuff.”

The shopkeeper lifted an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“All of it,” Jon said. “Out of everything in the world. How does it end up being… these things. A plush bear. A mug with Hang in there on it.”

“Procurement,” she said. “Catalogs. Contracts. Not as poetic as it looks.”

Jon laughed once, very softly. It came out wrong, like a cough that came out when you had meant to laugh.

The shopkeeper watched him with an expression that was kind without being intrusive.

Jon picked up the L-O-V-E bracelet again and held it as if weighing it might tell him whether it was the right choice.

“Who’s it for?” she asked.

His mouth moved before his brain finished deciding. “My… girlfriend.”

It was a harmless lie. Girlfriends received gifts; girlfriends wore bracelets. Girlfriends didn’t require you to explain the complicated geometry of love when the person you loved most in the world was three floors up and sleeping through daylight. When your protector—who could stand down any evil thing—was being cut down before your eyes.

The shopkeeper’s eyes flickered over him: the suit coat thrown over jeans, the hospital band he’d forgotten to cut off, the way his shoulders sat as if he were carrying something heavy he couldn’t set down.

“Mm,” she said, not buying it, not challenging it. “What does she like?”

Jon tried to picture Katia wearing one. Katia in sharp heels. Katia who liked her coffee black and her opinions unsoftened. Wearing a charm. Never.

“She likes… strong things,” Jon said. “Practical.”

“Practical girlfriends are the best kind,” the shopkeeper said. Then, nodding at the bracelet: “You seem stuck on this one.”

“It’s just… regular,” Jon said. “Just regular.”

“Sometimes regular is what lasts,” she said. “There’s no improving on it. Regular things are the ones we can depend upon.”

Jon stared down, unconvinced. Not because he doubted her, exactly—because he doubted everything.

The shopkeeper pointed to one charm among the hearts: a dark stone the color of rainclouds. “That’s hematite. Grounding. Protection.”

“Protection from what?” Jon asked, and hated how his voice sounded, like a dare.

She met his gaze. “From feeling like you have no control.”

Jon swallowed. The stone caught the fluorescent light and looked wet.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

She slid off her stool and came around the counter with a small velvet pouch, placing the bracelet inside as if it were fragile.

Jon wrote on the blank card: For when you wake up. Then: Love, Jon.

As she rang him up, she said, “You’re allowed to get something for yourself too, you know.”

Jon blinked. “What?”

“A mint. A coffee. Something warm.” She nodded at his face. “You look like you’ve been holding your breath for a month.”

He took a mint on impulse. It cracked between his teeth with sharp sweetness and cut the bite of the nicotine and tar coating his gums.

Outside, the hospital swallowed him again: disinfectant and stale coffee, muted beeping somewhere behind walls, soft squeak of nurses’ shoes. He held the velvet pouch in one hand and felt its weight like an anchor.

Three floors up, the hallway outside room 7B was quiet in a way that made Jon feel like he was intruding. Sue’s room was at the end, near a window that looked out at the garage and the gray beyond it.

Through the small window in the door, he could see her in bed. Head turned slightly, hair flattened against the pillow. The blanket rose and fell with her breathing—small and restrained, as if her body didn’t want to call attention to itself.

Sleeping again.

His phone buzzed. Evan – Partner.

He could ignore it. He should. The phone buzzed again, then again.

He answered.

“Jon,” Evan said immediately. Office life spilled through the speaker like a different world. “Where are you?”

“I told you,” Jon said. “I’m at the hospital.”

A pause. “Right. Okay. Listen, we’ve got a problem. The motion for reconsideration—”

Jon closed his eyes.

“It’s due today,” Evan continued. “I need you to look at one issue. Fifteen minutes, tops.”

Jon laughed, that wrong laugh, and dragged his fingers over his forehead. “I can’t.”

“Jon, I know it’s—”

“I can’t,” Jon repeated, hearing the edge in his own voice.

Evan lowered his voice. “Is it… bad?”

“What do you think?” Jon said.

