Accidentally Yours

by Bettye Griffin

  She had been speechless. Get to know his mother? She preferred to forget she’d ever met the woman. Under the circumstances, she could only accept and hope Mrs. Williams would decide she didn’t feel like doing any entertaining, and her involved, the woman probably wouldn’t.

  Bernard reached for her hand and squeezed it “I don’t think I ever thanked you for getting me to the hospital so promptly. I probably would have died if you hadn’t been there to hear me fall.”

  She tried to make light of it. The last thing she wanted was for him to get sentimental because he felt she’d saved his life. Eternal gratitude put her in danger of never being able to get rid of him. “You would have done the same for me, I’m sure.” Then she pointedly looked at her watch. “I guess I’d better be heading out.”

  “Already? You just got here. This isn’t the ICU anymore, Viv. You can stay until nine o’clock.”

  Good Lord. It was only seven-thirty. No way would she last another hour and a half. “It’s not the ICU, but it’s still the hospital. You’re not able to entertain; you’re here because you’re sick and you need to rest. Besides, Terry will probably be coming by.”

  “He was here already. He stopped in after work.”

  Her mind raced to find another excuse. “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer, Bernard, but I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow, and I want to make sure I’m prepared. With this merger coming up, I’m hoping to get a promotion. You know how it is.”

  Once more he squeezed her hand. “All right. Give me a kiss good-bye, and then I’ll let you go.”

  She tensed, not wanting to do anything to lead him on and make him believe she was interested, but knowing it wasn’t fair to tell him she wasn’t, not while he was recovering. If there was anything she hated more than seeing a working television stacked on top of a nonworking television, it was trying to give someone the brush. She bent and kissed his cheek, then quickly moved out of his reach before he could pull her on top of him. “Nothing hot and heavy for you. You’re in the hospital, remember?” From there she had practically run to her car.

  When she arrived home after the long drive, she called her parents and let them know she had arrived safely. Once she hung up, she checked her caller ID. There had been three calls from a telephone registered to Levi Williams; at noon, two-thirty, and five, respectively. No messages were left, and she wondered if it had occurred to Bernard that she could track his calls through caller ID.

  Just as her mother had predicted, she was hungry again. She removed the foil wrapping from the sturdy paper plate, covered it with a paper towel and put it in the microwave. She was certain Bernard would be calling again, but she wasn’t going to worry about it.

  *****

  Zack was pleased with his progress. He had just one more wall to go. It was quite a workout, but he was in shape, thanks to his skiing and those sessions at the Y. Still, his shoulder muscles weren’t used to the repetitive up-and-down motions involved. He would have to take a hot shower afterward and see if he could talk somebody into giving him a massage.

  He chuckled. Normally a massage was a prelude to sex, but the only thing he was interested in now was getting his shoulders rubbed. He was too tired for anything else. Austin had been right to caution him against overdoing it. Still, it would be silly to take two days to paint an apartment this small. He had stopped to rest plenty of times, watching the NBA game on the portable set he brought with him. Fortunately, the reception was coming in clear. He didn’t think those old-fashioned rabbit ears people used to put on top of their televisions were made anymore; and the apartment had no cable hookup.

  He moved to the top of the four-foot ladder in order to paint the upper part of the eight-foot wall. Once he got the top done, he would have a full fourth of the wall completed. He’d be out of here in no time.

  *****

  Vivian thoroughly enjoyed her meal. Her mother was a fabulous cook, but that wasn’t the only reason for her satisfaction. It had been a surprisingly nice weekend. This was the first weekend she could remember where she wasn’t either going out on a date or to an event with the hopes of meeting a future date. She knew that next weekend Glenda would want to make up for it, but it had been relaxing, that was for sure.

  The phone rang as she was washing out her glass and utensils. A glimpse at the caller ID revealed it was Bernard calling from his parents’ home. “Hi, Vivian.”

  “Hi, there. How are you feeling?”

