“Well, here I am,” I said. I lifted my head up and pushed against the sink, driving myself upright. My right leg tingled. Shakily, I rested both hands on the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. “Shit.” I didn’t much care for the aging, fat, old man that stared back at me, a little tremor pulling at the right side of his mouth.
I stood up straight and buttoned my shirt, then ran a hand through quarter-inch-long hair that didn’t need combing no matter what acrobatics I performed.
Crocker stood in the doorway of the bathroom, hands on the jamb. Evidently he’d left his crutches behind. I tried a grin at the sight of his worried reflection. With an effort I turned around, one hand still on the sink.
“You want some coffee?” I asked.
“You ought to call somebody,” he said, and I grimaced with irritation.
“I’m fine.” I let go of the sink and hobbled past him to make my way to the kitchen, thankful that the walls were holding still so that I could find them for support.
Once in the kitchen, familiar things worked their magic. I put on coffee without making a mess even though I had to hold the decanter under the faucet with my left hand. By the time I snapped the “on” button of the coffeemaker, I was feeling human again. The clock on the stove told me it was five minutes to four, and I had to look at it several times before I could believe I’d managed to turn a nap into a major crash.
I walked into the living room and thudded into my leather chair. My stomach growled.
Crocker had made his way along the hall wall from my bedroom to the living room, keeping his weight off his knee. He reached the sofa and eased himself down.
“I don’t much care for this getting old business,” I said.
“Well, no,” Crocker said slowly, as if he didn’t quite know what to say.
I leaned my head on one hand and regarded him from across the room. “What are you going to do when you’re too old to ride a bike?”
The question surprised him and he smiled. “Walk, I guess. It’s slower, but I got time.”
“I suppose you do.”
He nodded. “I ain’t got anything I just have to finish,” he said. “So I got time. How much ever I got, it’s what the Lord gave me.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said, not in the mood to discuss personal theology. The only mental image I could conjure was Maria Ibarra, maybe happy for one of the few times in her life, reaching eagerly for a big piece of sloppy, greasy, pepperoni pizza, the food offered to her by a good-looking American kid whose motives were probably not obvious to her. She wouldn’t have understood anything about theology if someone had told her that she had only seconds to enjoy life.
My lapse into silence worried Crocker. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“A little woozy, but otherwise all right,” I said. “You never said if you wanted coffee or not.”
He shrugged and I took that for a yes, even though I knew damn well what was going through his mind. I suppose that’s why it seemed necessary to me to push myself out of the chair with what I thought was my usual vigor and go to the kitchen.
The cups were sitting on the counter, and I had only to pick up the pot from under the machine and pour. My right hand went exactly where I sent it, but from there the signals were botched. With perfect ease, I drew the full decanter off the hot plate and swung it just enough that when my right hand spasmed, the pot crashed to the tile floor.
Glass and hot coffee sprayed into every corner of the kitchen. The string of oaths was painful for the gentle Crocker to hear. I bit off another curse and stood silently regarding the mess on the floor, on my shoes, even on the Navajo rug that lay just beyond the step down into the living room.
“You really ought to call someone,” Wesley Crocker said.
“What I need is a goddamned maid,” I replied. The broken glass seemed very far away. “Shit,” I added, and went into the pantry for the sponge mop, broom, and dustpan. I managed to sweep the most lethal of the glass shards into the dustpan, surprised and not a little alarmed at how useless my right hand had become. I opened the cupboard door under the sink and missed the trash can with the dustpan. The broken glass cascaded back onto the floor at my feet.
I rested with my hands on the sink, a posture that had become familiar to me. Wesley Crocker watched the performance in silence. Without looking up, I said, “How about a beer?”
“No, no,” Crocker said hastily, no doubt imagining the havoc I could wreak with a zip-top can. “No, beer and I don’t get along so well.” And then, like a recording, he added, “But I still think you ought to call someone.”
“I dropped the goddamned coffeepot, for God’s sakes. Why should I call somebody?” I regarded the mess again, the lake of coffee puddling nicely on the vinyl flooring, various tributaries and extensions and inlets spreading here and there, some of them scuffed into lines by the broom.
“To find out what to do,” Crocker said.
I looked at him and frowned. “What’s to do is clean up this mess.”
“You have a seizure like that, you got to take care of yourself.”
I stared at him. “I didn’t have a seizure,” I said with more irritation than necessary, partly because I knew that Crocker was right. It didn’t take a doctor from the Mayo Clinic to figure out what a flash headache with loss of consciousness and partial numbing of one side meant. That didn’t mean I had to dwell on it.
I glanced at the stove clock, then at my wristwatch. Estelle had had all afternoon, and there was no way of telling what I had missed by napping away those hours.
The telephone was only a step away, and I picked up the receiver, ready to punch in the number. My mind was blank. I closed my eyes, but that didn’t do any good. I had called Estelle Reyes-Guzman so many times that I hadn’t even bothered to write her number in the back of the phone directory.
“Shit,” I said again. The Reyes-Guzman number wasn’t listed, not surprising considering their occupations. Even if it had been, my reading glasses were on the nightstand beside my bed, now about a thousand miles away. Instead, I punched the number for the sheriff’s office. Ernie Wheeler was working dispatch.
“Ernie,” I said. “Is Estelle in her office?”
“No, sir. I think she’s home.”
I chuckled. “What the hell is her home number?”
Wheeler didn’t make an issue out of his boss’s senility, but just rattled off the number. I reached for a pen to write it in the back of the book where it belonged.
“Wait a minute,” I said, but Ernie Wheeler could have waited for an hour. My right hand refused to drive the pen, and I made a pathetic series of hen scratchings. With another curse, I tossed the pen across the counter. “Thanks, Ernie,” I said and hung up. I quickly punched in the number before it seeped out through the holes in my head.
Francis Guzman answered the phone with his characteristic “Yup?”
“Francis, is Estelle home?”
“Sure, Bill. I think she’s out in the kitchen hatching something with Irma. Hang on a minute.”
“No, wait,” I said, then hesitated. “Don’t bother her.”
“Can I give her a message?”
“No, that’s all right. Listen…” I stopped. “While I’ve got you on the phone…” I fumbled and stumbled, finding it harder to talk with the professional side of Francis Guzman than it was to mop up coffee-and-glass soup. “I, ah, passed out in the bathroom a while ago, and-”
“You did what?”
“Well,” I said offhandedly, “I think I got up from a nap a little too fast or something. Next thing you know I’m lying on the floor, looking at the bottom of the sink.”
“And that’s it?” His voice was calm, the sort of tone he would use to talk patients into letting him crack open their chests and switch hearts.
“Pretty much. I got some tingling in my right hand. Can’t seem to hold on to anything.”
“Stay put,” he said, and then before I could ask him what he meant, he added, “Here’s Estelle, by the way.” I heard mumbling in the background for a few seconds, and then Estelle’s soft, melodious voice came on the line.