“Not at all.”
“This fuckin’ sling has got to go,” Colleen said through gnashed teeth.
“I know, sweetheart,” Leah offered empathetically. “It won’t take long.”
Colleen peered into the bag. “This is hers,” she said.
“Wow!” said Leah. “That?” she asked and pointed at the pink iPod Nano.
“No. That’s mine,” said Colleen. “This thing on the bottom.”
“Oh,” said Leah. “I was gonna say.”
“What is it?” asked Augie excitedly as she leaned painfully to one side and tried to see what other surprises Colleen had for her.
“Just hand them to her?” Leah asked Colleen softly.
“Yeah,” said Colleen. “She’s gonna pop a vein or somethin’ if we keep her waitin’ any longer.”
†
Father Jones peered through the tinted window and saw the outline of a person’s head against the rear window, but couldn’t be sure it was Joan. The security guard at the ER exit offered little more than “Si, Señor” when asked if a woman fitting Joan’s description came through. “Joan?” he called again loudly.
Joan closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. “Maybe he’ll go away,” she whispered to herself.
“Hello?” he called with an assault on the window with his knuckles. “Anybody in there?”
Joan opened her eyes and looked down at her purse. She traced the length of the scuff with her fingers and shook her head. She wrestled with what to do next. She knew if she waited long enough, Father Jones would go away. On the other hand, she figured if she started The Bitch and gave her some gas to suck on, the noise of the powerful engine would send a clear enough message. She reasoned with herself and came to the conclusion that either way, the priest would move his ass.
“Another time, Father,” she whispered as she hurriedly unzipped her purse. The small plastic gnome at the end of Colleen’s bulky mess of a keychain clunked against the dashboard as she slid the key into the ignition. Out of habit, she gave the accelerator a double-pump. The starter whined as it cranked the engine for a few seconds, but would not fire. “Damn it,” she whispered through her teeth. “Come on!”
After a few seconds, she let go of the ignition and it returned to the “on” position. The red idiot lights on the dash panel glared at her as she thought about what to do next. “Flooded!” she sputtered loudly, startling herself. “Hold it to the floor!”
She tried the ignition key again. The engine cranked and then spat a loud KOOF! under the hood. She increased her pressure to the accelerator. The engine spat again and then started with a loud, smoke-choking “VROOOOOOM!”
Father Jones leapt backward and bumped his buttocks into the Volvo in the parking spot behind him. An alarm immediately sent a series of loud honks and high-pitched shrieks through the concrete and steel parking garage. “Shit!” he yelled loudly as he scrambled to get out from between the beastly El Camino and the screaming Volvo.
Joan raced the engine long enough for the idiot lights to blink off one by one. She moved her foot to the brake pedal, slid the gearshift into reverse and looked down again at the ruined leather purse in her lap.
The gnome swung back and forth happily as Joan flung her purse to the bench seat. She turned her head to the left and saw that the priest was standing behind the Volvo scratching his head. She eased up on the brake pedal and lurched backward. She checked her mirrors, swung around so that the hood was pointed at the exit, and intentionally avoided eye contact with the confused clergyman.
She whipped the gearshift into drive and eased up on the brake. The power steering pump whined in protest as the heavy steel hot rod bolted toward the exit with the fury of a teenager on a drag strip. The rear tires or “fats” as Colleen called them, lost their grip when she poked the accelerator. The “fats” left wisps of fine black rubber dust in tracks that followed the El Camino’s wake from the exit.
Father Francis ambled aimlessly toward the walkway near the exit and thought about what had just happened. “Demons,” he said to himself softly. He fiddled with the glass-beaded rosary in his pocket. “Must pray for them.”
†
“Here,” said Leah. “It would be easier if we just take this out.”
“Ya,” Colleen quipped approvingly and then leaned back to her pillow.
Leah removed the iPod and headphones and set them on the table. “It’s heavy,” she said. She turned to Augie, lifted the bag, and pretended that it weighed a hundred pounds.