  “A lot better. I figured I would the minute I was out of that hospital, but I miss you. I thought I’d see you this weekend.”

  “I figured you’d need some rest, so I went to Connecticut to visit my parents.”

  “Are they well?”

  “Yes, thanks. They miss me, though. It’s hard for them. My brother doesn’t live near them, either. I’m going to have to spend more time with them. I might go back next weekend.” She hoped he got the hint.

  “I know how you feel. My mother felt just awful when I went to Pennsylvania to school; and she was disappointed when I moved out after I worked for a couple of years. She already told me a dozen times how glad she is to have me back. I have to keep reminding her I’ll only be here for a few days. Oh, by the way, can you come to dinner on Tuesday?”

  Caught off guard, she couldn’t think of a way out. “Oh, yes; I suppose so.” She hadn’t expected an invitation to materialize at all, and she certainly did not expect it to be for a weeknight. Now that she thought about it, it did make sense. Bernard had just told her he’d only with staying with his parents for a few days. The Williamses were retired, so a Tuesday was just as good as any other night for them. It would actually work out well for her. She could make an early escape, citing an early morning at the office. “What time?”

  “Around seven, I guess. I’ll let you know.”

  “All right.” A crashing noise from above made her jump.

  Apparently Bernard heard it, too. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know. It came from upstairs. That apartment is supposed to be vacant, but I think the super’s wife might be working up there. Her husband just had surgery and can’t do much yet. I’d better see if she needs help. Can I call you back?”

  “Sure.”

  *****

  It all happened so fast. One minute he was attempting to step down, and the next he was on the floor. Doggone it, he must have missed the damn step. Zack was stunned. He was smarting, too. He never knew parquet could be so hard.

  He managed to move into a sitting position, rubbing his right elbow, which he’d banged. Then again, just because he could sit didn’t mean he could stand. He tried to get up. When he put his weight on his right foot he grimaced and fell back.

  “Hello?” called a female voice, simultaneously opening the door, which, fortunately, he’d left unlocked.

  The two syllables were not enough for him to recognize the voice, but as she came closer with hesitant steps, he soon recognized her. Or at least he thought he recognized her. For a split second he wondered if his injuries had been more severe than he thought. She was the last person he expected to see here, of all places. Was he unconscious and dreaming, or was it even worse than that?

  “Zack? Is that you? What are you doing here?” No longer moving tentatively, she rushed to where he sat. “You’re hurt! What happened?”

  “I fell off the ladder. I hurt my ankle. My elbow, too.” He looked at her with equal confusion. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live downstairs. I heard a crash, and since I know no one lived here I came up to see what was going on. I thought maybe Teresita was working up here and had an accident.”

  “You live downstairs?” He found this information astounding. How could it be possible that all the time he’d thought of Vivian, wanted to see her again, she was living right here in the building he owned, directly below where he’d been working all day?

  “All right. Now you know why I’m here, but why are you here?”

  “I own this building
. Well, I own it with my buddy Austin…and the bank. You probably know Austin’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hughes. They live on the first floor. Santos, the super, won’t be able to lift anything heavier than a phone book for about six weeks, and since a gallon of paint weighs more than that I figured I’d take care of it. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t such a great idea.”

  Vivian nodded, not knowing what to say. Of course she had already known he co-owned the building, but it had come as a big surprise to see him painting. Now it made sense. She looked at his elbow, which he continued to support with his other hand. “Do you think it’s broken?”

  “I hope it’s just a bad sprain.”

  “Maybe you can lean on me and I can help you get out of here. I’d be happy to bring you to the hospital.” She frowned. It seemed like she was always bringing her male acquaintances to the emergency room. Now she would be bringing Zack. She didn’t like the pattern and wished it would stop.

  “I don’t know if that’s going to work, not with two flights of stairs to get down. Why don’t you knock on the Hughes’s door? They’re in One-A. Mr. Hughes can probably help me get down the stairs. I’d rather lean on him; he’s bigger than you are.”

