by Julia Kent
“I thought you meant you had a favorite dessert here.”
“I do,” he said, with a lecherous smile.
Alex just shook his head and pretended not to be there.
Josie cackled. “We’re quickly getting into ‘too much information’ territory here, Ed.”
“When you’re my age, you take whatever information you can get,” he said.
“All right, all right.” Madge batted his hand away. “I need to get you guys seated. Come on.” She grabbed three menus, and Ed followed her, giving her a quick goose on the ass, making her giggle. The idea that Madge was capable of giggling threw Josie for a loop. As Madge showed them to their booth, Josie made it a point to sit across from the two men, claiming her space and needing to get as much distance as possible from both of them, to preserve whatever shred of dignity remained.
The first words out of Alex’s mouth, as he sat across from her and locked eyes, were exactly what she expected. “Threesome. Care to explain?”
“You know what she meant,” Josie retorted.
“No, I don’t,” Alex said skeptically. A smile struggled to stay inside as he grilled her, leaning forward, invading her space as much as possible in an effort to unsettle her. She knew it, and he knew it, and damn if he wasn’t succeeding.
“She called me ‘threesome girl’ because I came in here with the threesome, not because I’m part of a threesome.” She looked down at the menu, knowing exactly what she was going to order, but needing to break eye contact. “I don’t seem to be part of anything these days.”
He frowned, genuine concern pouring into his features. His eyes warm again as he let go of the guardedness. It made her want to let go as well and talk to him openly, rather than play this stupid game that she knew was one-sided, all on her, trying to shut him out.
“You can be part of whatever you want to be part of,” he stressed. His fingers started to tap the tabletop, and she knew that he was purposefully engaging his hands so that he didn’t reach across and try to take hers. The gesture was touching. Every movement and word orchestrated between the two of them as he tried to figure out why she had blown him off, and she tried to pretend that she was still blowing him off, and only here for Ed’s benefit.
That day in the elevator, their heated embrace while Laura was in labor, he had said to her something about games being what people who don’t know what they want engage in. Damn, if he wasn’t right. Playing this game was a reflection of her own internal turmoil, and she really didn’t know what she wanted.
That was the problem. The longer she sat across from him, though, the more she wanted him. He was the real deal. Diving in with Alex would be a mature relationship, one that she knew involved giving it all. This wouldn’t be a 50/50 or a 20/20, which was what she was more accustomed to. This would be a full on, 100% involvement, with each person giving their all. He’d mentioned having a family, and children, and she knew that she couldn’t offer that. That’s what had kept her away, the worry that he really was the whole package and that she just wasn’t. No matter how much Laura tried to convince her that Josie’s insecurities were her biggest obstacle, and that she really had value and was worthy, and could build a life with children and love, and family, and—dare she even think it—Alex, at the core, Josie just couldn’t believe that she could rise above her own fears and take the plunge.
“Coconut shrimp and fried green tomatoes for you,” Madge said to Josie without looking at her as she scribbled something in that little electronic device of hers. “Coconut cream pie and a cup of coffee for Ed…and Alex, I still haven’t quite figured out what it is that you want.”
“I know exactly what I want, Madge,” he said, his eyes boring into Josie. “Unfortunately, it’s not on the menu.”
This was how we were going to play the game, Josie thought. “I’m changing my order, Madge,” Josie said flatly. “Give me whatever Ed’s having.”
“Don’t you want the same thing Alex wants?” Madge said, those smoker’s lips pursed like the puckered butthole of a cat.
That’s the problem! her heart cried out, but her mouth, thankfully, didn’t open and say those words. Josie chose this moment to ignore everyone, her wishes already stated, and took the coward’s way out, standing and slipping past Madge to go and use the ladies’ room.
Alex worried that maybe this had all been a mistake. Surprising Josie at work and bringing Ed in today had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now, sitting across from her at the table filled him with so many conflicting emotions, he hardly knew which to act on. Teasing her about the threesome seemed to be a gentle ribbing that she could tolerate, but her speedy exit told him that he had crossed a line.
