by W E DeVore
“Isn’t that redundant, cowboy?” she asked rhetorically. Joking about the Dark Harm front-man being a member of the undead was a habitual pastime for both of them.
He pointed to the Styrofoam cup. “Drink some lemonade. You need some Vitamin C. I’m not exaggerating here; you look like death. How much weight have you lost?”
“I’m fine. Stop being dramatic,” she said and handed him the gift bag she’d stopped by the store to purchase on her way. “Here. Got you a present.”
Reaching across the table, he eagerly took it from her and pulled out the entire package of tissue she’d stuffed into the top of it. When he peered inside, his face immediately fell, and he scowled up at her. “Condoms?”
“I didn’t know what size you wore, so I got both. If you need the extra-large size, you’ll have to take these back. I saved the receipt. Just in case.”
Sanger blushed to the tips of his ears. “And what are these for?”
“Well, Sanger, when a man and a woman like each other very much and they don’t want to make a baby…” she started, leaning back in her chair and pointing emphatically to her belly with both index fingers.
“I know what they’re for, Clementine,” he interrupted. “Why did you buy me two boxes of condoms and gift wrap them?”
“First, no one deserves a gift-wrapped box of prophylactics more than you do, my friend. Second, you are coming to dinner at my house on Friday night and I want you to be prepared this time. No more ‘oopsies I made a baby,’” she said, deciding that, given her current condition, tiptoeing around the fact that Sanger’s girlfriend had been carrying his child when she’d committed suicide was no longer an option.
Sanger glared at her and she ignored him, continuing, “Now, and this is just a suggestion, I think it would be highly advisable for you to flirt like crazy with Yvonne Bordelon until such time that she begs you to take her to your bed, where you will fuck her brains out until you are no longer pining over Tori Gerard, and can start acting more Sanger-like. It’s been over a year. It’s time to get back in the saddle, cowboy.”
“I don’t do casual sex, Clementine.” He handed her back the gift bag. “And I’ve already told you, I don’t want to date anybody. Even Yvie.”
“Oh, come on, Sanger. Enough with the sad, lonesome cowboy routine, already. Besides, Ben and I started out as casual sex, and look where that ended up.”
“No, you started it out as casual sex,” he corrected. “Ben thought he was in a relationship.”
“Says him,” she retorted. “I was there. That man never said ‘boo’ about wanting to be my boyfriend, or anything else, until I cut him off from his main source of orgasms.”
Sanger laughed and shook his head. His face relaxed into an easy grin. “I don’t know, Clementine. It’s just that Tori was special…”
“In that treacherous, murderous sort of way you find so endearing?” she asked. When he didn’t reply, she said, “Honestly, I don’t even know what you saw in her, Aaron. Not to speak ill of the dead, but she was kind of a bitch.”
“So are you, and I still seek out the pleasure of your company several times a week.” He folded his arms.
“Touché. However, I’m not the bitch that you’re pining over. So, let’s go find you a nice woman with questionable sexual morals and get you around third base. At least, make it to second. Charlie always says nothing gets you over the last woman, like getting in the next one.” She sipped her lemonade.
“Since when do you take dating advice from Charlie Bourdel?”
“I’m not. You are. Try it, Sanger. Please.” She held out the bag to him and he peeked inside.
He pulled out the box of regular Trojans and handed it back to her.
“Fine, I’ll give it a shot.” He gestured to the box in her hand. “You can take those back, though, they’re too small.”
It was Q’s turn to blush and she drank her lemonade, quickly putting the box back into her canvas satchel to hide her embarrassment.
“I walked right into that, didn’t I?” She gave him a rueful grin as she sipped on her drink.
He rested back in his seat and crossed one leg over the other. “Better not let Yvie find out. I’d kind of like it to be a pleasant surprise.”
Q inhaled the lemonade in her mouth and it went up her nose. Her eyes stung from the citrus irritating her sinuses. She picked up her napkin and blew her nose. “It’ll be our secret, cowboy.”
She glanced down at the front of his jeans, trying to discern if Sanger was teasing her or not.
“Clementine?” he asked.
She looked back at his face. “Hmm?”
“I make it a habit of not ogling your breasts, even though you never wear a bra and on most days, that is very obvious, especially now that you’re knocked up. So, I’d appreciate it, if you wouldn’t stare at my dick.”
She leaned over and scrutinized his face. “How do you know I don’t wear a bra, if you ain’t been looking?”
He pointed to her t-shirt and she glimpsed down at the Cannibal Corpse logo emblazoned on her chest.
“Well, I have to find out who the band of the day is, don’t I? How else am I going to expand my musical horizons?” He sipped his lemonade and winked at her.
“Easy there, tiger. Save it for Yvie.” She studied him critically. “Besides, I’m about to be a Jewish mother. It’s time I got my full-blown yenta on, and you really would be doing me a favor. I can’t handle any more whining from Yvie about how she wishes you’d give her another chance. I can’t be held accountable for my actions. I’m right on the verge here, Sanger. You’ll be doing the world a public service.”
