by Claire Adams
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’ve heard of it?” she asks.
“If I had, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even know it. What’d you say it was?” I ask.
“It literally just means differently colored irises. It’s not some big, bad disease. It’s just the way my eyes are colored is all,” she says.
“Ah,” I say.
And there’s the awkward silence I was hoping to avoid.
“Well,” she says, “I just wanted to come in and see how Mick was doing. I’m off in a few minutes, so…” she trails off.
I take a look at my friend and decide I may have been a bit rough on him. “You know, Kate,” I say, “my friend Mick here, as you’ve probably picked up by now, has a bit of trouble with doctors and nurses and hospitals and IVs and medicine and hospital beds and-”
“Get to your point,” Mick commands.
“I don’t know, it seems the two of you have a rapport. I was just wondering if you might be able to pop in every once in a while when they’re going to be doing a test or something, you know, just kind of give him someone to talk to; is that inappropriate of me to ask?”
Okay, so maybe my intentions aren’t completely pure.
“Oh,” she says and looks over at Mick and then back at me. “Uh, well, I guess I could-”
“Excuse me,” that same joyless voice I’d heard over the nurse’s call box comes from behind Kate, who turns around, opening the door a little wider.
Kate moves out of the way as a short, stout woman with a red face and redder hair comes through the door. “Mr. Rafferty, how are you feeling tonight?” the nurse asks, looking past me into the room.
That’s not Mick’s last name.
Somewhere further in the room, probably behind that blue curtain, comes the voice of an older man, saying, “I’m feeling a bit anxious.”
I didn’t know there was anyone else in the room. I’d never heard the man speak and that curtain is always closed. I thought they were just leaving a bed open for the odd mid-shift nap.
The nurse disappears behind the curtain and when I turn around, Kate’s already gone.
“You saw that, right?” Mick asks, snorting laughter and seeming very proud of himself.
“What,” I ask quietly, “the fact that we’ve been talking shop with some guy in the next bed?”
“Oh, Mr. Rafferty’s cool, aren’t you, Mr. Rafferty?” Mick asks loudly.
“Big ups!” the old man’s voice creaks from the other side of the curtain.
“Yeah, Mr. Rafferty’s cool,” Mick says. “I’m talking about the volunteer chick. She’s way into me, right?”
“Yeah, man,” I say, doing my best to slather on the sarcasm. “I bet she goes home nights just thinking about you and the adorable way you lose your head every time someone comes near you with a stethoscope.”
“Say what you want, man,” he says, nodding. “That girl wants me.”
“What if I say that she’s not into you?” I ask. “What if I say she’s into me?”
“You?” he laughs. “Come on, Rans. I like you, but you’re not exactly a woman’s wet dream.”
“Do you mind?” the bitter nurse on the other side of the curtain barks.
“Okay, care to make it interesting?” I ask Mick in a softer voice.
“What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking the cost of your hospital bill,” I tell him. “After a week and all the trouble that you’ve put these people through, that’s going to be some pretty good money.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch,” I tell him. “You make your move, I’ll make mine. First one with a phone number wins.” I turn my head toward the curtain and say, “No matter who wins, she never hears about this and we’ll cut both of you in for ten percent each. Sound good?”
“Easiest money I’ll ever make,” Mr. Rafferty says.
I’m expecting the nurse to put up more of a fight, but she responds, “I’ve seen his bill, honey. I never heard a thing.”
I turn back to Mick. Now that the pressure is sufficiently on, I’m counting the money in my head. It’s not the noblest thing, but betting is what pays the bills. Racing is just the fun part.
“So you’re saying if I can get her phone number, you’re going to pay my hospital bill?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re definitely into five figures by now. If you’re going to need to take some time off racing to recover, I mean, how are you going to pay that bill?”
“But if you get her phone number first, I’m going to have to pay twice as much,” he finishes. “I know what you’re gonna do, though. You’re going to walk out of this room, tell her some crap about being worried about me, and ask if she can give you a call to let you know that I’m all right. No deal.”
“No, no,” I shake my head. “No tricks. Make your move, I’ll make mine. If she doesn’t give either of us her phone number, then Mr. Rafferty and Nurse…”
I wait a second.
“Pratchett,” the nurse answers.
“Really?” I ask. “Your name is Nurse Pratchett?”
“Is something funny?” Nurse Pratchett growls.
I turn back to Mick. “If neither of us gets the number, they can tell her about the bet. It’s a win, win.”
“Yeah,” he says, “except the guy that loses.”
I make sure he sees me looking up at the clock and I get out of my chair. “Well man, it’s been great talking to you, but it looks like visiting hours are over, so I’m gonna-”
“You really think she’s going to give you her number, don’t you?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” I tell him. “I’m just betting that she’s not going to give it to you, and I’m looking forward to seeing the aftermath.”
Kate said she was off in a few minutes. If I can get out of this room before she has time to get to her car, I’m sure I can catch up with her.
