Lovesick

by Alex Wellen

  “That two-timing weasel?” Cookie barks.

  “Go on,” I say, drawing out the words.

  “Oh, Lydia couldn’t stand the boy. Always flirting with both girls. Paige never liked him enough. Lara too much. If Paige didn’t show him sufficient attention, he’d just switch to Lara, and back and forth. It drove Lydia crazy. At one point, Gregory had to pull the fink aside and make him choose. Stop jerking my girls around, he said. Boy, I loved Gregory. Tyler Rich picked Paige, even asked her to the senior prom.”

  “But he took Lara to prom,” I remind her.

  “Yes. Lara very much wanted to go with Tyler, and Lydia knew that, so when Paige asked her mom for advice, Lydia encouraged her to pass on Tyler’s invitation. I don’t think Paige was all that upset, really. She was more disappointed she’d have to wait two more years to buy her prom dress.”

  That’s my Paige.

  I’m so happy I want to plant a big wet one on Cookie’s cheek.

  “One more thing,” Cookie says, “while we’re having this whole heart-to-heart and all. I want to show you something I had specially made for Sid to celebrate our sixtieth wedding anniversary. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

  Cookie reaches into her purse and takes out a blue velvet jewelry box. The taped-on bow is all crushed. She cracks it open, and there sits Sid’s anniversary ring—the one that we disassembled in his garage—but all in one piece.

  “Looks like new,” I tell her. “You replaced the topaz.”

  “Not on your life. That ring cost me a pretty penny,” she says, all offended. “After you two numskulls trashed it, I spent the next day and a half on my hands and knees in the garage searching for that stone. But when I found it, I started thinking that maybe your invention wasn’t so stupid after all, considering my heart condition and Sid’s health.

  “Look,” she says, taking the gold ring from the box. She touches something on its side and the whole top elegantly springs open. My eyes nearly pop out of my head. There, inside the tiny well, is a solitary pill.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad,” Cookie says, “it’s just an aspirin … for effect. I’m going to ask that young doctor of ours to prescribe something that saves Sid’s life in the event he ever has another heart attack.”

  I take the ring from her and examine it. My heart is racing. This is the first time I’ve seen a finished, working prototype of one of our inventions, and it’s a total beaut. I try opening and shutting the top of the ring a few times, and it works smooth as butter.

  “This is exquisite,” I exclaim. “How’d you manage to find someone who could make this?”

  “That was the easy part,” Cookie says. “Sid knows this Russian fella who is a jeweler in San Francisco—the best in the business. Our whole family uses him. I sent him the pieces and he put it together, special order.” Igor Petrov strikes again! “The hardest part was paying for it. That little enhancement cost me more than the original ring—but Sid’s worth it. He’s everything to me.”

  I delicately place the ring back in its velvet blue box and Cookie snatches it right out of my hands, snapping the case shut, nearly catching one of my fingers. Then she stuffs the gift back in her purse, squishing the bow even further.

  My two-way Motorola radio bleeps. I unhook it from my belt.

  “Andy, Manny, this is Manny. Over.”

  Cookie leans over and gives me a soft kiss on the cheek.

  “Andy, Manny. Over.”

  I want to hug her, but she’s already up, cane in hand, on her way back to see her husband.

  “Go!” I tell Manny. “Any sign of Paige?”

  “No, but I just got this strange call from Ruth Mulrooney. She didn’t sound so good, speaking real slowlike. She says she needs to talk to you right away. She’s experiencing some sort of problem with her medication. I promised I’d send you over.”

  Sid isn’t even out of the hospital, and already I’ve found him a roommate. I consider what Ruth’s taking: antidepressants—the ones I pushed on her. I was the one who swapped Prevos for Paxil.

  “Oh man, I think I broked it,” Manny says over the radio.

  “Broke what?” I yell back into the transmitter.

  “Oh good, you’re there,” Manny says, finally. “I dropped my radio on the linoleum in the kitchen and was worried.”

  “Ruth lives on Francis, right?”

