“Are you Mr. Carl’s son?”
I pulled myself out of my self-absorption to see a set of scrubs and a chart and a woman wearing and holding them both. She was young and thin and her eyes, though tired, were very blue. And she was a doctor, Dr. Hellmann.
“Like the mayonnaise,” I said.
She smiled thinly as if she hadn’t heard that more than a thousand times before and then went right to the chart. “You said your father has been in acute distress, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t give opiates to COPDers.”
“Excuse me?”
“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s what your father has, it’s why he’s here. But there is something maybe I can prescribe to ease his pleuritic pain. It won’t put him to sleep, but it will let him sleep if the pain is keeping him up. I’ll need to talk to him first.”
“Sure,” I said as I followed her down the hall. “How’s he doing?”
“We’re waiting for the antibiotic to work.”
“Maybe you should pump in some Iron City. That’s his usual medication of choice.”
She looked at me with her eyes narrowed. “Is that a joke?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Try harder next time.”
“How long have you been on duty?” I asked.
“Thirty so far.”
“Maybe after thirty hours nothing is funny.”
“Maybe,” she said, as we reached my father’s door, “but I couldn’t stop laughing at the evening news. That Peter Jennings, he was just cracking me up. You, on the other hand…” She gave me a jolt of her baby blues as she backed into the room. “Wait here.”
I waited. She spoke to my father for a long while and came out, writing on the chart. “The nurse will be back in a moment with the Toradol,” she said. With a toss of her hair, she walked toward the desk without giving me another glance. Hellmann, Dr. Hellmann. Like the mayonnaise.
I stuck my head in my father’s room. “Good news, the nurse is going to bring you something for the pain.”
“It won’t do nothing,” he said. “Whatever they give me, it won’t work. Nothing works. It’s just something else to charge the insurance company.”
“I’m going down to the cafeteria to get a bite. You want anything?”
“Get me a beer.”
“I tried,” I said, “but the cute doctor said no way.”
“She ain’t that cute.”
“Remember old Doc Schaefer you took me to when I was a kid?”
“With the nose hair and the mole?”
“Well, she’s cuter than him. I’ll be right back.”
I went down to the cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee, a soggy egg salad sandwich, a bag of chips. I sat down at a table and had my dinner. I took my time, I was in no hurry. I chewed the egg salad very carefully. I ate the chips one at a time instead of in handfuls. I spent a long while deciding on which color Jell-O for dessert.
When I slipped back into my father’s room, he was lying peacefully, asleep, his wet breaths rising and falling softly like the waves of a distant ocean. I spoke to him and he didn’t respond, but I didn’t want to leave him just yet. I turned on the television. The Sixers’ game was in the third quarter, they were up by three. It looked to be a pretty good game, a game I couldn’t get on my currently cable-free TV. I sat back in the chair, propped my foot on my father’s bed, watched the telly, wondered when Dr. Hellmann might check back in so I could flirt a little more.
It was turning out to be a rather nice visit with the game on and my father asleep and Mrs. Parma’s signed contingency fee agreement in my briefcase. It had worked out just as I had hoped when I went to the nursing station to complain of his pain because I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t want to hear his story about the girl in the pleated skirt. There are some things a son just doesn’t want to hear from his father, and his story of the girl who got away was, I was sure, just such a thing.
And I was right, yes I was, right at least about it being a story I didn’t want to hear. But I was wrong when I thought I had dodged it, because my father, for some perverse reason of his own, which I was only to discover much later on, was determined that I hear it, every damn breath of it, and I would, yes, yes I would.
And in its own peculiar way, his story told me everything I needed to know about the plague that had reached out to kill Joey Parma, the plague of slavery to the past that had doomed Joey’s life, and maimed my own life as well.
Chapter 7
“WHAT ARE WE supposed to do with this?” said Beth Derringer, from behind her neatly organized desk, holding the Parma contingency fee agreement in front of her like a floppy piece of moldy bologna. We were having a firm meeting, which meant that I had strolled into her office, the two of us comprising the whole of the less than prosperous law firm of Derringer and Carl.
“Investigate,” I said. “Isn’t that the first part of our three-part motto? Investigate, sue the bastards, collect gobs of money. I wonder what that would be in Latin. Vidi, vici, contingency fee?”
“Did you get a retainer?”
“Mrs. Parma is seventy-something, she can barely see, she lives off her husband’s Social Security. How was I going to ask for a retainer?”
“Victor,” said Beth, shaking her head, “we need money.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“But we need it now. Immediately. We need money or it’s over. The rent is long past due, Ellie has been two weeks without pay. I just got off the phone with the bank and they won’t extend our line. We’re in trouble.”
“Let’s go out and get a drink.”
“This is serious.”
“That’s why I want to go out and get a drink.”
“Victor, you’re avoiding.”
“Of course I’m avoiding. What sane person wouldn’t avoid what I’m avoiding. I don’t have enough money. I’m not getting laid. I have a glove compartment full of traffic tickets and a date in Traffic Court, where I’ll most likely be stripped of my license. I’m stuck every night or so visiting my father in the hospital and watching him die. And did I mention they shut off my cable? How is it possible to lead a meaningful life, I ask you, without the Golf Channel?”
She looked at me with almost pity in her eyes.
“Yes, it’s true,” I said. “No Golf Channel.”
“How is he?”
“Who?”
“Your father.”
“They want to slice him open and chop up his lungs. But I’d rather talk about business. What about our accounts receivable?”
“The accounts receivable, I’m happy to say, grow by the hour. But receivables don’t pay the rent. Guy Forrest still owes us for his murder trial. Why don’t you give him another call?”
“He can’t be reached. Whatever he had he sold and put in a trust for his kids. He says he’ll pay us when he can, but who knows when that will be. Now he’s hit the road. Bali. Tibet. Off to find himself.”