“What is it?” asked Augie in a girly voice.
“You’ll see,” said Colleen.
Leah plopped the bag on the bed in front of Augie’s line of treasures. It had barely settled in place before Augie snatched it and dragged it closer. She fought through the plastic and dug in. Leah stepped back and looked over her shoulder at Colleen. Colleen winked exaggeratedly.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Augie. “The two-pounder!” Augie hefted a bag of Hershey’s Chocolate Miniatures, presented them as she did the other items, and then set them aside with the rest.
Suddenly the expression on Augie’s face changed. She peered into the bag and her bandaged face turned a deep red. She slowly brought her hands to her mouth. Tears suddenly rushed from her left eye. Colleen turned her head and looked out the window. Fresh tears appeared at the wells of her beautiful azure eyes.
Augie’s breath became short and choppy. She fought to keep from bawling like a two-year-old. She leaned back against the head of her bed and held her breath. Leah turned and looked back at Colleen with her head tilted to the left, confused at what she saw.
“I must’ve missed something,” Leah thought to herself. She wondered why both women suddenly went from cheerful to sullen over a bag of chocolate and some underwear. A sealed six-pack of bikini underwear was the item Colleen referred to when she said, “And this thing on the bottom,” when Leah asked about the iPod. Leah was right. She missed something.
†
The El Camino seemed to guide itself down the driveway of the Triple C as if it were equipped with both cruise control and autopilot. As she rounded the corner from the driveway toward the house, Joan hit the remote for the garage door. Her head pounded. She pulled into the garage nose-first, which was in direct defiance of the way Colleen liked her car parked.
Colleen wanted The Bitch parked in the garage backward ever since she accidentally ran over her dog a year before she met Chase. “Dee-oh-gee,” who was a ten-year-old Dachshund, had been lazily sunning himself in the driveway when the rear tire of the heavy gas-guzzler crushed his slender body.
Dee-oh-gee, a present from her father for her eighteenth birthday, had a habit of sunning himself in places where the traffic of a bustling ranch was busiest. The Dachshund had his share of bumps and bruises from being stepped on by one horse or another, along with a series of narrow-misses by vehicles through the years.
Joan knew that Merlin the Pug was too much of a lazy ass to lie in the sun in front of the garage door. Merlin preferred the air-conditioned comfort of the office and usually stayed away from anywhere lots of people and animals actually performed work.
Joan shifted the car into park, switched off the engine and removed the key. Tinny clicking noises emanated from under the hood. She opened the door, grabbed the scarred purse from the seat, punched the garage remote again and slammed the door shut.
The garage door squealed an awful metal scraping sound on the way down. It sent a shiver down her spine as if someone had scraped their fingernails against a blackboard. She opened the door that led to the interior mud room. Suddenly a cinnamon-spiced, air-conditioned breeze from deep within the comfortable, four-bedroom abode circled Joan’s entire body and chased away her shiver. She immediately felt better.
She headed straight for the refrigerator and pulled out an ice-cold bottle of Wisconsin Premium. She ignored the sting of the frosty brew and chugged what she often referred to as Ten Seconds of Heaven be
fore the empty bottle sailed through the air and landed with a thud in the heavy trash bin near the corner.
†
The sun silhouetted Colleen’s face against the large picture window. Her tears left shiny trails of quicksilver on her soft, pinkish cheeks.
Leah’s eyes welled at the thought of what must be in the bag in Augie’s lap. She thought that, in a way, she didn’t want to know. She had been accused so many times by co-workers and supervisors of becoming too personally involved with her patients, and she suspected that this was one of those times.
She couldn’t help who she was any more than she could control her heart when it came to caring for people. She remembered reading something years ago about what makes a good nurse. Someone had scrawled a quote in pencil in her new Basic Nursing textbook.
“A good nurse is defined not only by the skills she has but by the size of her heart.”
