Now there’s a man who understands how to do his own laundry, she thought.
He was pulling the other rickety chair up beside hers.
“Is this okay?” he asked. “Or are you out here trying to think your own thoughts in peace?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “Sit with me.”
He did.
She held the pack of cigarettes in his direction, but he only shook his head silently.
“You don’t smoke, do you?” she asked him.
“I don’t, no.”
“Did you ever?”
“Oh, yes.”
“So you quit. You’re a better man than I am. Well, that came out wrong, but you know what I mean. When did you quit?”
She looked over at his face. He had a trace of jet-black beard showing. He’d apparently left his glasses inside.
“June 12, 1957. Recognize the date?”
She didn’t, at least not for a moment.
“You should,” he added. “Being a doctor and all.”
“Oh, right,” she said when it hit her. That was the day the U.S. Public Health Service had taken its official position on smoking. “All that cancer stuff.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Oh, I believe it.” She could have said more. Probably should have. Instead she just held up her bottle. “What about this?” she asked. “Can I interest you? Given a year or two they’ll probably find out this stuff is killing us, too. All the good stuff is bad, if you know what I mean.”
He laughed, but just a little. Just low and almost private. “What is it exactly I’m being offered?”
“It’s a decent Scotch. I only brought one glass. But you can have the glass. I’ll be uncouth and take a drink right out of the bottle.”
She held the glass out in his direction and he took it from her. Their fingers bumped briefly.
“Now that I’ll take you up on,” he said. “Owing to the fact that it’s been such a miserable day. But just two fingers. Just enough to take the edge off this horrible time. I won’t stay.”
“Don’t leave on my account.”
“I’m not. I just don’t want Justin to be alone long.”
“Oh. Right.”
She was too embarrassed to admit that she had briefly forgotten about the boy’s need for close care. Her mind had been drifting a million miles away from such concerns.
“I mostly just came out here to thank you for stepping in where you were needed. And also . . . well, sooner or later I have to ask . . . I’ve been doing some worrying about what I’m going to owe you when all this is over.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Nothing. Or, I don’t know . . . whatever you can. Just pay me what you can when you can. I really don’t practice for money anymore. If it wasn’t for how much it costs to feed the animals and buy their medical supplies I’d say it’s on me. But as it stands, I’d say pay what you can, down to and including nothing if you can’t manage it.”
She heard something wordless come out of him. A rush of air. Fear exiting.
“That’s a big relief,” he said. “I’ve only been on the job since yesterday. And then I went and missed hours today. I haven’t even been paid yet. I guess I owe you more than one thank-you.”
“You’d better tear yourself away from him and go in tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday.”
“Oh, right. So it is. You lose track of the days of the week when you don’t have to obey them anymore.”
They sipped in silence for a minute or more. Dr. Lucy was aware of the cicadas, their special sound, in a way she usually wasn’t. Because normally she was so used to it. On this night everything felt vivid and almost new. If called upon to say why, she likely would have been unable to pin the feeling down. Probably just the startling experience of “not alone.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Calvin Bell said.
“All right. I’ll answer it if I can.”
“What the hell is wrong with people?”
A pause as she allowed the enormity of the question to settle in. It matched so well with the enormous wondering that filled her own days.
“Calvin, I’ll be damned if I know. And it’s not for lack of trying to figure it out, let me tell you. My personal theory? They’re scared. Crazy world full of a bunch of people who are scared out of their wits over everything and playing a bunch of stupid games to fool you into thinking they’re not. Maybe even to fool themselves. But, I don’t know. I’m a doctor, not a psychiatrist. I could be full of it.”
Another long silence.
“It’s none of my business,” he said, “but . . .”
Dr. Lucy figured her time was up on his asking about her children.
“. . . how do you manage out here if you don’t work?”
“Oh. That. I get alimony from my ex-husband. It would be enough for just me, but the animals strain the system. I have to get a bit creative sometimes to cover their costs.”
A brief pause. Then Calvin said, “Please feel free to tell me to shut up and go away if you like.”
But she didn’t want him to shut up and go away. Another comfortable silence filled only by cicadas would have been nice. But she didn’t want him to go away. Which was an unusual feeling. To say the least.
“I’d like very much to hurt somebody,” Calvin said after a time.
His voice was constrained into something like an artificial calm. She could tell it wasn’t easy for him to constrain it.
“I hope you won’t.”
“No. I won’t.”
“Good. Won’t help your son much to have you in jail.”
“True. But there’s an even better reason. I refuse to let them pull me down to their level. I won’t let them turn me into them. I decided that a long time ago. But still. An eleven-year-old boy. The temptation is almost too much to tame. I hope I never find out who did this. It’ll be a lot easier to keep talking myself down from violence if I never know. But . . .”
He never went on to say but what. Dr. Lucy didn’t think the end of the sentence was hard to figure out, though.