He opened his container of food. “In my experience, you’re about twenty years from being a yenta and I seriously doubt you’re a danger to anyone, but I’m not about to argue with a pregnant woman. What can I bring to dinner?”
She reached across the table to take his hand in hers. “Seriously, Aaron, you can’t keep pining after Tori.”
“Who says I’m pining?” He tried to flash his effortless smile, but it was forced and fell flat.
“How was Memphis?” she asked.
While Q was on the last leg of her tour, Sanger had gone back to his hometown for the tombstone placement at Tori’s grave and hadn’t mentioned it since.
He cleared his throat and rubbed at the back of his neck. “It was fine. It was good to see everyone.”
“The unveiling?”
“Nice.” He picked at his lunch. “My father wants me to move home. Join the Memphis force.”
Q bit back an unexpected upwelling of emotion as a wave of tears overwhelmed her.
“But you can’t,” she exclaimed, surprising herself as her outer calm shattered. “This is your home, not Memphis. You can’t just leave. What about your house? Your friends? Me? How am I going to do this without you? I can’t do this without you.”
Sanger laughed, letting go of her fingers to reach over and wipe away the tears on her cheek with his thumb. “Holy god, you are so pregnant. I wasn’t going to do it, Clementine. I’m about to be a fake uncle. I’m not going anywhere.”
She reached for another napkin to blow her nose and dry her eyes. “Jesus, cowboy. How could you do that to me? I was about to ugly cry. I’m on a hair trigger right now.”
“I can see that.” He took a bite of his lunch.
The smell from his food made Q’s mouth water and she opened her own container while she brought her overactive emotions back under control.
“Fuck. I hate to cry. I hope this isn’t going to keep up,” she said.
“You’ll be alright,” he replied, taking another bite of food. “Now, what can I bring to dinner Friday?”
“Just some wine and that sexy brain of yours.”
“You think I have a sexy brain?” he asked, taking a bite of white beans.
Q cut into her pork chop and took a small, tentative bite, relieved to find her body was accepting nourishment without resentment.
“
Fuck no, that’s Yvie. I think your brain is average, at best. She thinks you’re like the non-sociopathic version of that BBC Sherlock Holmes dude. So, be charming. Remember, you did have a few very good dates before the shit hit the fan last year. Yenta’s orders,” she said.
Sanger gave her a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am. And, by the way, I was right. You are a lioness.”
Q sipped her lemonade and replied, “Damn straight.”
He winked at her and opened the notebook near his left hand. “Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’m hoping you can clear up a few other things.”
She cut a piece of her pork chop and scooped up some of the okra smother. When the food hit her tongue, she moaned and sighed around her bite.
“Oh my god, food.”
Sanger regarded her with amusement. “You need a minute?”
She nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry, but I haven’t eaten anything but rice and toast for going on three weeks. Thank god for pharmaceuticals. This new anti-nausea med might actually be working.”
“Take your time. You eat. I’ll lay it out for you,” he replied. “So, like I said on the phone, the toxicology labs came back. Mr. Ackerman’s death was consistent with a suicide, excepted for one small problem,” he explained, pausing to eat some of his lunch.
“What’s that?” she asked with her mouth very full of food.
“Would you slow down and chew your food?” he replied in disgust. “Jesus, you’re eating like a prisoner of war.”
“Sorry.” She swallowed and immediately took a slightly daintier bite. “You were saying.”
“His drug levels were off the chart,” he said.
“Is that bad?” she guessed.
“It is if your blood alcohol level was right up there with it,” he said. “It’d be pretty easy to overdose. I don’t see how he was still conscious, let alone with it enough to load a gun and shoot himself.”
“Maybe the gun was already loaded. All he had to do was pull the trigger.”
“He did a crap job of it. If someone had been there to call 911, he might have made it,” Sanger replied.
“I don’t want to know that, Aaron,” she scolded him as she finished the rest of her pork chop, resisting the impulse to lick up all the remaining smother still clinging to the container. She rubbed her finally full belly and sipped some lemonade. “I still can’t believe he was a smackhead.”
“Why is that so hard to believe?” he asked.
“Well, you know Pete? Our old bassist? He used for a long time. Mike tried to help him - help all of us, really - to get him clean,” she explained. “But it’s not like he was super anti-drug like a former addict or a 12-stepper would be. He definitely enjoyed his wine, and there was always weed at his parties.”
Sanger screwed a wry smile on his lips and asked, “And how would a nice Jewish girl, like yourself, have seen that?”
“Oh, get off it. You got me, detective. I’ve smoked pot with Mike Ackerman and eaten pot with you, incidentally.”
“I was pressured.”
