Loves Me, Loves Me Not

by Libby Malin

  Oops, Gina didn’t really like those irises. A patch of new stalks flies into the air in the far corner of the yard, their flat leaves falling like timber.

  But I’ll get better at this with time. How many lawns could I mow in one day—three, four, five? If I start early and mow until sunset. I wonder how much Gina paid her father-son team to do her yard. Probably a pretty penny. Nothing’s cheap in this end of town. Maybe fifty bucks? Maybe seventy with trim work thrown in? That’s at least two-fifty a Saturday if I manage to rope five clients. Not bad. I don’t even need an office for that. How much does a lawn mower cost, anyway? If I get one of those rider ones…but no, I want the exercise, too. Maybe I can get both—a push mower and a riding mower—and alternate between them at jobs. If I mow on Sundays, that’s another two-fifty and I’m only working weekends. I like this, I like it. With fifty-two weeks in a year, that means I’d make around 25 K just working Saturdays and Sundays!

  Around a curved section, I carefully maneuver the machine to avoid a newly planted bed of annuals. I manage to miss most of them and make a mental note to rake up the fallen so Gina won’t notice.

  After I complete the front, I take a break and head in for a cool drink and a bite to eat. Gina is on the phone, obviously talking to Fred, so no danger of me giving in and calling Henry before my self-imposed noon time. But I linger, waiting for her to get off, and when she finally does, I’ve decided to do the rest after an early lunch when I have a new wave of energy.

  She’s looking a little more chipper now, but still in her robe. Holding a coffee mug in hand, she leans against the counter as I microwave myself a hamburger. When I offer her one, she turns up her nose and shakes her head.

  “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I might lie down, though. You need anything?”

  “Nope, I’m fine.”

  If she’s going to nap, I shouldn’t mow the back right away. It will disturb her peace. So I snarf down my burger and give in and call Henry. Hey—it’s nearly eleven by now. Voice mail picks up. Inhaling, I get ready to leave a message with Gina’s number but think better of it. I want to actually reach Henry, not have to wait for him to return my call.

  To distract myself, I wander into the den and flip on the TV, which seems permanently set on HGTV. Switching to a cooking show, I watch as some French chef mutters what I’m sure are obscenities aimed at Americans as he prepares a dish whose artful arrangement on the plate requires him to touch the food at least 2,345 times. No thanks, I’ll stick to my prefabricated burgers.

  I try Henry again after the show, but still no go. As another cooking show scrolls into view, my eyelids become heavy. Napping seems like a damned good idea and I let myself meander down that happy path.

  When I awake, it is nearly one. I’ve slept for more than an hour. But I don’t feel lazy, I feel victorious. It feels so good to catch up on my sleep. I’m energized and ready to tackle that lawn again. Stretching, I turn off the latest cooking show—this one featuring a German who touches the food only twelve fewer times than the French chef—and head for the kitchen. Still no sign of Gina, but I figure she’s had a good hour to doze it off and if I wake her up now, it won’t be a tragedy. So I go back outside to the mower, which I’m beginning to view now as a trusty friend, like an old horse who’s carried me through many a battle.

  “Hello, Old Blue,” I say to the machine, patting it on the handlebar. But it’s red so that name doesn’t really fit. “It’s working time again,” I drawl. She does not answer.

  This time, I start her up with one deft pull and we’re chomping away at the heavy growth like a Gillette on a two-day-old beard. Since the backyard is bigger than the front, the sweat factor increases a hundredfold. It’s also more difficult, with fewer straight edges and a steep hill at the end of the yard.

  By the time I make my way around most of the lawn, it’s nearly two and I’m heading to the trickier part of the job—the area near the flagstone patio with its curved and angled edges. A bunch of lilies of the valley nestles against the stones.

  Here, I can’t do the concentric-circle thing because it’s too hard to get the mower’s edge against the border. I have to push and pull it in and out as if I’m vacuuming, a time-eating process that tires my upper arms. But hey, it’s better than push-ups. I never liked exercise, anyway. It seems so self-centered to spend all that time on yourself. At least here I’m doing something that helps someone, that gets something done, that…

  Eeeyowza! Something flies into my face and slashes me across the eye. Godammit—the lawn is fighting back!