“Well, man,” I say. “May the best man win, etcetera, etcetera. I’ve got to go see about dumping a new carburetor in the Galaxie. I’ll talk to you later, man.”
“Wait,” he says, and I stop, already halfway out the door.
I turn around. “Yeah?” I ask, really wanting to meet up with Kate tonight. Otherwise, I’m going to have to camp out here with the wounded animal or else I may never see her in time to win the bet.
“Could you do me a favor and just tell Maye that I might be out a few more days, but I’ll be back at work just as soon as my lawyer gets me out of here?”
“Oh, right,” I chuckle. “She wanted me to tell you that if you’re not there by tomorrow morning, she’s outsourcing your job to Freedonia.”
He starts laughing. “Tell Maye to keep her Marx Brothers routine to herself. I’ll be out of here when I get out of here.”
“Knew she made it up, huh?”
“Nope,” he says. “It’s from a Marx Brothers bit. If you’re going to catch her, Romeo, you should probably get a move on.”
This is why I have so much fun messing with Mick. He’ll draw you in with conversation, say some things that are probably below what you’d hope his IQ would allow, and then, out of nowhere, he flicks you off his shoulder.
I walk out of Mick’s room and head toward the elevators. She could already be gone, but it’s worth a shot.
I press the button to call the elevator. The blue digital display above shows 1. I’m on the third floor.
By the time the elevator gets up here, I could be at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey,” a soft voice comes.
It’s Kate.
“I thought you already left,” I tell her.
“Nope,” she says. “Just on my way down to clock out now.”
“Ah,” I answer.
I’m freezing.
Why the hell am I freezing?
“So,” she says, “your friend tells me you’re into racing.”
“Yeah,” I answer
. “I guess you could say that.”
She leans toward me and whispers, “He says you two run an illegal racing club.”
Mick is a friend, but Mick is an idiot.
“He likes to talk big. I do race, and I do usually meet up with a lot of the same people, but I don’t own anything except my car, and as far as illegal—who’s to say? I don’t pay attention to politics.”
“Legal, illegal is just politics, huh?”
“No,” I answer. “What?”
What is my problem?
“Well,” she says, a moment before the ding of the elevator, “are you going down?”
Without an actual word, I follow her onto the elevator.
The doors close.
We’re standing next to each other, both facing the front.
The elevator’s slow, but the hospital’s only three stories high. If I’m going to stop acting like an idiot and make any kind of headway here, I’m going to have to move fast.
While I’m telling myself all of this, trying to really get that motivation going, Kate is reaching into her purse and pulling out a card. She hands it to me.
“If you’re ever free,” she says, “you should take me for a ride sometime.”
Words would be an excellent thing to use right now. I’m not even sure it would matter so much which words they were, just saying something would be an improvement.
She must notice that I’ve stopped blinking because her face is going red and she’s covering her mouth as she points and laughs at me.
Mick put her up to this. No wonder he was willing to go along with that bet. Sure, I strong-armed him into it, but that was just part of his plan. Mick may seem like an idiot—and he is, but...
Okay, I really don’t know how to finish that sentence.
“I’m sorry,” Kate says through her wheezing laughter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Well, don’t take pity on me,” I tell her.
“I meant I’d like to go for a ride in your big race car,” she says, tears forming in the corners of her eyes as her laughter overfills the space inside the elevator.
“Oh,” I say, cracking a smile, myself. “Oh, okay, so you’re not just playing some practical joke on me, you just misspoke.”
She furrows her brow, but her shoulders are still moving up and down.
The elevator doors open again and Kate walks out, turning her head on the way, saying, “Seriously, give me a call sometime.”
I smile and look down at the card. It has her first name—that’s encouraging. It’s impossible to know whether or not anything else on the card is accurate, but it is a good start.
This is definitely enough to win the bet with Mick, even if she did just try to give me the brush. I guess Mick didn’t have anything to do with it after all.
Sure, it may seem heartless winning a bet against some guy in the hospital, especially after he was so pompous about his chances. What makes it funny is that I never intended to hold him to the debt.
I just wanted there to be a scenario where he’d be completely aware that Kate’s not interested in him. Now that she’s given me her card and she’s already agreed to check in on Mick more often than she already has been, thus forcing the two to be in the same room, rubbing his face in the fact that she never actually liked him, it’s fair to say I’ve hit the jackpot.
Hey, the world’s a cold place.
Even better, I get to take a beautiful woman “for a ride.” Maybe she’s not quite as timid as I thought she was.
Chapter Three
Dinner and a Set of Earplugs
Kate
“Could you pass the peas?” I ask.
It’s the third time I’ve asked in the last five minutes.
“So then,” Mom says, “we get in there, and it’s like a bomb went off, okay? His spleen didn’t just rupture; it exploded.”
“Do we have to do this every time we sit down to dinner together?” I ask.
My dad looks at me. He opens his mouth like he’s going to respond, but turns back toward my mother, asking, “Were you able to remove the remnants?”
I get it. My parents are both doctors. This is just something I’m going to have to live with, but it would be wonderful if, just once, the three of us could sit at a dinner table and not talk about who had a more disgusting day at work.