  “Yeah. You need me to come?” he asks. “I’d rather not leave my mom. The Vallejo fireworks are done, but we have a better view of the ones from Martinez.”

  I take a deep breath. “No, I’ll go it alone,” I say.

  “Call me if things get screwy.”

  On my way out of the hospital, I stop outside Sid’s hospital room. Cookie is standing by his bed, tenderly wiping away a few loose hairs matted to Sid’s forehead. I do my best to stay out of sight, but it’s no matter—the two lovebirds are absorbed in their own world.

  CHAPTER 32

  Medicine Woman

  ALL the lights are on in Ruth Mulrooney’s riverside estate—all of them. There are no cars parked outside her house. No movement inside.

  I haven’t seen Ruth since her implosion and subsequent explosion. Ruth’s grandson wasn’t the only one a bit shaken by Grandma’s erratic behavior.

  You don’t treat a customer with a life-threatening illness the same way you treat someone with a mild sinus infection, but “pain is pain,” Gregory always told me. “Everyone has something, and whatever your something is, when you’re in pain, it’s the most important, frightening, debilitating thing in the world.”

  I take the steps to Ruth Mulrooney’s front door two at a time and rap three times. I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other side of this door, but tonight I will channel the Ghost of Gregory Day and try to help ease this woman’s pain. Just let her be breathing. Let her be lucid.

  “Yes!” Ruth screams as she eagerly opens the screen door. “I knew you’d come. I so knew it.”

  Ruth is once again a redhead. She’s wearing an attractive gold-colored silk blouse and white pearls. She grabs my cheeks and gives me a smack on the lips.

  “Are you okay?” I confirm.

  “You’ve made me so happy,” she cries. “I’m so happy!”

  It’s only now that I realize that I’ve been duped. I’ve been invited here tonight to keep a lonely widow company on the Fourth of July.

  I follow Ruth through the center of the house toward the back deck.

  “I was driving on Loring Avenue tonight,” I yell over, “and I see you’re making some nice progress on those lofts.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she hollers back. “You can see them from here. Harold wanted to call the building complex ‘The Waterfront,’ but it was my idea to add ‘Oasis.’ Since changing the name we’ve received four new offers. The first family moves in October 1.”

  Ruth then tells me to hurry up and meet her out back.

  Standing on the patio is the loveliest woman I’ve ever seen. I want to cry tears of joy, but Paige is a step ahead of me. She blurts out a laugh that sounds more like a cough; even Paige and Ruth seem surprised at just how perfectly their plan came off.

  “I’m getting you some lemonade,” Ruth informs me and marches inside.

  Paige stands up.

  “Hi,” I whisper, breathless.

  Paige’s thick, dark hair is in an updo; loose strands hang over her forehead. She’s got on a simple fitted black T-shirt and red skirt.

  We both take two steps closer. Our faces are now inches apart.

  “What happened to you?” she murmurs, gently patting my puffy eye.

  Our lips are nearly touching.

  “Drug dealing carries its share of inherent dangers,” I whisper back.

  “Why can’t I just settle down with a nice guy?” Paige teases, her mouth hovering ever so closely as she studies my face for additional bruises and scars.

  I kiss Paige right below her left ear. She moans. I wrap my arms around her waist and we give each ot
her a big, long squeeze. Then we sit on the porch swing and Paige starts telling me about her afternoon in Alexander Park.

  She was handing out hot dogs and hamburgers to the first graders when this cranky volunteer walked right up to her, jabbed her cane in Paige’s face, and started screaming something about illegal prescription medication, sample pills, and of course, everyone’s favorite Fourth of July topic: “attempted murder.” Cookie was in rare form, Paige tells me, and not making a lot of sense. She tried to calm Cookie down, but it was too late: one little boy in face paint started crying, and then a little girl, and then another, and another. Parents swept in like commandos. Before long, Paige broke down as well.

  “It was so humiliating,” Paige recalls. “Ruth found me behind the pool house, bawling. She handed me a soda, gave me some motherly love, and promised everything would be okay. When the barbecue was over, I stayed and helped clean up. Then my car battery went dead. That’s when Ruth insisted I come home with her, so I did.”