Grandpa seemed happy to be in a familiar place with his girlfriend nearby; her fast, sure motions around the rundown restaurant were reassuring, even to Alex. He liked Madge, they all did. She was a crotchety old curmudgeon, but she dearly loved Ed, and Alex, his mom, and his aunts were grateful for her stable, stalwart presence, as Ed was in decline.
Alex reached out and tapped Madge on the elbow in one of her many trips past the table. She halted, like something out of a Road Runner cartoon, coming to a screeching halt and turning to him with a look of surprise.
“Yes, Alex?”
“Do you really know Josie?”
“She’s been coming in here for a while.”
“Hasn’t half of Boston?” he asked.
“Well, yeah, but I mean, she’s been coming in here for the better part of a year. It started with the blonde, the pregnant one, and shortly after that, the two guys came in. They’re the ones who made the warlock waitress, you know, back in the day.”
“No way, Mike and Dylan were responsible for that?” he said in disbelief.
“They are indeed.” She nodded somberly. “One of them stole the cardboard cutout from some video store and they came in here with their old girlfriend and they finagled a waitress’s uniform out of me, and I don’t even remember who the hell put the balls on there.”
This was probably one of the longer conversations he’d ever had with Madge, who was already tapping her toe to get back into the kitchen and handle orders. She looked at the table in horror. “I completely forgot about your drinks! Shit!” she muttered under her breath.
Ed tapped her on the knee and said, “Don’t worry about it, honey, we’re good tippers, no matter what.” A quick wink from him, and Madge just smiled. The look of happiness on her face peeled back three decades—not enough to see the young girl she must have been at one time, but enough to see how much Ed’s presence lightened her heart.
He wanted to put that kind of joy on Josie’s face, just with his mere presence. The time they’d spent together a few weeks ago, everything from the birth of baby Jillian, to asking her to go on a walk, to their first time together at her place, it all had seemed seamless and ecstatic, electric and charged, with a strange combination of the new and the familiar. Call it fate, or kismet, or luck…whatever you called it, it had rolled out as if it were meant to be. Was the aberration Josie’s cooling off, or was the aberration the connection that he had felt? Figuring out the answer to that meant having access to her thoughts, so that his own looping questions in his mind didn’t become an echo chamber. Reinforcing his own ideas was easy; in fact, it was lazy, not worthy of the kind of self-reflection that he’d always engaged in. He didn’t want to just understand what he felt. He wanted to understand why he felt it.
Coming to Ed’s appointment, facing her head on, pushing her just a little to come to Jeddy’s, to sit with him and Ed, had seemed like it was a way to crack the door open, to get his foot in there and wiggle it enough for her to accept him as an audience. To ask questions, to be heard, and maybe, just maybe, to go back to the slow unfurling of what had seemed like a linear development of a relationship. A real relationship, with a woman who was not his type, who he would never had picked out in a bar, or at a coffee shop, or online, but who might just be his soulmate after all.
No amount of self-reflection or careful planning had made that so. It just got dumped on both of them through some act of whatever higher power they might want to believe in. Maybe just dumb, dumb luck.
She came back from the ladies’ room with a chip prominently displayed on both shoulders. Her body edged into the booth with a non-verbal defensiveness that almost made him laugh at its rigidity. Somehow he had done this, and somehow he would undo this.
“Toffee mint cannoli?” he asked as she scooted into the booth.
“Excuse me?”
“Madge said they’re experimenting with some new desserts.”
Josie groaned. “I don’t think I can handle more.”
“What about coffee?” Madge barked, appearing suddenly with a carafe.
“Always room for coffee,” Josie backpedaled.
Alex stopped Madge. “Not now. Thanks. We’ll get a latte somewhere else.”
