"Do you have a phone number, then?"
"Sorry, ma'am. Can't help."
"Come on, Trina! Norman's almost here," calls Rick, and a moment later Trina is joined by her two teenagers, Rob and Kylie, as she stands in the garage with tears of joy streaming down her face.
"It's beautiful, Rick… It's absolutely beautiful," she blubbers, then she turns to an elderly-looking man who has just wheeled himself into the garage in an electric wheelchair.
"Look, Norman," she says, pushing her children aside for the newcomer, "isn't it wonderful? Rick is so clever, isn't he?"
Norman Spinnaker is, like all of Trina's patients, facing a bleak outlook. Diabetes has blocked his blood vessels and robbed his legs of the strength to carry him, while nephropathy has destroyed his kidneys. Without constant dialysis, or a transplant, Norman is well aware that he is never more than few days away from meeting his maker. But thanks to Trina's unbounded optimism, he looks to his uncertain future with more confidence than a teen pop idol.
"I think it's… um… fabulous," says Norman, critically eyeing the machine that Trina insists will save his life. "But are you sure about the power-to-weight ratio?"
"Absolutely," says Rick. "C'mon Trina, climb aboard and we'll give it a trial run."
"Yes!" exclaims Trina, and she punches the air triumphantly.
The machine is a two-person quadricycle which has been fashioned from a kidney-shaped fibreglass bathtub complete with faucets, shower and soap rack. Wheels, and a nautical steering wheel from a marine junkyard in West Vancouver, have been added by Rick, along with a brass bulb horn that he had liberated from a vintage Model T Ford in his college days. A limp Canadian maple leaf flag hanging from the top of the ten-foot shower pole caps off the bizarre-looking machine, and Rick gives the pole a shake as he explains in a madinventor's voice, "Shipmates and shipbrats… Note that this apparently standard shower unit is, in actual fact, the mainmast, from which a shower-curtain sail can be suspended. And this," he carries on as he triumphantly pulls a large yellow plastic duck from a bag, "this is the figurehead which I shall now fasten to the plughole puller while naming this vessel… " He turns to Trina with a questioning look.
"The Kidney Queen," suggests Trina regally.
"Absolutely," agrees Rick. "The Kidney Queen. God bless her and all who pedal in her."
"She's terrific," says Trina, running her hand over the canvas lawn-chair seats. "What d'ye think, kids?"
"You're crazy," spits Kylie. "Like, you really think you can pedal that all the way to New York?"
"No problem," says Trina as she hops in and tests the pedals. "It's all downhill from here. Check out a map."
"Mum," questions Rob, "why are you doing this?"
"To raise money for kidney transplants —" she begins, but her fourteen-year-old son cuts her off.
"No, I meant, why are you making me look such a dweeb?"
"A dweeb?" questions Trina, and she looks to Rick for support, but he's busy watching a spider on the ceiling.
"Yeah, Mum," carries on Kylie. "It's kind'a embarrassing. My friends all say you're weird."
"Hold on a minute, you two," says Norman, coming to Trina's side. "I think your friends must be weird. You're lucky to have a mother — what's that smell?"
"Oh — oh," cries Trina, leaping out of the machine and racing for the kitchen. "Flaming banana curry cake."
"You were saying, Mr. Spinnaker?" questions Kylie.
Trina's intended Kidney Run to New York is seven months away, but her goal to raise a million dollars for kidney transplants is already looking shaky. Her primary problem is that she lacks the wholehearted backing of the local Kidney Society. Indeed, the president and members of the steering committee have been frantically distancing themselves from the scheme from the moment Trina announced her plans.
Until Trina's arrival, the Society's fundraising committee had been both inoffensive and ineffective due to the advanced years of most of its members. And how Trina, in her late thirties, was elected to the chair of the committee at her very first meeting is still a matter of some debate, although some of the blame has been laid at the feet of Maureen Stuckenberg, the Society's perennial president.
"We need someone with bright new ideas," Ms. Stuckenberg insisted, and the group unanimously voted for Trina, knowing that any event requiring most forms of physical activity, financial input or personal solicitations by members could easily be discussed to oblivion within a year or so.
"Just propose a few of your best ideas," the president had told Trina a few weeks before the annual committee meeting, not knowing of Trina's passionate nature and unswerving doggedness in her desire to do good, and Trina arrived at the meeting weighed down with graphs, sketches and a slew of fundraising manuals, and quickly set the stage.
"You have to personalize the plea to open purses," she explained poetically to the group. "I mean, look at the opposition —"
"We don't think it's helpful to characterize other charities in that manner, Trina," Maureen Stuckenberg admonished. "We are all in the same boat when it comes to raising money."
"Okay. But we haven't got a bunch of goggle-eyed pot-bellied orphans on our side," Trina continued, undeterred. "To really squeeze the pips you need something zappy, like a kid with no legs or a hole in his face you can get your fist into."
"Trina…" the President warned.
"Well, let's face it. Most of our people are just ugly, fat old fogies with nothing to show for their complaint but a dodgy urine sample. I mean, all they do is sleep."
"Trina. We are not in the business of exploiting the suffering of our patients."
Trina's mumbled retort — "Everyone else does" — didn't sat well with the executive, and she found herself with an increasingly hostile audience as she worked her way through her presentation.
Dances, duck races and fashion shows were all shrugged off without debate; lawn mower marathons, telemarketing and pet shows were given the cold shoulder; and Trina was getting down to the wire when she suggested inviting Martha Stewart to design a commemorative kidney-shaped teapot.
"Okay," she told the committee in desperation. "Idea number twenty-seven. We could do the same as the Women's Institute in northern England. They made a mint selling their own Christmas calendars."
"At last," Maureen Stuckenberg muttered under her breath, and immediately garnered nods of support from around the table.
"Shall we take a vote on that, ladies?" she proposed loudly, and had a full show of hands, until a spoilsport — Trina's geriatric predecessor — demanded details. "What kind of calendar was it? Recipes? Knitwear? Cute little cuddly animals?"
"No. Just portraits of the president and all the members," Trina responded imperturbably.
"Well, that sounds very sensible, Trina," Maureen Stuckenberg carried on, primping herself up and slicking back her eyebrows. But the spoiler had a cautious eye on Trina and insisted on specifics.
"Well, actually," Trina mumbled, with her head in her papers, "they all posed in the nude."
Ms. Stuckenberg came close to meltdown, but Trina was running out of options and persisted. "You needn't worry, Maureen. I mean, most of them weren't particularly good-looking, either."
"Trina. Our Christmas fundraising event has been very successful for the past twenty-seven years without smutty ideas like that," the president fumed indignantly, and bristled still further when Trina pointed out the obvious irony in the Kidney Society's seasonally appropriate sales of cholesterol-loaded Christmas cakes, giant chocolate bars and sugar-coated butter shortcake to a diabetes-prone, overweight populace with a forty-percent chance of developing kidney failure.
"It's like the Cancer Society selling cigarettes," Trina