“Pete told me a man saw them walking together today,” she said, “and it was the same man who’d told on them to Pete’s father last time he saw them together. So I’m thinking it’s not a hard trail to follow. Can’t literally be Pete’s father, though, because he has a work-related injury that keeps him down.”
“Recent injury?”
“I think so. I’m not sure.”
“What’s his name?”
“Pete never told me his last name. But I was over there earlier this evening and the mailbox says Bernard Solomon.”
Calvin did not reply. Not for quite a while.
In time he held his glass out to her and she poured him another two fingers.
“I’ve only been at the plant not quite two days,” he said, startling her. She’d begun to think he never planned to speak again. “And already you hear things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like if a man goes out with an injury. Goes out on worker’s compensation, so the industrial accident board has to pay him to stay home. Some men, nobody questions it. If they say they’re hurt, they are. Other men I guess don’t get the same full measure of faith.”
“You think he’s faking?”
“I don’t think anything about it. I’ve never met the man. I’m just passing along what I’ve heard.” He threw back the glass and downed the balance of the Scotch. “I’d best be getting back to my son,” he said, handing her the empty glass. “Thank you for this. Thank you for everything.”
“Sleep well.”
Calvin laughed. There was a bitterness to the sound.
“I won’t sleep a wink,” he said.
“Can’t sleep when you’re worried?”
“Can’t sleep when I’m angry.”
He carefully returned his chair to the brick patio outside the back door of the house. Then he was gone.
A knock on her bedroom door blast
ed her out of sleep. Winston the upstairs dog had opted to sleep downstairs to better keep an eye on the wolf-dog, as he had done since Prince’s arrival. So there was no one to bark. No one to protect her. And for a panicky moment she couldn’t remember why anyone would be in her house.
“Doctor?”
It was a deep male voice calling through the door, and she recognized it. She pulled a deep breath and sighed out her fear. Of course. It was only Calvin.
“Everything okay?” she called back.
“I’m not sure. I’m sorry to bother you, but—”
Before he could even finish the sentence she had made her way to the bedroom door and thrown it wide.
“I hated to wake you—”
“What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Justin got up to go to the bathroom just now and he got scared because there was blood in his urine.”
She hurried into the spare bedroom. The bedside lamp was on, casting a warm glow in one corner of the room. Justin was lying awake with the covers pulled up to his chin. He met her gaze with wide eyes.
She sat on the edge of the bed and instinctively held a hand to his forehead. Even though it really wasn’t a question of whether he had a fever. In that instant she came fully awake. Her first awareness was that of a sense of familiarity to the moment. Waking in the night to look in on a sick child—that often-repeated scene every mother holds etched deeply into her cells.
Except in her personal memory there had been no father present. He had lived in the home, but had rolled over and gone back to sleep while she dealt with nighttime issues.
Her second revelation was the fact that she had not bothered to put on a robe. She was sitting on the edge of the twin bed wearing only a short nightgown. Calvin stood over her wearing only his boxer shorts and sleeveless undershirt.
She looked down at her own exposed legs.
Calvin reached over to the other twin bed and grabbed the thin blanket, pulling it toward them. He half draped it over her lap, half handed it to her to do the same.
“Thank you,” she said.
She reached over to the bedside table for her blood pressure cuff.
“It’s really not so very unusual, what happened just now,” she said to Justin in her best calming voice. “Usually when someone is hit hard in the soft parts of their belly, or kicked like you were, it’s pretty common for their organs to bleed a little. It’s like a bruise, except in this case the blood ends up in your kidneys instead of just sitting under the skin like a bruise on your arm or leg. So if it’s only a little blood I’m not too worried. Did the urine look bright red like it was almost all blood? Or just pink?”
“More pink,” Justin said, relaxing some.
“No cause to panic just yet, then,” she said, wrapping the cuff around Justin’s skinny upper arm.
He had been sleeping in his underwear. One strap of his sleeveless undershirt was stained with dried blood.
“That’s good,” he said.
“I’ll take your blood pressure to make sure you’ve still got plenty moving around in your veins. And I’m going to feel very gently around your stomach if you’ll let me. It’ll hurt some but I’ll be as careful as I can.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can do that.”
“Let me do the blood pressure first.”
As she squeezed air into the cuff in short bursts she glanced over at Calvin, then quickly looked away. He was climbing into his Levi’s to cover himself.
She focused on the dial and turned the valve, deflating the cuff.
“His blood pressure is fine,” she said to Calvin, who stood over them again. “It hasn’t changed at all. If he had serious internal bleeding it would be dropping. Maybe I don’t even need to feel around that poor injured belly.”
“It’s okay,” Justin said. “You can.”
He sounded so brave and cooperative that Dr. Lucy had to give him the exam. Even if she did know it wasn’t entirely necessary.
She pulled the covers down to his hips and gently pressed his midsection.
“What are you looking for?” he asked, clearly working hard to manage his wince reactions.