Another pause. Then Evan, suddenly human: “Okay. I’ll handle it. Just… keep me posted.”

A nurse walked toward him with a clipboard. Warm brown skin, hair tucked under a patterned cap. Her badge read: MARIANA, RN.

She smiled in a way that didn’t demand anything back. “Hey, Jon. You’ve been here a lot.”

Jon looked at Sue’s door. “She wakes up sometimes. And then she’s gone again.”

Mariana nodded. “She’s still strong,” she said. “Mothers are always strong for their sons.” She glanced at her clipboard. “Her vitals are stable. She’s comfortable. I’ll check on her in a bit. You can go in if you want, but… if you need a break, that’s okay too.”

A break. Jon almost smiled at the absurdity.

A memory hit him like a shove: eight years old, throat on fire, the world narrowed to pain. Sue in the café line, returning with honey lemon tea, peeling back the lid carefully, stirring in honey with small, unhurried circles.

“Tiny sips,” she’d said.

Later, broccoli cheese soup. He’d made a face at it—green things had no business in soup—and she’d dared him. One bite, a grin, which hurt, which made him laugh, which made his throat bleed a little—pink in the tissue. Sue’s gasp, then laughter.

“Well,” she’d said, “that’s one way to prove you’re alive.”

He’d believed then, with the certainty only a child could summon, that as long as she was there nothing could go wrong. Because she was watching. Because she always knew what was needed.

Footsteps approached—more purposeful this time. Down the hall, partly hidden by a wall, a tall doctor in a white coat spoke with a woman holding a tablet. His accent was faint but unmistakable.

“She’s deteriorating,” the doctor said quietly.

The woman replied too low to catch, and then the doctor: “Her body is consuming itself.”

Jon’s grip tightened on the chair until his knuckles hurt.

“Hospice?” the woman asked.

A pause. “Soon,” the doctor said. “She can’t eat. We can’t force it. It won’t be long.”

Jon sat very still, as if moving might make it true.

His phone buzzed again. Katia.

He answered.

“Jonny,” Katia said—warm but direct, a Coney Island Russian that sharpened certain words. “How is she?”

“She’s good,” Jon said immediately. “She’s sleeping, but she’s good.”

A pause, the kind Katia used like a tool. “Sleeping, okay. But how is she?”

“She woke up earlier,” Jon said. “She was talking. She had energy.”

“Da nu,” Katia said softly. Really? Come on.

“She did,” Jon insisted. “She was asking about you.”

“What did the doctor say?”

Jon’s voice caught. He forced it smooth. “Stable. Improving.”

“Da nu,” Katia said again, and this time it wasn’t teasing. It was skeptical, almost sad. “Jon. My father—”

“I know,” Jon snapped, then softened. “I know. I just… I don’t want to—”

Katia didn’t argue. That was the worst part. “Do you want me to come?”

Jon pictured her here: bright scarf, eyes that saw too much. “Not yet.”

Another pause. “Okay,” she said gently. “But you don’t have to be a hero. You know that.”

Only God could stop this. No doctor. No nurse. No pill. No charm bracelet. And God, apparently, wasn’t going to.

Jon found himself in the cafeteria without remembering choosing to go there.

He picked up two cups. Hot water. Tea bags. Honey. Lemon. The scent rose—bright citrus, floral honey—and for one second his body forgot where it was. Steam fogged his glasses. He wiped them with his sleeve.

In the corner, a crock with a handwritten label: Broccoli Cheese Soup.

He took two bowls. The ladle came up thick and steaming. The smell was bluntly comforting: butter, salt, something green softened into submission.

He set the tray down, stared at it as if assembling these items could rearrange the universe. He took a sip of tea. It burned his tongue. The sting filled his eyes, and a tear slipped down his cheek, landing on the white plastic lid—one tiny dark spot.

He blotted it quickly, as if sadness was not the only option available, and carried the tray down the hall.

Sue’s room was dim, blinds partly drawn. The monitor blinked soft green numbers. Sue lay on her side facing the window, cheekbones sharp, hands pale and still.