  She took a deep breath. It was time to come clean. “I do know the Hugheses. I know Austin, too, and his fiancée as well.”

  “Desireé?”

  “Yes. I took her to get her hair done when she was staying with them. She caught malaria in Africa.” She sensed the dawn of realization going on in his mind and decided not to be around when it bloomed. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go away, now.”

  Zack was too dazed to respond. First he learned that Vivian was his tenant, and then he was told she was a friend of Desireé’s, which, given that Desireé only knew a handful of people in New York, meant Vivian was probably the one she had wanted to introduce him to. He could have met her something like a year and a half ago, before all this craziness started. Instead of being his angel of accidents—his accident this time, he noted wryly—she could have been the angel of his heart. Damn.

  Vivian slowly walked down the two flights of stairs. Her advantage was over. The playing field had evened out. Of course, Zack might not even remember Desireé’s repeated efforts to fix them up. It had been, after all, over a year ago, but that look in his eyes said otherwise. It was the look of an inventor who just thought of that missing link that would make his creation work properly. He knew, all right. He was probably thinking about how small a world it was. She wished he would think something else, like that he wished he’d consented to meet her then. A simple introduction would have changed so much between them. Zack was probably telling himself the reason he’d fallen was because of bad vibes she was sending from the floor below.

  When she got to the first floor she frowned. She was about to ask the wrong person for help. She turned around and climbed the two flights again.

  “Yoo hoo, Zack! The rescue squad is here,” Vivian said cheerfully.

  Zack expected to see Mr. Hughes with her, but instead she was accompanied by a beefy fortyish male he didn’t recognize. Damn, did she have a boyfriend right here in the building? He wouldn’t want to be socially involved with any woman who lived on the same block, much less in the same building, but of course that was him. And it wasn’t as though it could be said there was anything going on between

  “This is Michael Harris, Zack. He lives upstairs. I thought it might be more appropriate for him to help you; it might be too strenuous for Mr. Hughes.” She turned to her neighbor. “Michael, this is Zack Warner, your landlord.”

  Michael bent to shake Zack’s outstretched hand. “Don’t bother to get up, man,” he joked.

  “Yeah, that seems to be my problem now. My ankle’s messed up. The entire right side of my body is hurting, actually. That parquet is as hard as…I don’t know what.”

  Michael went into action, squatting at Zack’s right side and swinging his arm around his neck. “Okay, I’ve got you. Try to get up on three, okay? One…two…three.”

  Zack noticed that Vivian appeared to be holding her breath as he struggled to stand with his weight on his left foot. She went to his left side and guided his arm around her shoulder. Using the two of them as human crutches, he managed to hobble to the stairs. “I feel like I’m at the top of Mount Everest looking down over Tibet,” he said at the landing. “Maybe we should tie a rope around me and hoist me down the side of the building like a piano.”

  “Aw, you can do it,” Michael urged.

  Zack turned to Vivian. “Why don’t you lock up the apartment for me? The key is on the kitchen counter. Give it to Teresita. I can manage with Michael.” He hated the idea of leaning on her to get down the stairs; he found his weakness embarrassing.

  “All right. I’ll stop and get my keys and purse and meet you downstairs.”

  She had put the small television on the floor and was locking the apartment when the door to 3-C opened and Miles Harris—or maybe it was Mason—poked his head out. “Miss Vivian, where’s my daddy?”

  “He’s helping the landlord. He’ll be up in a minute.”

  She clumsily walked down one flight with the television, which she deposited on her table, then retrieved her purse. By the time she emerged, Zack and Michael were almost to the first floor landing. She could tell that Zack was becoming more adept at moving with only one leg. She waited quietly while Zack maneuvered the remainder of the stairs with help from Michael, then called out, “Here I come.”

  “How far away are you parked, Vivian?” Michael asked.

  “I’m right out front. I guess we’ll go to Mount Vernon Hospital, huh, Zack?”

  “If that’s the closest. All they have to do is an X ray. They shouldn’t botch that up.”