Leah thought of that quote many times during her nursing career. Whenever she was faced with hard choices about how to deal with the less-than-glamorous side of nursing, she would think of the quote and forge ahead the best way she knew how. Leah was much more than a nurse. She was an angel.
She was sure that whatever was in the bag was something that she would remember for a long time. Never before had she seen two humans gain such unbelievable affection for one another in such a short time.
Leah felt that someday these two were going to accomplish incredible things together. She caught herself still staring at Colleen’s silhouette. She hadn’t noticed that Colleen had turned and was smiling at her. Colleen winked again and the nurse-angel wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. Leah suddenly searched her pockets for nothing in particular.
The expression on Colleen’s face suddenly turned from serene and calm to one of despair and concern. Leah turned to Augie and saw that she had removed the bandage from her head. All that remained was an oval-shaped patch of cotton pasted to her right eye.
“Oh n—” Leah started, but stopped short. “Honey—”
Augie turned her head away from them in an attempt to hide what she was doing. She gently pulled at the edges of the oval patch of cotton. She held her breath as she freed the tear-stained patch and touched her eyelashes gently with the tips of her fingers. “I need to see this with both eyes,” she said with a labored tone.
“At least let me help so you don’t damage somethin’,” Leah said worriedly.
“Okay,” said Augie. “I need to get this eye open, but it has goop holding it together.”
Colleen turned her head away and looked out the window again. She tried to keep from envisioning what Augie’s eye looked like underneath. “How could some fucker do this?” she whispered to herself. “If he shows up here, I swear to God I’ll kill the bastard, leg or no leg.”
“Put your hand down for a sec,” Leah instructed.
Augie waited while Leah put on a fresh pair of gloves and tore open a pouch that contained square pieces of layered gauze. She supported Augie’s neck with her left hand and blotted the corner of her eye with the gauze. “I can’t really feel that,” Augie said.
“That’s what worries me,” Leah said as she gently wiped the lower eyelid with the lightest pressure possible.
“No. I mean you can press harder.”
“It looks pretty clear, actually,” said Leah. “Here, let me wet this gauze and we’ll moisten everything.” She let go of Augie’s head, turned and went to the sink.
While Leah’s back was turned, Augie raised her hand, grabbed her upper eyelashes and pulled her eyelids apart. A thick yellow crust lined the edges of her deeply-bruised eyelids and hung on like yellow cement. She squinted at the brightness but resisted rubbing her eyes. “There we go,” she said.
Leah turned and gasped at the sight of Augie’s eye. The once-white tissues that surrounded Augie’s ocean blue cornea were a deep, painful red.
“It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” Augie asked rhetorically as she closed her eyes and bowed her head. “You know what? Don’t even answer that.”
“You already know the answer, sweetheart,” said Leah. “Can you see… out of it?”
“Yes, thank God,” Augie said.
“That’s good at least,” said Leah. “Do you want a mirror so you can see what it looks like?”
“No,” said Augie. “I wanna see this.”
Augie opened the bag again and peered inside. Leah watched curiously. Colleen leaned forward and turned her whole upper body so she could see without straining her neck any more than it already was.
“This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life,” said Augie.
“Her name is Buttercup,” said Colleen with a weepy girly voice. “I think you need her more than I do right now.”
Leah shook her head as she tried to envision what was in the bag. Her curiosity was getting the best of her, but she was afraid if she said anything it would ruin the moment.
Augie slowly lifted a small stuffed pony from the bag. Leah swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and began sobbing. The yellowish-brown pony had a blonde mane and tail and a worn English saddle made of brown felt.
“She’s beautiful,” Augie sobbed. She brought the pony to her chest and hugged her as hard as she possibly could.
“Buttercup helped me through some really tough times,” said Colleen. “Now she can help you.”
All three women wept uncontrollably. The soft fur of the tiny Palomino stifled Augie’s sobs, just as she had done for Colleen many times. Leah composed herself, wiped her eyes and quietly slipped out of the room without saying a word.