“It took a while,” Mom says. “Surgery like that, you don’t want to miss anything.”
“Oh, I know,” Dad says in his never-ending attempt to convince Mom he’s just as much a doctor as she is. “You don’t want to leave anything floating around in there.” He’s not very good at it.
“Oh, and then, I was getting washed up after Mrs. Johnstone’s appendectomy, and I couldn’t find my wedding ring,” Mom says.
“Uh-oh,” Dad responds.
There’s a false alarm story like this every time we eat together. My only solace is that between all of our schedules, we really only eat dinner together once, sometimes twice a month.
What I want to do is get my own place.
Mom and Dad aren’t that bad, I guess. They treat me like I’m still a teenager, which is frustrating, but I don’t think their hearts are in the wrong place.
The problem is that I like going to college. Maybe I’d want to switch minors if it wouldn’t mean I’d lose my free parental financial aid, but even going through the motions to be a boring doctor like Mom and Dad is reason enough to play by the rules.
I could always go into research. I’ve never been huge on looking at, talking about, thinking of, or otherwise interacting with or acknowledging the inside functions of a person’s body, but if I don’t actually have to be in the room for it, I bet it wouldn’t be that big of a problem.
“So, I’m wheeling Mrs. Johnstone in to get an X-ray of her abdomen to see if I can spot the ring in there—she’s still out, by the way-” Mom continues.
Dad’s cracking up. “Did anyone see you?”
“I told Dr. Bloomberg that Mrs. Johnstone had-” Mom bursts into laughter.
I guess the worst part of my plan to move out is that I don’t have anything beyond, “I want to move out of here.” With school and work that doesn’t pay me, it’s not like I can just go check out apartments in my free time. Even if I had free time, to get an apartment, a person needs an income.
I don’t think an allowance counts.
Mom’s still trying to collect herself enough to tell Dad what she said to Dr. Bloomberg when the phone rings. I’m out of my seat as soon as I hear the sound.
It’s been a while since I saw Eli. I would have thought he would have called by now.
This would be a lot easier if I had my own cell phone, but again, no paying job and no time to find, much less work at, a paying job means I get to live without some of the nicer things.
Luckily, my parents couldn’t care less about the phone right now.
“Hello?” I say, answering.
“Hi, is this Kate?” a man’s voice asks.
I’m not quite sure if it’s Eli’s. I think it is, but it’s not like we’ve spent a lot of time together, either. Of course, the only people that ever call me are Mom and Dad. Paz would call if she wasn’t afraid of my mom picking up the line. Paz may be a malcontent, but she doesn’t cross my mother.
“Yeah, who’s this?” I ask.
“It’s Rans-” he stammers. “It’s Eli.”
Can I really date someone who goes by the name Ransom? I guess I’m not really dating anyone else.
“Hi, Eli,” I say.
Whew. That was tough.
“Hey,” he says. “You told me to give you a call if I had some free time to take you for a ride in my car.”
It’s a statement, so I’m not sure if he’s got something else coming or if he’s waiting for me to answer.
“Yeah?” I eventually respond.
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve got anything going on or not, but I was thinking maybe we could do that tonight.”
He’s talking a little faster than before. Could it be possible he’s just as nervous right now as I am? Maybe it’s one of those spider things: they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.
I’m probably just reading too much into it.
“I can’t take the Chevelle out right now, but I did just get my Galaxie fixed,” he says.
I love car talk. It’s never made any sense to me at all, but guys just sound so confident when they’re going on about them.
“Okay,” I say. “When did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking maybe an hour or so? If you’re up for it, there’s something I think you might like to see, but it is kind of time-sensitive,” he says.
“What is it?”
“Have you ever watched the sun set from the top of a hill overlooking the undeveloped parts of the valley?”
“Spectacular, is it?” I ask. We’re going to have to work on Eli’s romantic talk. It seems to me that he missed an opportunity for a more enticing description.
“A few people go up there,” he says. “It’s pretty cool. I was thinking maybe we could pick up some dessert on the way. Sound good?”
He’s no Cyrano de Bergerac, but at least it sounds like he’s trying.
“All right,” I tell him. “Did you want to do dessert first or just go straight for the sunset?”
Oh, Kate. Oh, silly, stupid Kate.
I cover the phone. This is so not my game.
“What I meant, was did you want to go watch the sunset first or did you want to do dessert first?” I correct, but he’s quiet for a few more seconds before responding.
“If you want, we could pick up something on the way and eat when we get there,” he says.
“That sounds good, but would you mind if I meet you somewhere? There’s kind of a family thing going on at the house right now, and my parents can get a little uptight when they’re not expecting someone to drop by the house.”
“That’s fine,” he says.
We agree to meet at Soeur Torsadée. I’ve never been there, but Eli insists that he’s paying, so I go along with it.
I’ve never actually gotten takeout from a nice French restaurant. I didn’t know nice French restaurants even did takeout.
