The Lovesick Cure

by Pamela Morsi

  “Better not to give birth on the highway,” he told them. “Meet me at the clinic. I’ll be there in less than fifteen minutes.”

  He hung up and glanced across the table at both women.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  They were both encouraging through his reluctant goodbyes.

  As he stood next to Jesse, Aunt Will piped up. “Go ahead and kiss her. You know you want to and I’m practically blind.”

  Piney didn’t have to hear it twice. They melted into each other’s arms for a fervent, if necessarily brief moment.

  “I’ll call you later,” he promised.

  But he hadn’t.

  He phoned Doc Mo from the road, but the physician didn’t make it in time to catch the baby. Piney had. And he’d placed the big, healthy little girl in Twyla Gluck’s arms. Unfortunately, not all of the placenta was delivered intact. Piney spent more than an hour attempting to manually get it to release, including having her sit up and try breast-feeding during induced contractions. When Doc Mo arrived, they teamed up with position and manipulation. But by midnight, it was clear that it wasn’t happening. And they took turns scrubbing up before administering regional anesthesia and doing an evacuation.

  That, at least, went well. Doc Mo reassured the young mother that everything now looked healthy and healing, but they were going to send her to the hospital for observation.

  Piney stepped out to call the ambulance and saw Twyla Gluck walking the floor with the little blanket-wrapped newborn in her arms, her face glowing with love.

  “They are pretty sweet when they’re tiny like that,” he said.

  “I never imagined…I never imagined that it felt so amazing simply to hold a little one.”

  It was 3:00 a.m. before mother and baby were seen off in the ambulance. Twyla followed in the car.

  “You’re welcome to my couch, Doc, if you’re too tired to go home,” Piney offered.

  Doc Mo shook his head as he gathered up his car keys. “I never feel sleepy after all this adrenaline,” he said.

  Piney understood that feeling of more wired than tired. But back in his place, he forced himself to lie down and pretend to sleep, even as a million thoughts ran through his brain.

  A lot of them were about Jesse. But there were many about Shauna, as well. Theirs had been a hurry-up-I’m-pregnant marriage, but he had loved his ex-wife. And she had repaid that by stabbing him in the heart—twice. It didn’t matter that her behavior was more addiction than intention. Intellectually, he understood that the drug dependent did not have the capacity to love anything but the next score. Yet, it still colored his vision of himself as a man, his confidence in maintaining a relationship with a woman that he loved.

  It was then that he realized that his son had been right about him. And that he had been right about the Baxley men. He was in love with Jesse Winsloe. As he drifted off to sleep with a smile on his face he thought, if getting his heart broken again was the price he had to pay, then so be it. His Jesse was worth the pain.

  39

  The team’s Tuesday game in the preliminary round was scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon. Piney didn’t even consider going. It was Doc Mo’s day in the office and the appointment schedule was full.

  Viola got a call, less than a half hour after the start, letting them know that the team was running away with it in a rout. That was very good news. And when she announced it to the waiting room visitors, even the sickest managed to applaud.

  The next round would, of course, get harder. They’d go against other winning teams, two games in one day. If they lost they were out.

  “Tomorrow you should go,” Doc Mo told him. “Reschedule your appointments and I’ll take call for the emergencies.”

  “It’s basketball,” Piney said. “I shouldn’t inconvenience you and all our patients for a couple of games.”

  The doctor shook his head and made the luh-ah sound that was the negative interjection in his native language. “Everybody takes time off,” he said. “Many people have personal days, holidays, even vacations.” His words were sarcastic, but true. “This is important and you should go.”

  “Besides,” Viola chimed. “It’ll give me time to hand Doc Mo a dose of our daily heartburn. You’ve got him spoiled worse than the chubby toddler of a rich man’s third wife.”

  Piney took the chance offered. The next morning he dropped Tree off at school to catch the team bus and headed for the distant high school gym in West Plains.

  He felt giddy almost, like a kid playing hooky. But he didn’t want to play alone. He called Jesse to crow that he wasn’t working.

  “Slacker,” she teased him. “I’m outside among my farm staff here, sorting out personality conflicts between pigs and chickens.”

  “It must be hillbilly genetics,” Piney told her. “I don’t think you can bring every teacher from Tulsa and expect her to subsistence farm in a few short weeks.”

  They talked and laughed and shared the enthusiasm of the morning and the outlook for the day.

  “How is Aunt Will?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she answered. “She was pretty unsteady getting out of bed. But I’ve got her up in her chair. If anything I think she looks a little less yellow. That’s got to be good, right?”

  “It may be bad lighting,” he answered. “I don’t really expect her jaundice to relent. But maybe it could look better.”

  He was still in high spirits when he got to West Plains, although parking was a mess. One of the positives of living in the country was there were always places to put a car. Today the tiny lot around the gym was full to bursting with school buses and pickup trucks. Piney finally found a place two blocks away. It was half hanging off in a bar ditch, but it was legal and safe. He had extra copies of Tree’s new packet. He stuck them in his bag just in case.

