“This isn’t correct,” Sweeney said.
“Get the hell out,” Myer said.
SWEENEY DROVE DIRECTLY back to the hospital. This morning, on his way down the hill, he’d thought about finding a comic book store and searching for some of the back issues of Limbo they were missing. Maybe he’d pick up some dumbbells at a sporting goods store and some rabbit ears, if they still made them, at a Radio Shack. But now he just wanted to get safely back to the Peck. He’d eat some lunch at the cafeteria and spend the afternoon with Danny.
He got lost twice because he couldn’t stop replaying the incident at the lunch counter. His question about the garage was honest and innocent enough. Why had it provoked such an overreaction? Granted, it would have been smarter to ask the old man. And maybe most people would’ve avoided the biker out of a general sense of caution. But what bothered Sweeney more than his bad judgment was that this kind of thing had been happening for a year now.
Back in Cleveland, he’d find himself almost weekly in an instantaneous shouting match, often with customers and always, it seemed to him, with the most ridiculous instigation. In the last six months, he’d had arguments in parking lots, pizza houses, dry cleaners, and the public library. And more than a few of them had rushed right up to the brink of physical violence.
Because of the number of incidents, logic told Sweeney that, at least some of the time, he must have been the inciting party. But when he’d replay the scene after the fact, he’d find himself, invariably, the clueless victim. Slow on the uptake. Stumbling through an ineffectual defense.
He’d shared a few of the early incidents with the therapist in Shaker Heights. And it was the only time her manner had turned from professionally compassionate to suspicious. She’d interrogated him, asked insulting and provocative questions: Are you sure that’s what you said to the man? Are you sure that’s how you said it?
After each of those sessions, she had tried to sell him on a prescription. And he’d asked her, joking, kidding around to defuse the tension, if she’d taken a job with Pfizer.
Sweeney considered himself, if not a pacifist, then at least a man less comfortable with casual violence than the rest of his culture seemed to be. He found nothing appealing in the cheap brutality of boxing or hockey. The nightly spewing of blood and viscera on television appalled him — maybe even more than it did Kerry. In the pharmacy, he had occasion to see stressed and overtired parents give in to the urge and deliver the fast slap or pinch to fussy children. He called them on it every time and once had notified Social Services.
He’d been a quiet kid growing up, bordering, maybe, on withdrawn. Through high school, he’d had exactly one fistfight and it had been less than glorious, a short and awkward tussle with a next-door neighbor. In college, he’d gravitated to pot more than booze, spent long, slow hours in small, dim rooms with a handful of friends, passing pipes and eating pizza and listening to mournful songs.
His amiability had occasionally grated on Kerry. At dinner once, a few years ago, when he’d boasted to friends that he and his wife never argued, she put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I try, but he just won’t fight.”
But over the past twelve months, he’d been in more arguments than in the rest of his lifetime.
And then there were the outbursts of rage, so far directed only at inanimate objects. At the old house, he’d had to replace two closet doors and the mirror on the medicine cabinet before he could hire a Realtor to sell the place. At the pharmacy one night after closing, he’d knocked a shelf clean and thrown a can of Ensure across the room, gouging the wall. It was infantile stuff. Pure temper tantrum. And after the fact, it always scared him and sickened him.
What if his response to the biker’s abuse had been to grab for his knife or fork? He’d have ended up in the hospital or, less likely, in lockup on assault charges. Either way, he’d be jeopardizing both his and Danny’s stay at the Clinic.
Maybe he’d call Shaker Heights tonight and ask for a referral and a prescription. But probably he wouldn’t.
12
The Honda made terrible noises all the way back to the Clinic. The girl from the drive-away agency had done something to the car. Sweeney parked in the back lot and killed the ignition and the engine went through a melodramatic death scene, bucking and coughing up clouds of gray smoke. After the last spasm, he noticed the cigarette burns in the dash and the cupcake wrappers peeking out from under the passenger seat. Sweeney reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out two empty tequila nips and a half-empty can of Jolt. He put them in the handbasket — Myer hadn’t offered to bag his purchases — and got out of the car.
He dropped everything but the pajamas in the apartment, went up to the cafeteria and was surprised to find it crowded. He got a coffee and was looking for an empty table when Nora Blake whistled to him from the back of the room.
He slid into the seat opposite her. Nora was finishing a turnover and a paperback novel that featured a blond pirate on its cover.
“I didn’t know administrators worked Saturdays,” Sweeney said, and Nora held up a finger and brought her head just a bit closer to the words on the page.
Sweeney waited, sipped his coffee, and watched the woman concentrate. The book was beaten up, the spine cracked and peeled and the cover sporting dozens of creases that did nothing to lessen the pirate’s virility. Nora started to shake her head, a slow sway, side to side, and Sweeney couldn’t tell whether she was enthralled or disappointed. Finally, she looked up at him and gave a sigh that was almost as dramatic as the Honda’s.
“You like pirate books?” Sweeney asked. He noticed that Nora was wearing pearls.
She shoved the paperback into a purse that was slung on the back of her chair.
“I was a virtual widow for twenty years,” she said. “And I’m in love with historical romance.”
“How much is history,” Sweeney asked, “and how much is romance?”
“This one,” Nora said, pulling her Virginia Slims from a pocket, “was about seventy-five, twenty-five romance to history. And I think I’m being generous. So how was your first night in the Peck? And what’ve you got there in your lap?”
He answered the second question first.
“They’re pajamas for Danny,” he said. But he didn’t bother to hold them up.
Nora grimaced. “They might not go for that,” she said, “depending on the G-tube and all.”
“Danny would want these,” Sweeney said. “I’ll talk to Alice.”
“Oh,” said Nora, still feeling the effects of the high seas, “it’s Alice already?”
He ignored her and said, “As for my first night, you know anything about a card game called Limbo?”
She smiled, almost laughed, and sucked the life out of her cigarette, then pointed at him with it.
“Limbo is new,” she said. “Ernie’s game was Blue Migraine. We made close to two thousand dollars one season. I bought myself a portable Jacuzzi for Christmas.”
“So you know about the game and it’s all right with you?”
She put on a concerned grandmother face but Sweeney thought something mocking was in it as well.
“Does it bother you?” she said. “Because I was outraged at first. It’s amazing I didn’t go to Dr. Peck that night.”
“Why didn’t you?” Sweeney asked. “I’m thinking about telling Alice today.”
“You think she doesn’t know?”
Sweeney hadn’t even considered the possibility.
“Does she?” he said, a little too loud.