  The mower sputters off as I reach up and touch the wounded spot. There’s blood on my hand! What the hell is going on here? I wander to the patio door but am not reassured when my sister comes into view and drops her coffee cup as she catches sight of me through the glass.

  “Amy, my God, what happened? Get in here! Let me call a doctor! Sit down, sit down!” She pulls me through the open door and I sit at the kitchen table, now beginning to feel a little woozy, but I’m not sure if it’s from the gash or the fear generated by Gina’s reaction.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I say. “I was doing well and then, bingo, the grass threw something at me.”

  Gina soaks a clean dish towel in water and gently washes my face, but this does not stop the flow of blood, which is coming from what she describes as a wicked three-inch cut above my right eye. It hurts, too, and I can feel the headache starting to hiss and gasp to life at that spot. The throbbing intensifies.

  “I’m getting dressed,” Gina insists, “and taking you to the hospital.”

  “Gina, that’s crazy. It’s just a scrape.” But part of me will be glad to have it taken care of if for no other reason than I don’t want to be left with an ugly scar. And hell, I might meet a doctor, right? The lawyer circuit isn’t working for me—one dead, one philandering. Maybe I’ll be more successful on the doctor circuit.

  Gina’s back in a few minutes but not before the phone rings. She answers it in her bedroom and I assume it is Fred, but when she comes into the kitchen, she tells me it was Wendy and she told her about the accident and that I’d call her back. Gina’s put on another pair of designer jeans with a peach silk camp shirt, and since she’s still suffering from the night before, her ashen face doesn’t look good next to its warm hues. Hiding her own aches, she takes charge.

  “Do you think you can walk?” she asks, coming over to me and putting her arm around my shoulder to help me up.

  “It hit my eye, not my leg,” I say, and stand. But the room does spin a little, so I let her let me lean on her. I’m not willing to admit I’m dizzy from the accident, though. It could just be I’m not used to so much exercise all at once. I had been feeling a little light-headed on that last pass near the patio.

  In the car, she does my seat belt up as if I were a child. While reaching across my blood-stained shirt, she plucks something from it and holds it up as evidence. “A hairpin!” she exclaims, letting me see the twisted piece of metal. “It must have fallen out of my hair one day!”

  She hands it to me. I don’t know what to do with it. Then she hands me a damp wash-cloth she’s brought along, scowling when it drips on her silk.

  “Here, honey, hold this to your eye to stop the bleeding. I really don’t like the way that’s gushing. You could have hit an artery or something. Maybe I should call 911 instead.” She hesitates before turning the key.

  “No, I’m fine. Just go ahead.”

  “Okay. It’s only a few minutes away.” She backs out of the garage so recklessly that she dings a fender on the corner of the door. Fred will not be pleased. Gina winces but forges on nonetheless.

  She manages to get us to Greater Baltimore Medical Center in under fifteen minutes, which has to be a record on well-trafficked roads on a Saturday afternoon. But then again, we are traveling in the opposite direction from Tess, so we are out of range of her evil spell.

  Along the way, I recalculate the lawn-mowin
g business. I wouldn’t be mowing each week of the year, I remember. There is that pesky thing called winter. So that would cut down on profits. With worker’s comp insurance sure to be a bite, I’m thinking that this lawn-mowing gig is not a good career move. Better to find out now rather than after investing half your life in it, right?

  By the time we arrive at the hospital, I don’t care anymore why I’m feeling woozy or why I’m bleeding so much. I just want it to stop. A migraine has exploded near the site of the original damage and it is taking hostages in my brain. I might have to surrender soon. I try not breathing but that makes it worse.

  Gina is all bluster and business when we walk in together after she stashes the car in a handicapped parking space near the door. “You’re handicapped right now,” she explains. I make her promise to move it.

  We end up waiting nearly an hour to be seen by a doctor after the nurse evaluates me and places me at the end of the triage line, probably behind the fellow who looks like he’s having a heart attack and the woman who is retching into a plastic bucket. Personally, I’m glad they took her before me.