  Inside the gym it was a den of noise and chaos. Virtually every seat in the house was taken. The teams eager to take the court waited out of bounds on the floor. He caught sight of Tree sitting cross-legged and thought he looked not a lot different than he had at nine or ten.

  The game in progress was close and rough. The refs kept calling fouls, which stopped the action and turned the match into a free-throw contest. It was down to the wire and then into overtime. The crowd seemed to groan collectively.

  But surprisingly, the overtime play was fast and engaging. It was still close and the game was won on the last shot. The audience applauded the great skill and tremendous effort of both sides. But the losers filed out to their bus and the winners headed to the showers to change jerseys and be ready for their next match.

  As Tree and his team took the court for warm-up, Piney trailed in among the great exchange of parents and supporters and found a good seat between Murphy Jay’s grandma and Rob Turley.

  On the court, Tree looked easygoing and relaxed. There was no sense about him that this was anything more than simply another game. And maybe he was right. Perhaps it was nothing more. But Piney surveyed the crowd, looking for people who didn’t quite fit. It was harder to spot them among a crowd of people that included folks from lake communities and tourist meccas. It wasn’t all hayseed hillbillies. Still there was an Ozarkian look that couldn’t be defined by clothing or physical traits. It was as if there were a genetic propensity to appear openly friendly and unfailingly stubborn at the same time.

  The ref blew the whistle and the game began. Tree was in the center circle for the jump. He was a head taller than his rival and easily got the tip. But Piney noticed the kid had jumped directly into Tree instead of up toward the ball. It was going to be a tough game.

  Piney watched his son as if he were performing death-defying feats from the high wire. His rival continued with behavior that was increasingly thuggish. Rib jabs, body slams, stepping on his feet, two-handing his jersey. All moves designed to frustrate and neutralize him. It was holding Tree back from his best play, but he kept his wits about him. Piney would have crossed his fingers if he thought it would
help. Tree kept playing. Like a yeoman he kept at his job, refusing to be pushed, pulled or drawn into anything but his own game.

  The team was ahead by six points as they approached the half. Tree had made seventeen points and had blocked two shots, three really, though the ref had inaccurately called one goal tending. Then the opponents had the ball and Tree was guarding the guy under the rim. The point guard slipped a pass to him and he tried to go up. Tree was there with his hands straight up, six-foot-six and two feet of arms. There was no way the guy could get it over him. He went up anyway and brought the ball straight to Tree’s hands. His son easily slapped it away. Play done. Except on the way down, his opponent brought his elbow sharply into Tree’s face. Piney could hear the bones in his nose crack from across the building.

  His son’s jersey was immediately covered in blood and it was dripping on the hardwood. The ref whistled a time-out and Piney rushed over to the court.

  Piney was already making his way to the bench even as Coach Poule was handing Tree a towel and an icepack.

  “May I take him to the lockers?” he asked the coach.

  His nod of agreement showed both anxiety for his star player and the game in progress.

  As he led his son to the steamy, sweat-smelling recesses of the gymnasium, Tree kept the ice on top of his nose. The bloodstain on the towel was growing.

  Inside the locker room, he had Tree lie down on the bench with his head hanging off the end. Piney knelt down beside him.

  “Is it broke?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Piney answered, opening up his bag. “Did you see any stars out there? Have you got ringing in your ears?”

  “No. Hurts.”

  “I know, big guy,” Piney said, squeezing his shoulder and wishing his son was still young enough that a kiss could make things all better.

  Piney heard a commotion as somebody came through the door. An instant later, Camryn was kneeling on the other side of him.

  “Oh, my God! Are you all right?” She moved to hug him, but Piney waylaid her with a protective arm. The look Camryn gave him was mean enough to have done justice to a cornered raccoon.

  “He’s fine. But his nose is broken and I don’t want him jostled any more until I get it set.”

  She was mollified, but not much.

  “Cammy, this is the guys’ locker room,” Tree pointed out.

  Piney was certain that his son’s logic wasn’t going to send her running out the door.

  “Do you have a tampon?”

  “What?” The young woman was both shocked and embarrassed. “Uh…no.”

  “Do you think you could get me one, from a friend or the ladies’ room or…somewhere? I need one. Please.”

  Without another question, she rushed off to do Piney’s bidding.

  “Tree,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I need to set your nose and it’s going to hurt like hell. Now if we were in the clinic, I’d put you on some good pain meds and once they’d begun to kick in, I’d give you a local and straighten you out. I can still do that. In fact, that’s exactly what I would like to do.” Piney considered not giving Tree his other option. But he knew his son deserved his own choice. “If I do that, you’re out for the game and if they win, you’re still out for the next one. No more basketball for you today.”

  “I have to play,” Tree said.

  “I could give you a local anesthetic and you could try to gut it out—but I don’t recommend that.”

  “The team needs me,” Tree told him. “I’m not sure they can win without me. And this is my chance for scouts to see me.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the game, the team or the scouts,” Piney said. “All I care about is you. I can drive you home, you can spend the rest of the day in bed. And tomorrow we’ll worry about all this other stuff.”

  Piney gathered his tools together and created a sterile table with a chair and a disposable drape as his son gave it a long consideration.