  I clasp Paige’s hands.

  “Cookie might have acted and sounded like a madwoman, but she was telling the truth,” I tell Paige. “Minus the ‘attempted murder’ part.”

  “I know. Over a couple of glasses of wine, I put it all together.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell Paige. “I tried to do what I thought your father would have wanted me to, but everything happened so quickly,” I say, rubbing my forehead. “I thought I could find a way to get him—us—out of this mess. I got it stuck in my head that telling you about the pills would somehow tarnish his reputation. But it’s so obvious now: I should have been up front.”

  “Me, too,” she says, dropping her voice.

  Paige takes another long pause. She’s making me nervous.

  “I love you,” I squeeze in there right before she tells me something unforgivable about Tyler Rich.

  “Sample drugs were never a big deal in my family,” Paige begins. “I remember when I was twelve, Daddy would bring home sample packets all the time, and on the weekends, the four of us would sit around the dining room table and sort them into different jars. It was a game. Lara and I used to compete to see who could do the most pills in the shortest amount of time, and Daddy would give the winner one of those Nestlé Crunch chocolate bars.”

  “You and your sister competitively sorted drugs in exchange for candy in grade school?”

  “Middle school,” Paige insists.

  “For how long?”

  “Ten, twenty minutes at a time.”

  “No, for how many years?”

  “Five, maybe six, maybe more,” she says. “I stopped in high school and I figured that was that. But it sounds like Daddy kept going.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you might be placing people’s lives in jeopardy, not to mention breaking all sorts of laws?”

  “I was a kid. It wasn’t a big deal. Mom always went over our work with a fine-tooth comb, and Daddy always told us how proud he was of us. For customers who couldn’t afford important medication, now they could, he’d tell us. I never got into the nitty-gritty of how the finances worked, and it didn’t even occur to me that it might somehow be a problem with the insurance people.”

  “You mean an insurance fraud problem,” I correct her, gently. “It didn’t occur to you or you didn’t let it occur to you?”

  “Look, Andy, you did it, too.”

  “I did it?” I shriek. “I did it because you started this cycle twenty years ago!”

  “That’s not true,” she says. “You did it for the same reason I did—because you thought you could help people.”

  “Paige,” I say, touching her softly on the knee. “An hour ago, I was still under the impression that I was the one who put Sid in the hospital by giving him the wrong medication. Then I get this frantic phone call from Ruth.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I should have said something a long time ago. Maybe I was a little ashamed, too. Lara and I suspected Daddy’s money problems had something to do with his ‘charity work,’ but I never dreamed it was so extensive, or that you’d somehow get wrapped up in it.”

  Only now do I realize that all my sneaking around was for nothing. Paige helped launch the Day Co-Pay.

  “This thing is bigger than financial problems,” I tell her. “We’re playing with people’s lives, and it’s no longer little girls sorting drug packets around the dining room table.”

  I gently cradle her cheek. Paige leans in and closes her eyes. We rock quietly on the swing.

  “There are doctors who could still lose their medical licenses, a drug ring that includes our neighbors, thousands of pills, and about two dozen customers who still live on the Day Co-Pay,” I whisper. “Add in one relentless Blue Cross of California collector who is dangerously close to finding us out, and that spells trouble … right here in Crockett City.”

  The two of us think.

  “But I will admit,” I say, “I am sort of relieved. I was convinced you were going to tell me that you and Tyler Rich ‘did it’ on his floating love shack.”

  “Are you crazy? Have we met? I would never”

  “Really? Because I was in Cookie’s bushes spying on you with binoculars the other day, and I saw Tyler Rich pick you up at the house.”

  She looks at me sideways.

  “It’s a long story, but this is me being more honest.”

  “It was nothing. My car wouldn’t start; I was late for work; one more time and the news director was going to fire me for sure; Lara was nowhere to be found; I was desperate, so I hesitantly accepted Tyler’s offer,” Paige admits.

  “And is he still advocating a regime change?”