“You were stoned,” she corrected. “Anyway, we were discussing one of Pete’s descents into opioid madness and he didn’t sound like he was speaking about his experience getting himself clean. It sounded more like he’d tried to get someone else to stop using.”
“Any idea who that was?” he asked.
Q’s lately unused digestive system grumbled a response. She blushed and rubbed her stomach. “Sorry. His ex-wife maybe?”
“Got a name?”
When her stomach began to cramp in earnest, she grimaced and massaged it with her hand.
“Wanda? I think. I’d have to ask Tom. He used to work for Mike in high school. He’d know,” she told him, beginning to feel slightly clammy. “Could have just been one of the regular customers, though. The New Orleans music scene isn’t exactly short on junkies and Mike was a stand-up guy.”
Sanger’s face tightened in anxiety. “Are you alright? You look really pale, like more pale than when you came in, and that’s saying something.”
The cramping grew worse, spreading pain up to her eyes. She shook her head and said, “I think I just ate too much too fast. I’ll be right back.”
She excused herself to go to the bathroom. As soon as she stood up, the pain seized her stomach, and she clutched the back of her chair to keep from losing her balance.
Sanger quickly stood up and reached for her. “Clementine, I think we better get you to a hospital.”
“No, I’m okay,” she said, the hurt passing as suddenly as it had come. She exhaled as it released, actually feeling better. “Really, I think I’m fine now.”
He shook his head and pointed down. “No, Clementine, you’re not.”
Her eyes followed his gesture to see blood running down the inside of her leg, dripping onto the floor.
“Oh, god,” she said, looking helplessly at Sanger.
He wordlessly picked her up and carried her out of the grocery store, walking urgently to his truck parked on the street nearby. Laying her down on the bench seat, he ran around to the driver’s side and jumped in. Q curled her body protectively around her abdomen, willing the bleeding to stop. As they rushed up St. Charles towards Touro hospital’s emergency room, she began to cry.
Sanger stroked her hair and said in a tense whisper, “It’ll be alright, Clementine. It’ll be alright.”
◆◆◆
Q lay in the hospital bed with her face to the wall. Sanger sat on the opposite side, silently holding her hand in both of his. Neither of them had spoken for the last thirty minutes.
“It’s my fault,” she finally said. “I didn’t really want it, not at first, and then when I did, it was too late. I didn’t take care of myself like I was supposed to.”
Sanger didn’t respond, waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he said, “I don’t think that’s how it works, Clementine. Lots of women miscarry. Most of them want that baby more than anything. Most of them do everything they’re supposed to. It just happens. Bad things happen every day. It’s just the way the world works.”
She turned to look at him. “You were right. Cops have the worst bedside manner.”
He smiled. “Not really my area of expertise. But if you ask me, you didn’t do anything wrong. Better?”
“Not much,” she said, and he cupped her face with his hand.
“Tell me what you need.”
She flinched at the sadness aching in her chest. “You’re already doing it, cowboy. Thank you for staying with me. I don’t know how I would have done this alone.”
He nodded without saying a word and tightened his grip on her hand.
When Sanger had called Ben, he had just made it to his meeting in Mandeville. Ben had immediately headed back to New Orleans only to discover a mile-long traffic jam on the Causeway and was delayed further. Sanger had stayed, holding her hand through the pulseless ultrasound and the procedure that followed. They’d hardly spoken to each other for the last two hours.
Sanger contemplated her fingers between his and said quietly, “It’s loss of the potential. That was the hard thing. For me, anyway. Tori was real. One minute she was here and the next, she wasn’t. She was gone. I felt it. I still feel it. But the baby…. It was just a dream. An image I had in my mind. Watching her hold it. Feeling those tiny fingers on my thumb. But it wasn’t real. It still hurt, though. Knowing I’d never see any of that happen.” He grimaced at the memory before continuing, “You have to let go of it, Clementine. The harder you try to hold onto it, the harder it’s going to be.”
It was the first time since the day Tori had died that Sanger had mentioned her pregnancy and the first time since those early, awful days after her death that he’d spoken openly about his grief. The recollection of his pain merged with her own heart’s agony and she began to cry.
“How did you let go of it, Aaron?” she pleaded.
Sanger rested his mouth against his fingers, his breath warming her hand. “I thought about something else.
Something that I wanted more. Something that I still want. More than anything else in the world. And I hold on to that instead.”
The curtain moved back, startling Q, and Ben rushed in. Sanger abruptly stood up, letting go of her hand. He reached for a box of tissues, handing it to Q. She blew her nose and wiped away the dampness at her eyes.
Sanger looked from Q to Ben and said, “I’ll let you two be.”
As he moved to walk out, Ben grabbed him and hugged him tight. “Thank you, Aaron. Thank you for staying with her.”
Sanger gave them a sad smile before leaving the room. When he’d gone, Ben took his place in the chair beside her bed. “What happened?”