NINE
Kate was in the garden chopping weeds with a hoe when she heard the doorbell. The garden was on the north side of the house, and usually cool and shaded, but despite being mid-December, it was one of those warm winter days that explains why California is over-populated, and Kate was sweating with the effort. She straightened and, with resignation, felt the inevitable jab in her head travel on down her spine and seize her stomach, setting off the vague nausea she had come to dread.
She was by now a connoisseur of headaches, a seasoned expert in knowing just how far she could go, when to back off and fetch the dolly rather than lifting a heavy object, how a change in the weather would affect the nerve endings inside her skull. Two weeks after the injury now, and she was beginning to resign herself to a permanent degree of ache. It was bearable, however, if she took care not to push herself.
Except for the other headaches, those bolts of pain that came out of the blue like slow lightning, rippling across her brain and turning her stomach upside down. Those sent her straight for the powerful tablets the doctor had given her, left her groping up the stairs, blind and retching and seeking the dark sanctuary of the bedroom. They would pass, after four or five hours, as suddenly as they had come, although the combined dregs of pain and painkillers in her body meant that she was worth nothing for the rest of the day. Kate had had three of these since leaving the hospital, and she would have given a great deal to avoid having another one, but the doctors said there was no knowing what triggered them or how long they would be with her. What they did tell her was that she could not go back to active duty until she was free of the threat.
This headache that was now settling in seemed to be somewhere in between the basic nagging kind and the bullet-in-the-brain sort, which all in all might be a hopeful sign, Kate thought as she pulled off her muck-encrusted shoes against a boot scraper and walked through the house to the front door.
Any change was for the better, and any visitor a welcome one. Kate was thoroughly fed up with sick leave. The first two days home she had spent in front of the television, falling asleep over the large collection of unwatched videos Lee and Jon had taped for her over the months. On the third day, boredom had set in, and she found herself wandering through the house cataloging the unfinished jobs she found there, until eventually she went downstairs for a screwdriver and replaced the switch plate that had cracked back in September.
In the five days since then, interrupted only by an afternoon when she had to put on her official clothes and go in for a hearing about the shooting, she had trimmed and rehung two sticking doors, replaced the broken sash cords in the upstairs window, fixed the drip in the bathtub, finished grouting a patch of tile in the under-the-stairs bathroom that she and Lee had put up two years before, climbed a ladder to replace a cracked pane of glass and touch up the paint around it, and shifted everything in the living room to wax first one half of the inlaid wood floor and then the other.
The floor had been the worst, because having her head down made her skull pound so horribly that she could only bear an hour at a time, whereas with an upright job she could stretch it to two hours before she had to lay down her tools and take herself trembling to bed for an hour or two. On the whole, however, physical work, done with care, seemed actually to help, particularly in the fresh air. Today she had been digging and weeding for nearly three hours before the doorbell interrupted, she saw as she glanced at the clock on her way through the living room. It looked as though she was going to pay for the exertion.
Kate picked up the loose knit cap she had taken to keeping on the table in the hallway and pulled it on as she went to answer the door. At first she saw nothing through the peephole; then, with a growing and fatalistic sense of déjà vu, she looked down, and there she saw the top of a head of black hair, neatly parted. She slid the bolt and opened the door.
"Morning, Jules."
"Uh-oh, you're not feeling well."
"I'm okay."
"Are you mad at me, then?"
"Why would I be mad at you?"
"It's just that you usually say, 'Hey, J.' 'Good morning, Jules' sounds so formal."
"So I'm feeling formal. Don't I look formal?"
Jules examined her muddy, sweat-stained clothing and grubby bare legs. "No, you don't. We tried to call, but we kept getting your machine, so we thought we'd come by anyway. Can I come in?"
"Who's 'we'?"
"Al." Jules turned and waved at the road. Kate bent to look and saw Al's car pull out from the curb and drive away. She cursed under her breath as Jules continued. "He has to pick something up from the office. I wonder why you call it an office when it's just that big room you guys share. Anyway, I wanted to say hi, so he said he'd drop me and come back. He won't be long. Are you sure you're feeling okay? You don't look like it."
"I'm fine. Come on in, Jules."
"I like that hat," Jules said, looking over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen. "Where did you get it?"
"A friend made it for me. It hides the stubble."
"Can I see?" Jules asked, turning to face her, going suddenly serious.
"Not much to see," Kate said, but she pulled the cap off anyway and dropped it on the table. Rosalyn's partner, Maj, a woman of many talents and with a recipe for killer tiramisu, had come by the house with it and a pair of electrical clippers the week before. The resulting haircut was not all that much shorter than Kate's last one, though slightly lopsided, but it necessarily revealed too much of the still-clear lines where the surgeons had cut a flap in the skin to give access to the bone below. Maj's hat was pretty, but there was angora in it, and the damn thing itched. She pretended not to feel the girl's eyes on her as she reached for two glasses and took a bottle of juice from the refrigerator.
"You like cherry cider?" she asked.
"Sure, I guess. They didn't have to put a metal plate in your head, did they?" Jules demanded.
"No. They thought they might, but it wasn't that bad."
"That's good. A friend of mine has an uncle with a big plate in his skull. He has to carry a letter from his doctor around with him, because he sets off metal detectors."
Kate came near to laughing at the thought of the number of detectors she went through in the course of a week, all of them going off madly in her wake.
Jules absently accepted the glass of cider that Kate handed her, but her mind was still on the topic of the consequences of metal plates. "That must be a real pain," she reflected.
"It must be," Kate agreed seriously, and sat down. "It's good to see you. How've you been? How's Josh? Have you seen Dio since he got out of the hospital? And why aren't you in school?"
"It's a half day, for finals week. Dio's fine. And I haven't seen Josh in a while, except in school, of course. He has a girlfriend." She sounded disgusted.
"I thought you were a girlfriend."
"I was a friend. Am a friend still, but he's busy. He'll get over it," she said, as if talking about the flu, which Kate thought reasonable enough.
"What's your shirt say today?" Kate asked. Jules held the lapels of her windbreaker open so Kate could see the writing, and when she saw the words, she began to laugh.
"Good, huh?"
"It's great." Kate did not tell her she had seen it before, worn by women who intended a rather different take on the message, but it was still a fine shirt: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.
Kate was about to ask about the word for the day when the girl blurted out, "Can I come and stay with you when Mom and Al go on their honeymoon?"
Kate opened her mouth, then shut it again.
"They were going to take me with them to Baja, and at first I thought it sounded great, but then I realized it was impossible. Talk about spare wheels." Kate wondered if she was hearing the voice of a friend behind the girl's words, that devastating peer criticism that could reduce even a self-contained person like Jules to a quivering mass. "Taking the kid along on a honeymoon," Jules said dismissively, her demeanor cool but with a clear thread of discomfort through it, and Kate stood up to take a random plate of food from the refrigerator in order to hide her smile. Jules, she guessed, had belatedly connected the traditional activities of a honeymoon couple with her mother and the amiable cop she was marrying; the mortification when her friends pointed this out must have been extreme.