  “No … yes … maybe … I don’t know. I don’t care. He drove me to work and I set the record straight. He kept going on about needing ‘closure,’ so I made it abundantly clear—that door is closed. You have nothing to worry about. We did not ‘do it’ on the Lobsta Mobsta.”

  I’m relieved.

  “Did you hear? We have to sell the pharmacy,” she tells me suddenly.

  I know.

  “Lara had some of the pharmacy chains drop by and size up the place. She said it wasn’t such an easy sell. Walgreens passed, but Longs Drugs offered us $10,000, and Lara managed to leverage that offer into a $15,000 bid from Rite Aid. They can take possession as early as October. Lara is quite the wheeler and dealer,” Paige huffs. “It took my parents a lifetime to build that business. I hate to sell it, and for so little.”

  “Fifteen thousand. Our inventory alone is worth twice that,” I estimate.

  “I know!” Paige complains. She’s so offended. “Rite Aid thinks it’s doing us some sort of favor by taking all that dental floss and deodorant off our hands. As for the prescription drugs, by law, apparently the new pharmacy is only allowed to accept ‘sealed, unopened’ pharmaceuticals.”

  “Given all of our mixing and matching, maybe that’s just as well,” I suggest, gently.

  Paige agrees.

  “So if it’s not our toiletries or drug inventory, what does Rite Aid get for $15,000?” I ask.

  Paige takes a deep breath. “Our goodwill,” she says flatly. “Lara says goodwill is code for ‘customer records.’ We hand over all of our customer records and then we promise Rite Aid that we’ll encourage our patrons to shop there.”

  “And if they don’t come?”

  “It doesn’t matter, so long as we try to convince them we’re fine,” Paige says, thinking about it. “I guess I always knew we’d have to sell the pharmacy.”

  I place my hand gently on the small of her back. “I’m sorry, I know what that place means to you.”

  “It does, but not for the reasons you think,” she says. “Daddy loved that pharmacy. It gave his life such meaning, especially after Lara and I left, and Mom died. I know he secretly wished that it would stay in the family forever, and I’ve always felt so guilty that I couldn’t give that to him. But I didn’t want to run a pharmacy, and neither did Lara. I think that’s wh
y he allowed himself to get into such debt—because he knew that Day’s Pharmacy was in its golden years, too. But then you came along, and everything changed. It was like a light switch went off in his head. You have no idea how impressed he was with you, sweetheart. He had plenty of pharmacy techs, interns, and apprentices over the years, but Daddy never reacted to any of them like you.”

  “But then you and I started dating …,” I conclude flatly.

  “No, you’re wrong. We started dating right away. He felt that way about you after he knew about us. Even after you dropped out of pharmacy school. In the beginning, Daddy didn’t know what to make of you. But how could he resist someone who came so highly recommended,” Paige brags.

  She continues: “I kept tabs on you after high school. I knew you were back in town. I knew you were in pharmacy school. Daddy didn’t really need an intern, but he took one. Like it was any coincidence that I visited him on your first day of work. My father could have let you go when you quit pharmacy school. But instead he hired you full-time. You were it for him. Just like you were it for me. You were going to run the place. You were going to be his son. You were going to take over someday and carry on the tradition.”

  “I feel like I’m always … always disappointing your father, even now,” I say.

  Paige takes my hand. “You’re not hearing me. What I’m saying is, he loved you,” Paige insists, her eyes welling up with tears. “He loved you.”

  We’re both quietly crying now.

  The Martinez fireworks are now under way and Ruth’s porch swing provides the most splendid riverside view.

  “I have fresh-squeezed raspberry lemonade!” Ruth announces as if she hasn’t been eavesdropping.

  I take mine from her.

  “So what’s with this wedding?” Ruth says, squeezing her butt between us.

  “The costs are getting out of hand, and so far, we’ve received forty-two yeses, and zero noes. Actually, forty-four, Ruth is coming with a date,” Paige informs me.

  I give Ruth a kiss on the cheek.

  “Maybe I can return the dress,” Paige suggests, sadly.

  I’m touched by the offer, but I tell her no way: “You’re wearing that dress.”