  Skepticism dripped from his voice like liquid from cooked collard greens, and Vivian said with a smile, “I suppose the only hospital you really trust is Hudson.”

  “I feel more comfortable there, yeah.”

  She shook her head. “I feel sorry for whoever treats you.”

  Chapter 9

  Role Reversal

  “Thanks a lot, Michael,” Vivian said, echoing Zack’s sentiments after Zack was seated in her passenger seat.

  “No sweat. Free rent next month, right, Zack?” he joked before growing serious. “You take care of yourself.”

  “I will.” Zack closed his eyes. His ankle was throbbing now, and it felt like it weighed fifty pounds.

  Vivian settled behind the wheel and spoke with cheery optimism. “We’ll be at the hospital in a few minutes. It’s Sunday, so I don’t think they’ll be too busy. We probably won’t have to wait long.”

  He looked at her skeptically. She seemed to be in a hurry, and he wondered why. “You got a date?”

  “No, silly. I’ve just got to go to work tomorrow.”

  “Is Michael a friend of yours?”

  Vivian didn’t know whether to smile or pout. On one hand, it was cute that he seemed to be a tad jealous of an imagined flirtation between her and her neighbor. On the other hand, he knew she had gone out with Gary, Gordon, and Bernard; and she certainly didn’t want him to think she had been around the block more times than the mailman.

  “Michael lives down the hall from Mr. Ellis, or maybe I should say from where Mr. Ellis lived. With his wife and sons,” she added pointedly.

  “Oh. Well, it was good that you thought to go get him. You’re right, getting me down those stairs might have been a bit much for Mr. Hughes.”

  As Vivian predicted, the emergency room at Mount Vernon Hospital wasn’t very crowded, and Zack was seen right away. X-rays determined that there was no fracture in either his ankle or his elbow, but both were sprained badly. He also had bruises on his chest that would give him some discomfort in that area.

  “I don’t want you to bear any weight on that foot for four days,” Dr. Christine Kalafus instructed after she had bandaged Zack’s right ankle and applied a sling to his right arm. “On Friday morning you can try it, a
nd I want you to follow up that day. By then you should be all right We’re getting crutches for you, but is there someone at home who can perhaps help you minimize your movements, help with your ADLs?”

  Vivian wrinkled her forehead. “What’s ADLs?”

  “Activities of daily living.” Zack and Dr. Kalafus spoke simultaneously, then laughed.

  Zack proceeded to answer the doctor’s question. “I live alone, Doctor, and there’s a flight of outside stairs to the entrance of my house, plus another flight inside to my bedroom. And my couch is terribly uncomfortable to sleep on.”

  “That’s far from ideal. Any family members you can stay with?”

  “My parents are retired, but they’re at my brother’s in Virginia. They just left yesterday. My cousin used to be my tenant, but she took a job transfer to Detroit. My only contact with the guy who lives there now is collecting his rent check.”

  Dr. Kalafus glanced at Vivian before returning her attentions to Zack. “Any friends?”

  Zack shrugged. “Well, I don’t like to brag, but—”

  “It’s a slow night here, Dr. Warner, but not that slow,” Dr. Kalafus said dryly. “Can you tell me the situation in ten words or less?”

  “Actually, most of my friends are of the female persuasion. They think highly of me, but I don’t know how they’d feel about me dropping in on them for such a long period. Might give some of them ideas. I might not be able to get out without making a lifetime commitment.” He shrugged. “You know how it is.”

  Anyone else saying those words would come off sounding like they had an ego the size of the Pentagon, but Zack looked so boyish and bashful as he spoke, like a wide-eyed, innocent child, that it only added to his charisma.

  Dr. Kalafus smiled. “All right. What about you, Ms. St James?”

  Vivian lowered her chin to her chest in her best Say Whaaaat? look. “Who, me?”

  “You look like a sensible girl. Do you think you can take care of your friend for a few days without wanting to make it permanent?”