Jon set the tray on the table and sat. He waited, watching her breathing, listening to the machine sounds, staring at her eyelashes as if he could will them to move.

Then her nose twitched.

So small, so human, it nearly broke him.

Her eyelids moved, slowly, like curtains lifting. Her eyes opened unfocused, then found his face.

“Jon,” she whispered. Her voice was dry, like paper rubbed together.

“Hi,” he said, too brightly. “Hey. You’re awake.”

Her gaze drifted to the tray. “Is that… broccoli cheese soup?”

Jon laughed, real this time. “Yeah. They had it.”

He held out the tea. “Honey lemon. Don’t—don’t drink too fast. Tiny sips.”

Sue’s hand moved slowly. When her fingers brushed his, she felt impossibly light, like holding a bird. She lifted the cup, inhaled, eyes closing—not in sleep, but recognition.

“That smell,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Jon said.

She took a tiny sip and winced. “Still too impatient,” she said, and the faintest smile flickered.

After a moment she said, as if it were ordinary: “Tell me about Katia.”

Jon blinked. “What about her?”

Sue’s eyes softened. “Are you going to marry her?”

“Mom—”

“What?” she said. “I can ask. I’m allowed. I’m your mother.”

“I don’t know,” Jon said.

“You’ll give me grandchildren,” she said. “It is an order.” Humor, and underneath it something reaching.

“You better not sleep through the ceremony,” Jon said, because it was the kind of sentence he could say without breaking.

She looked at him. She had wanted to be there. She still wanted to.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jon said. “I don’t— I don’t know how to—”

Sue’s hand shifted under the blanket. Slowly she lifted it. Jon leaned forward and offered his own, and her fingers curled around his—weak but deliberate.

“You’re doing it,” Sue whispered.

“It doesn’t feel like enough.”

“It is,” she said. “You are enough.”

Jon bent his head to the bed and cried quietly into the blanket like he was eight years old again. Sue’s hand stayed on his.

The door opened softly.

Mariana stepped in, like a ghost that simply appeared. She glanced at Sue, then at Jon. “Hi. I’m sorry to interrupt. Sue, how are we feeling?”

Sue’s eyelids drooped. “Tired,” she said, as if the word carried an immortal curse.

Mariana nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.” She checked the monitor, adjusted a line, then looked at Jon. “She needs her rest. You can stay a little longer, but… try to let her sleep.”

“Yeah,” Jon said, wiping his face as if tears were a mess he should clean up. “Of course.”

Sue’s eyes were already closing again.

Jon leaned in and kissed her forehead. Her skin was warm. Too warm.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” he whispered.

Sue’s lips moved, but no sound came.

Jon watched her breathe for another minute, as if he could memorize it. Then he stood, took the tea cup Sue had barely touched, and carried it into the hallway.

The corridor seemed longer now, as if someone had stretched it while he wasn’t looking. He walked past closed doors, nurses’ stations, the sailboat print, toward the garage, toward the exit, toward the cold.

The vestibule was dim, air cooler. The automatic doors showed the world outside in fragments: concrete, headlights, gray sky.

It had started to snow.

Not a storm—just steady flakes drifting down with quiet insistence, catching in streetlight glow, almost gentle, almost beautiful, as if the city were being softened around the edges.

Jon held the cup against his chest. The warmth was already fading. The lid was sticky where honey had dried. He could still smell lemon.

He took out a cigarette. A Marlboro Light. He’d started smoking again. The bitter taste brought tears to his eyes anyway.

His hands stung as he took one drag, then another.

The snow kept falling.

Jon lifted the cup and took one last sip. Lukewarm now, almost cool. It tasted faintly of honey and something else—something as faint as a whisper—a feeling only a child can know. The feeling that it will all be all right. A remembered certainty. A thing from another life. Something you knew you felt once, but doubted you could ever feel again.

He pressed the cup to his chest again and felt the last of its warmth radiate against his beating heart.