“Latte,” Madge huffed. “Well, excuuuuuuuse me for offering plain old brewed pig shit,” she said, storming off.
Josie choked on her water. “She’s always like that, isn’t she?”
“Can you imagine being related to her?”
“Yes,” Ed announced.
Josie raised her eyebrows and just looked at Alex, who humored Ed.
“Grandpa?”
“I want to marry her.”
“You go for it, Ed,” Josie said, cheering him on.
Alex gave her a death stare. They’d been over this with his grandpa plenty of times. If he married Madge, it would affect his housing subsidy and maybe future nursing home prospects. Madge was a nice woman, if a bit gruff with everyone but Ed, and she seemed firmly rooted in reality. The gesture was sweet, and he knew his grandpa did it out of a sense of love, but it was complicated.
“We can talk about it later, Grandpa,” Alex said, motioning to Madge to come to the table, pulling out his wallet.
“You think you’re getting a check, Alex? Oh, please,” Madge said, patting his cheek kindly.
“I’ll pay the tip in bed,” Ed added.
“Oh, God,” Alex mumbled, standing quickly, desperate to get out of there. Josie snickered. Alex guessed she had no idea how badly Ed’s filter had worn away this year. Then again, maybe she had. As much as it horrified him, Alex—or his mom, or aunts—should ask her whether Ed had been coming on to her. Fortunately, he always took “no” for an answer, and most of the young women he propositioned found it amusing, rather than threatening or creepy. But still…
And when he wasn’t hitting on younger women, he openly discussed his sex life with Madge. Alex really, really didn’t need another frank discussion about the kind of nipple clamps Madge liked.
Really.
“Josie, you ever heard of something called ‘pegging’?” Ed asked as they walked toward the exit.
Madge had the decency to wince. “Ed, we don’t talk about that,” she whispered.
Hurrying his grandpa toward the door, Alex caught Josie biting her lips, clearly enjoying watching him squirm.
“I read Dan Savage’s column, Ed, so yes,” she replied as they walked outside, Alex's eyes taking a minute to adjust in the bright sunshine.
Ed nudged Alex. “Lucky young man.”
And then Josie turned away, tears in her eyes from cry-laughing. Alex wanted to join her but he was too busy turning into a mortified puddle of flesh as his grandfather openly discussed pegging with the woman who had blown him off for the past week. The woman he’d chased down this morning, using his grandpa as desperate leverage.
Who was now talking about assfucking with a strap-on dildo.
So this was what his life had come to?
“I’ll see you next month, Ed,” she said, starting to walk off. “Bye, Alex,” she added, like he was an afterthought. Headed toward the train, her back to them as she walked quickly, shoulders shaking from laughter, Josie faded out, and Alex felt a keen sense that somehow—at some unknown point—he’d just blown everything.
“Wait!” he shouted.
She halted.
“What about the latte?”
She froze, then turned slowly. “I’m too full.”
“Too full for coffee?” The struggle to keep a begging tone out of his voice wasn’t working, damn it. “Really?” he added in an incredulous tone, trying to sound jocular and not quite so needy.
Even Josie had to acknowledge her caffeine addiction. She took a deep breath and said, “Barrington Roasters on Congress. Tomorrow morning?” Her words leaked out like helium through a pinhole in a balloon, as if she were reluctant to let them go.
“When?”
“Seven?” He could do that. He would do that, even if he had to get coverage for two hours to make it.
“It’s a date!” he shouted as she walked away.
“It’s coffee!” she retorted.
Date. Coffee. Whatever.
It was a plan.
The head of the research trial that Josie worked on was a lab rat, what they called a Mud-fud: an MD and a Ph.D. For him, practicing medicine was about studying human microbiology—not about touching human beings. Which was probably better for everyone all around given Gian Rossini’s appearance…and mannerisms…and general tone.
He was more interested in glutamate receptors and how they functioned neurologically than in watching the love fade from the eyes of an Alzheimer’s patient who could no longer recognize her husband of fifty-three years.