  By the time I get into the little curtained cubicle to be seen, all I want is a big fat juicy pill to make my headache go away. I curl up on the gurney and close my eyes and wait another half hour until a woman doctor comes in with a clipboard in her hand. She’s attractive with an auburn page-boy and green eyes and lightly freckled face. Her name is Dr. Robin Wheeler.

  After Gina explains what happened, Wheeler takes a good look at me, asks a few questions and tells me I’ll need that gash closed up.

  “Head wounds always bleed a lot,” she tells Gina, even though I’m the patient. “We see a lot of kids whose parents get all excited about a bump to the head.” Wheeler laughs a little at those silly parents. I wonder if Gina is making a mental note never to bring her kid here when she has an emergency. Who would want a patronizing doctor shaking her head over those excitable parents, huh? They see a bump on the head hemorrhaging like Niagara, and they overreact, those moms and dads. Better to let Johnny bleed to death than bother the good Dr. Wheeler.

  Wheeler disappears and it’s several years before she comes back. At least it feels that way to my throbbing head. Several times she passes our cubicle and Gina tries to get her attention, even calling out her name at one point. But Wheeler acts like she’s deaf in that ear—whatever ear happens to be facing us at the moment.

  Eventually, she comes back in, smiley face in place, glue gun in hand. Well, not a glue gun per se, but some sort of glue-y stuff that she uses instead of stitches to pull the gash together. When I ask for a pain pill, she looks at me suspiciously, as if I’m an addict who hurt herself just to get the free drugs. She gives me some souped-up Motrin, which I swig back before a nurse even has a chance to give me water, which I’m sure just reinforces their drug-addict image of me.

  Closing my eyes again, I lay back down awaiting my discharge papers. Gina peppers the doctor with questions about whether or not I should see a plastic surgeon to make sure there won’t be a permanent mark, but I drift away, trying hard not to think about my headache and think only of pleasanter things. Pineapple ice cream dog running after boy. Henry.

  Henry.

  I hear Henry’s voice. I must be dreaming. Dr. Wheeler accidentally gave me a hallucinogen, right? It’s a damn good hallucination, though, because I smell his Tommy Hilfiger cologne, too.

  A nurse says, “Amy Sheldon? She’s back here.”

  The curtain opens and there he is—in the flesh. Or at least, in the flesh in my dreams. I don’t know anymore. How did he get here? How did he know where I was, that I’d hurt myself?

  In this dream, he reads minds because he answers my questions before I have a chance to say them out loud.

  “Your friend Wendy called me. She said your sister was bringing you here. Jesus Christ, Amy!” He looks at my scarred face with a mixture of concern and disgust. I’ll take the former, thank you very much. “What did you do?” He comes to my side and stands with his hands on the edge of the gurney.

  “She hurt herself mowing the lawn,” my sister says, coming back into our cubicle. I introduce them, and Gina gives Henry the once-over, then looks at me and raises her eyebrows, but she does it so quickly that I can’t make out the code words she’s sending.

  “Bobby pin to the brain,” I say, smiling wanly. I’ve always wanted to smile wanly.

  They stand awkwardly staring at me, both of them with concerned looks that seem to ask me how I could be so dumb as to kick up a hairpin with a lawn mower and create a not-so-neat three-inch gash above my eye. But I ignore their scorn and sit up.

  Sitting up is a mistake. It intensifies my headache pain, which I can’t hide.

  “Something the matter?” Gina asks.

  “This migraine. Started in the car,” I manage to spit out between the threshing, slicing blades of pain that mow down my mind’s fresh, green thoughts.

  “Doctor!” Henry calls out to Wheeler who crosses our line of vision. Hah! Like she’ll listen.

  For Henry, she does listen. Dr. Wheeler stops and comes into our crowded stateroom immediately. Is it the drug or is Henry giving her the once-over? Is it my paranoia or is Dr. Wheeler using those green eyes to flirt with him?

  “She has a migraine,” he says, pointing to me as if I’m Babette, the pet poodle.