  “I want to play,” he said, finally.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Just do it, Dad. I trust you.”

  Camryn came rushing back in holding two long cylindrical packages, one pink and one yellow.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted regular or super,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he answered. “Pull up that stepstool to the end of the bench. I want you to hold his head in your lap.”

  She rushed to comply.

  “Keep your knees low,” he cautioned. “We don’t want to raise his head yet. I need to be able to see what I’m doing and I don’t want to restart the bleeding.”

  She did exactly what he said.

  “Tree, I’m going to give you a few small injections to numb up your face. Local anesthetic. The shots themselves are no walk in the park, but it’ll make the bone setting a lot better.”

  “Sure, okay,” he said.

  Piney gently sterilized the entire area with alcohol swabs.

  The first shot went right between the eyes, then one each in the cheek muscles. He saved the worst until last.

  “Hold him steady,” he told Camryn. “I don’t want him to flinch.”

  Piney kept his voice calm and steady as he slid the needle into the highly sensitive flesh on the underpart of the nose between the nostrils.

  “This little end of the nasal septum, at the top of the philtral column, is called the columella which is also the name of the very prominent nerve there.”

  Tree sucked in a great gasp of air and his eyes teared up, but he didn’t scream and Camryn held him steady.

  “Okay, that’s good, that’s very good. We’ll give that a couple of minutes to soak in and then we’ll get this nose of yours back into shape.”

  A minute later brought the noisy arrival of the team. They crowded around too closely, like a whole herd of young bulls in a very small china closet.

  “What is she doing in here?” Coach Poule asked angrily.

  From the corner of his eye, Piney could see Camryn gearing up for nineteen rounder.

  “She’s assisting me,” Piney said. “I need to set Tree’s nose. And I need some space and some quiet. I’m sorry it has to be in your locker room, but that’s where it is.”

  Coach herded the guys back toward the shower area where he had them sitting on the floor as he gave them a pep talk. Then the man came back into the main area to look at Tree.

  “Score’s all tied up,” Coach announced. “We really lost ground after you left the court.” He directed his next question to Piney. “Is he going to play?”

  “He’s going to try,” Piney answered. “But he’ll have a hard time breathing. Don’t expect to get the kind of minutes out of him that you usually do.”

  Coach went to give the word to the team and Piney looked down at his son. “Ready to wrestle that nose back into shape?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He took a long, stainless steel nasal elevator and slid it inside the right nostril. He eased it around the misaligned cartilage and snapped it back into place with only a grunt from his son. The left nostril was more swelled and more displaced. Piney didn’t even try to be careful, he tried to be fast. His son shrieked at the pain.

  “Okay, okay, that’s it. Try not to cry, we don’t need the mucus.” He ran his fingers lightly down the length of the septum. “Good as new,” he proclaimed it. “You’re still the best-looking guy in school. Right, Camryn?”

  “Totally,” the girl agreed. “And bravest, too.”

  Piney unwrapped the tampon and removed it from the applicator. He cut it lengthwise in half and forced one half into each nostril. Then he taped him from cheekbone to cheekbone.

  “You’re going to have to breathe through your mouth,” he told him. “And you can’t afford to be a hero. If you get light-headed, signal Coach to pull you out.”

  By the time they returned to the court for the second half, Tree was on his feet. His face looked bad, but his three-point shot from the corner was perfect. He kept his mouth open, but he never looked winde
d. Piney cringed every time he went up for a rebound. But there was no hesitation in him. Tree played full out.

  They won the game by seven points. They hardly had time to congratulate each other before starting to think of the semifinal round. They were scheduled to play again in three short hours.

  Coach Poule wanted to keep the boys on a short leash. He got them all on the bus and headed out to a restaurant for an early dinner.

  Piney was thinking to do the same. He was walking down the street to his car when a vehicle pulled up beside him and stopped.

  “Mr. Baxley,” the man said as he rolled down the window. “I don’t know if you remember me. Ted Jakowski?”

  “Of course, you’re the scout from Mizzou.”

  “This is Curtis Westbrook,” he said, indicating the driver. “We saw your son take that hit.” The man shook his head. “It sure looked like a break, has a doctor looked at him?”

  “Not yet,” Piney answered. “I’m a P.A., so I set it myself. Tree wanted to stay in the tournament.”

  Jakowski nodded. “So where are you off to?”

  “Thought I’d catch a bite to eat before the next game.”

  “I guess we all have the same idea. Hop in, you can ride with us, but you’ll have to pick up your own tab. NCAA rules don’t allow us to treat families of our prospects.”

  The term prospect reverberated in Piney’s head.

  40

  None of the girls were happy about being left to fend for themselves while the boys went off to dinner.

  “Typical!” Jadee Swann complained.

  Camryn had less reason to bellyache. She wasn’t on the team anymore. Therefore she’d had to borrow her mom’s truck for the trip. So while her friends were whining, she got into action.

  “Does anyone know where they’ve gone?”

  “Probably the pancake house. You know how big Coach is on pancakes before a game.”

  “Where is that place?”

  “I think all the chains are up on Porter Wagoner Boulevard,” Brooke said.