“With serious internal bleeding there might be a soft swelling where the liquid pooled. Well, there would be. Internal bleeding has to go somewhere. But it might be where I could feel it. I think you’re doing okay. Tell you what I’d like to do. I’m going to go downstairs and get you a specimen cup. And next time you have to urinate, you can go in the cup and save it for me to see in the morning. And then I’ll know how much blood. Does that sound okay?”
Justin nodded. And smiled at her unguardedly.
A thin outer layer of the ice around her heart melted.
She hated it when that happened.
Calvin joined her in the kitchen at a few minutes after six a.m. She was standing up, peering into cupboards, trying to figure out what she could serve four people for breakfast.
She’d been smoking a cigarette, but she ran it under the kitchen faucet and dropped it in the trash when she saw him.
He was wearing yesterday’s shirt—what choice did he have—but it looked noticeably wet at the seams, leading her to believe he had washed it out in the sink. He smiled in a way that looked . . . she couldn’t find the word for it. Not at first.
Sheepish?
“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “It’s your house, remember?”
“I don’t mind. I should cut down anyway. You know. All that cancer stuff. How’s the patient?”
“He seems fine. He’s upstairs trying to figure out how to brush his teeth without a toothbrush. Right now he’s using his finger and a little table salt. I hope you don’t mind. He came down here and got some salt out of that shaker on your stove. He’s fastidious about his teeth.”
“I think I’ll manage without it,” she said. “So here’s what I’m thinking. I don’t have enough eggs for four people. I wasn’t expecting anyone. But I have enough eggs to make French toast for four people. How does that sound?”
“It sounds wonderful, but it’s more than you owe us. Wouldn’t you rather we just get out of your hair?”
His words hit her in unexpected ways and places. She had not considered the possibility that he might be about to go. And so, without warning, she had to admit—to herself, anyway—the fact that she didn’t want him to. It was a thing that had floated just beneath the surface of her consciousness for most of a day and yet it startled her when it broke out into the light.
“It might be better if I observed him for a little longer,” she said.
“I hate to impose on you.”
Did he want to go? she wondered. Or did he merely assume she wanted him to? And that statement she’d just made, that Justin would benefit from observation. Had that been a full truth?
“Did he fill that specimen cup?”
“He did. It doesn’t seem like much blood.”
“It’s probably fine. But you’re more than welcome to stay until we’re a hundred percent sure.”
“You’re so generous with your time,” he said. Then he sat at her kitchen table. “Will you come sit with me a minute? I need to get something off my chest.”
She joined him at the table and sat not a foot from his side, something almost akin to a tremble roiling in her insides from waiting to hear the something. To learn what kind of something it would prove to be.
“I want to apologize for last night,” he said, his voice deep and serious.
“What about?”
“Here you are a woman, and living on your own, and you’re good enough to offer us lodging right by your bedroom door. And then to come over and knock without even thinking to dress first, and in my panic drawing you out without even giving you time to wake up enough to think whether you’re decent. I feel like I stepped over a line of your privacy, and I want to be sure you know that was never my intention. But I’m apologizing for it all the same. Because I put you in an awkward position, whether I intended to o
r not.”
Dr. Lucy shook her head. A few more times than necessary.
“Calvin, don’t be silly. You have nothing to apologize for. You were just worried about your son. We both were.”
She placed one hand gently on his arm.
He had his sleeves rolled back, and her hand touched his bare skin, and they both looked at the hand and the arm as if they’d never seen anything of the sort before. She wanted to pull the hand back again but she didn’t. Or at least it didn’t. She felt as though no routine signals to her extremities were being received.
She looked up to see Pete standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at them with wide eyes.
She quickly pulled her hand away.
Chapter Ten: Pete
When he got to the kitchen, Dr. Lucy and Justin’s dad were there. They were sitting at the table leaning in together, their heads close, the way people do when they know each other well. Not all people, though. His dad would never do that with his man friends, for example.
She had her hand on his arm, touching him.
It seemed a little confusing to Pete, because he thought of Dr. Lucy and Mr. Bell as hardly knowing each other at all.
Then she looked up and saw Pete standing there. She took the hand back too suddenly, as though Pete had caught her doing something embarrassing. Or just plain wrong. But it had been a friendly and kind-looking gesture, that touch. Maybe she didn’t want anybody to see her being so nice. Any time he’d observed her being nice she’d always treated the moment like something she wouldn’t want to see catch on.
She looked away from Pete’s face and rose from the table and bustled around the kitchen, taking plates down from the cupboard and bread from the breadbox and milk and eggs from the fridge.
Pete was hungry, so he was happy to see this action toward breakfast.
“I’m making French toast for everybody,” she said, her voice strangely fast and light. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m starving, ma’am. Thanks. How’s Justin?”
“He seems okay, but he might have a touch of internal bleeding, so he and his dad are going to stay here a while longer, until we’re sure it’s no problem.”
Say Goodbye for Now Page 10