†
Joan found solace in the leather sofa that had held residence in the dark, nicotine-stained den since before Colleen “Wilson” Caldwell was born. An ice-cold Wisconsin Premium kept company with a lit Yankee Candle on the huge antique steamer trunk in front of the sofa. The candle’s vanilla aroma danced with the fragrant bitterness of the alcohol and mingled about the coffee rings, cigarette burns and faded blots of spilled cherry Kool-Aid.
Joan scooted deeper into the couch and leaned forward, grabbed her beer with two fingers and took a long swig of the amber-colored swill, nearly draining the twelve ounce bottle in one breath. She swallowed hard as tears welled at the corners of her eyes, both from the sting in her throat and the thought of the events that had taken place not thirty minutes before. Joan thought that this was one of those days that alcohol could help her escape everything and everyone, if only for a few hours.
She introduced the last of the beer to her stomach and stood uneasily as the alcohol worked its magic on her head. The empty bottle sailed through the air with the arch and accuracy of Magic Johnson just as the first, second, and the third one did before it. She held up both hands like a referee signaling a three-pointer, which actually meant, “I’m getting drunk!”
Joan retraced her steps to the fridge and pulled out another Premium. She underestimated the sharpness of the barbs that lined the rim of the bottle cap. She twisted it in her calloused hands and received a series of short, shallow scratches down the length of her middle finger.
“Ouch! You fucker!” she shouted and inspected her finger. “Jesus. Now I’m yellin’ at my beer.” She gathered a handful of material at the bottom of her blouse and gave the bottle cap another try. She chuckled to herself as the bottle made a “PFFT!” sound. “My thoughts exactly,” she said. She flicked the bottle cap at the trash bin, raised her swill toward the heavens in a silent toast and downed the entire beer without taking a breath.
†
Augie sat motionless and clutched Buttercup to her chest. She sniffled at the warm, silent air. “I think she likes me,” she said.
“I know she does,” Colleen said.
Augie opened her eyes and stared blankly into space. “Colleen?” she said.
“Yeah?” said Colleen.
“You can’t leave things like that with your mom.”
“I know,” said Colleen. She rested her head on her
pillow and turned toward the window. “I really fucked it up this time.”
“Yeah,” agreed Augie, who paused for a few seconds as she took another breath. “I can’t be the cause of the friction between you two, Colleen. I just can’t. I can’t bear the thought of it.”
“It’s not you,” said Colleen. “I’m so fuckin’ independent and bullh-eaded that I just get caught up in the moment sometimes. I can’t control it. I never could. It used to drive Chase crazy.
“How did he deal with it?”
“He didn’t,” said Colleen. “He just let me make a fool of myself because he knew if he said anything that it would only piss me off more.”
“He was a smart guy,” said Augie.
“Fucking genius, if you wanna know the truth. He knew his shit about horses, and even more about people.”
“So how you gonna fix it with… what is your mom’s name again?” asked Augie.
“Joan,” said Colleen. “I’ll buy her flowers.”
“Flowers?” asked Augie inquisitively.
“Yeah,” said Colleen. “I’ll buy her flowers like I used to buy Chase when I acted like a horse’s ass.”
“You bought him flowers?” asked Augie as she lifted her chin from Buttercup’s soft fur.
“All the damn time,” said Colleen. “I swear I gave him flowers more often than any man ever gave me any.”
“Sounds like you got the better end of the deal,” Augie said.
“You got that shit right,” said Colleen. “Chase was a fuckin’ saint if ever there was one.”
“So… back to my question,” said Augie as she rested her chin on Buttercup.
“Oh right,” Colleen continued. “Flowers first.”
“Then what?” Augie persisted.
“I guess I’ll just keep trying to call and apologize. If she’ll answer the damn phone, that is,” Colleen said begrudgingly.
“Caller ID?”
Remembering August (Triple C Ranch Saga) Page 24