He was short, though like everyone, taller than Josie, about five-five. Squat, but not fat, more that barrel chested look of an Italian man who played a lot of soccer and ate his share of cannoli. Gian lived at home with his mother on Boston’s North End, the Little Italy section of the city; she knew this only because he talked about his mother nonstop, adoring her and taking her to mass four nights a week and Sunday mornings.
He was in his early fifties, a bit of a recluse, and seemed quite content with his life. He had always puzzled her because she wondered how he could be happy the way he was…and yet, he was.
The problem with Gian had absolutely nothing to do with any of the issues that she’d just been thinking about. She had watched enough patients go through the trial now to notice a distinct difference. She had no way of knowing who was in the control group and who was receiving the new medication.
That was what a double blind study was. No one was supposed to know, and therefore the outcome of the trial could not be compromised. Josie was careful and ethical—and always would be—but that didn’t mean that her very human instincts couldn’t collect their own data, honed through careful observation skills.
Patients who had come in at roughly the same functional level were different. Some, like Ed, were definitely in decline, while others seemed to stand still—and when it came to Alzheimer’s you begged whatever deity you believed in, for the patient to stand still. Some patients had deteriorated even worse than Ed had, losing a temporal sense. Lost in 1938, 1957, 1985, a few mistook grandchildren for children and one had taken to stripping naked every day and doing her gardening in the nude.
Their children, their grandchildren, their spouses, and girlfriends, and boyfriends, pulled Josie and the other nurse on the trial aside to talk about the real issues—not the twenty- to thirty-minute test that they gave every month, but daily life functioning. All she could do was refer them to support groups in the area. But as each week passed her teeth began to clench just a little more, her jaw aching, her occipital lobe tight and straining at her scalp muscles, causing tension headaches as she watched the growing disparity between about half of her patients and the other half, fading faster.
So she approached Gian with a sense of dread, not because she thought that what she was about to say was futile but because she knew how he felt. Well, actually “felt” was inaccurate—Gian didn’t feel anything about science. He deduced, he hypothesized, he analyzed, he collected. Feeling? That wasn’t Gian’s style.
Lining up her facts, her observations, her data, and tying
it all into an FDA regulation was her only chance of helping Ed.
The problem was that he was more stubborn than she was. It had to be some sort of hand of fate reaching down into her life and choking her, to make her boss as obstinate—no, rather more obstinate than she was. Once he got an idea in his head, especially one that was credible and backed up with facts and figures and data, there was little chance of changing his mind.
Gian’s office was very much like hers, an eight-by-eight cell with fluorescent lights, a small counter, a desk, a chair or two, and reams and reams of unfiled paper. Most of what they did was crunched by the computer these days. Actual paperwork was typically stupid administrative crap from inside the research facility, regulatory nonsense that no one should have had to fill out. Most of them ignored it until at least the third pleading reminder from the poor administrative assistants across the facility kept begging.
“Hey, Gian?”
“What’s up, Josie?” He pinched the bridge of his nose and smiled, a wan, weak attempt at friendliness.
“I just finished with some interviews and I’m noticing a pattern.”
His face clamped down, as if an iron gate had been slammed shut. “A pattern? We don’t like patterns in double blinds.”
She had to tread carefully. “We do if they’re positive.”
He snorted. “How often does that happen?”
He had a point.
“There are some patients who are showing marked decline. Others are maintaining remarkably. It’s pretty unmistakeable, and I—”
“You know how to report it.” Gian could shut a person down faster than a prostitute who learns her trick is flat broke.
“I did report it. Last month. This month I’m seeing it too, especially with one patient.”
“A sample size of one is not ‘data.’”
“No, it’s not. It’s a human being.” They’d been through this argument a thousand times before. Time to hit him with #1001.
He sighed. “I’ll look into it.”
“Thanks. If we have to break the trial—”