  Woof, woof, I want to say, and hope that Henry pets me and nuzzles me behind the ears.

  Wheeler comes closer. “You get these often?”

  “Every week or so.”

  “Taking anything for them?”

  The magic pills. I want one. I give her the drug name and dosage.

  “Okay. I’ll give you one.”

  “Can I take it with the Motrin?”

  She smiles condescendingly and pats my hand the way they taught her back in Bedside Manner class. “Yes, you can. And I think you’re all set to go now. The nurse will have you sign a few papers and that’s it!”

  When she leaves, Henry’s eyes go with her.

  The nurse, a little tugboat of a woman, brings the papers and the migraine meds. These pills are so magic that they dissolve in your mouth without water. They taste like peppermint. Yum. As soon as it hits my tongue, I have a Pavlovian response and the pain recedes. The guy who invented them should be beatified.

  As I scoot off the gurney, Henry helps me. Now that the pain is going away, I become aware of just how hideous I must look—blood-spattered shirt, grass-stained jeans, hair damp from sweat, grimy face decorated with Frankenstein wound, and I probably have b.o. to boot. What a catch.

  Gina scurries ahead. “I parked illegally,” she calls over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you at the house.”

  So both Gina and Wendy have conspired to get me together with Henry today. I wonder when they thought of planting the hairpin in the lawn to set me up for this whole E.R. trip, too. No matter. Henry gently leads me to his BMW and doesn’t even make a fuss about me dirtying his leather seats. Once I’m strapped in, he asks for directions to my sister’s house and we glide back on to the road.

  “I must look a mess,” I say apologetically.

  He smiles. “I didn’t expect to see you in evening dress.”

  Wrong response. First, it conjures up images of Tess in evening dress. Not a good comparison. Secondly, he should have lied and said I look fine. Lying is the right answer here.

  “I’ll get cleaned up at Gina’s.”

  “I tried to call you,” he says as he smoothly maneuvers the car through heavy traffic. It is now late afternoon, well past the hour when I’d told myself I could call him. One more reason this hairpin setup was a neat little scheme.

  “I know. I checked my voice mail. But I didn’t get the message until today. Phone’s being disconnected.”

  Henry chides me for not telling him I’d moved in with Gina and for not giving him the number. “If you expect a man to take you out, the first step, my little conchita, is to make sure he has the right phone number.
” I like hearing him call me “conchita” now, and I like the way his hand artfully shifts the gears as he intently studies the road. No wonder women fall for race-car drivers. A big machine under them, skillfully handled.

  “Stay for supper,” I say simply as we near Gina’s house. “It’s just us and Gina. Her husband’s out of town.” I don’t know why I mention this. Henry doesn’t know Fred.

  “You’re tired,” he says. He pulls the car into the driveway, turns off the engine and sits. Gina has beat us home, and I see the light on in the kitchen up above.

  “Not too tired. Those pills are great.”

  “I didn’t know you had migraines.” His brow creases as he says it. He actually looks concerned.

  “There are lots of things you don’t know about me,” I say, trying to sound coy, but it’s impossible to sound coy in a bloody T-shirt. It blocks coy rays. “Come on in. At least stay for a drink.”

  He doesn’t protest and we head in together. He even takes my hand.

  Gina brightens when she sees us. She’s already pulling down cocktail glasses and doesn’t waste a moment offering Henry a Scotch or gin or whatever he wants. He opts for a bourbon, neat, but I take nothing. Too many systemic anesthetics on a tour bus through my nerve cells as it is.

  “You should stay for dinner,” Gina says to Henry.

  “Hear that? She’ll be brokenhearted if you say no,” I tease him.

  Grinning, he sips his drink and nods. “Okay. Can I help?”

  That’s a charming gesture, I note—not only agreeing to stay, but offering to help. Maybe there’s more to Henry than I give him credit for. He did come to the hospital and he hardly knows me. I mean, we’re sex partners, but in today’s world that doesn’t signify anything deep, necessarily. Though looking at Henry now, with his gleaming eyes and happy grin, I wonder if it does mean something to him, despite the regular flower orders, despite the notes about “incomparable nights.”