“Give me all those groceries,” he said, “and then go out back and sit and relax. And have a cigarette. You know you want to, and you shouldn’t be shaking up your routine just for me.”
“But I have cooking to do. You don’t know Pete as well as I do. He’s quite the bottomless pit. I’m sure he’s been champing at the bit this whole time.”
“I’ll do the cooking. It’s the least I can do. You’ve been taking care of our every need for days.”
She hung motionless for another moment, then moved in and handed him the bag.
“You know how to cook?”
“Of course I do. How on earth would Justin and I have survived all these years if I hadn’t learned? Now how do you like your eggs?”
“And I can have them any way I want! This is an awful lot of luxury. I’m afraid I’ll be spoiled.”
“You deserve to be spoiled. You take care of everybody and everything, all the time, and nobody ever takes care of you.”
To her surprise, she felt the presence of potential tears somewhere behind her eyes. She did not allow them to have their way.
“You’re very sweet,” she said.
She moved in a step closer and kissed him on the cheek.
She closed her eyes at the moment of contact. His skin was warm and clean. And fragrant. It smelled of a pleasing aftershave and the natural skin scent of a real living human man. It flitted through her mind without actual words that skin is an odd thing for the world to make a fuss about, especially when, with your eyes closed, it all feels more or less the same.
“Over easy,” she said. “Thank you. You’re an angel.”
Chapter Fourteen: Pete
“Are you bored?” Justin asked Pete. “Or is it just me?”
It was an hour or so after breakfast. They were lying on the linoleum floor near Prince’s cage. Staring at the wolf-dog. Watching him stare back. Watching the soft way his eyes blinked as he gazed into Pete’s eyes. Pete wanted to feel it was a measure of affection, that softness. But in truth he wasn’t sure.
“Yeah. Kind of,” Pete said. “I mean, I love spending time with Prince and all. But he can’t really do much. Not that it’s his fault. But he has a broken leg and everything. And he can’t do anything but pretty much just lie there.”
“And mostly neither can we,” Justin said.
“There are things we can do.”
“Like what?”
“Not sure. How do you feel?”
“Pretty good,” Justin said. “Last time I peed there was practically no blood in it. It was almost all pee.”
“That’s good. Still, we don’t want to push our luck. But we could do something easy like checkers or card games.”
“But it’s hard for you to sit up,” Justin said.
“The game could be on the floor right here between us. Let me go see what Dr. Lucy has.”
He pulled carefully to his feet and began to search the house for the doctor and Mr. Bell.
He found them sitting next to each other on the living room couch, their heads tilted close together. This time neither one jumped away from the other when they noticed Pete watching.
“Ma’am? Do you have a checkers set? Or a board game, like Monopoly or something?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Deck of cards?”
“No. Sorry. I know you boys must be bored to death.”
“I thought everybody had checkers and cards,” Pete said.
“Nobody to play with,” she said.
Her hands swept wide, as if inviting Pete to see the reality of her world for himself. She sounded strangely calm and satisfied in the statement, as though that wasn’t the saddest thing in the world to have to say.
“Now you do,” Pete said, and flipped his head in the direction of Mr. Bell.
That brought a long silence.
“Justin is a fan of hide-and-seek,” Mr. Bell said. “Or anyway, he always used to be. Maybe he feels he’s too grown up for that now.”
“Aw, heck, nobody’s too grown up for hide-and-seek,” Pete said.
He went off to share the idea with Justin.
While Justin covered his eyes and counted, Pete scoured the backyard with his gaze. There was no place very promising to hide. There was a shed, but that’s the first place anyone in his right mind would think to look. And he sure wasn’t going anywhere near those dog runs.
He circled the house via the side yard and noticed a good climbing tree in the front yard of the house. He’d be so close he could watch Justin roaming around looking. But with any luck Justin would never think to look up. Besides, it was leafy, and would provide great cover.
He took a running start and grabbed for the lowest limb. Got it on the first try. Then he swung himself up and braced the bottom of his sneakers on the rough bark.
“Ow!” he said out loud as the skin on his backside stretched.
He scaled the tree fairly easily from that point on, as high as he could before the branches seemed maybe not strong enough to support him. And that was pretty high. He was just about level with the second-story roof when he stopped.
Then he wondered if he’d made a tactical blunder. Because now he’d committed to sitting until he was found. But he swung one leg over a strong branch and discovered he could straddle it quite comfortably. The branch only made contact with the insides of his thighs.
He set his chin down on a higher branch and sighed.
A police cruiser was moving down the street. Which Pete thought nothing about until it pulled level with the doctor’s house and slowed considerably.
Pete’s heart hammered in his chest as he watched, though he wasn’t fully clear on why.
Then the black-and-white car pulled away again, and Pete breathed more deeply.
Faintly in the distance he heard Justin call out, “Ready or not, here I come!”
Pete found it impossible to suppress a smile, because he was delighted by his hiding spot.
But just then the police cruiser came back, rolling slowly in the other direction this time. Again it paused in front of the doctor’s house.
Pete’s smile vanished.
“Don’t come out,” he whispered out loud, talking to Justin in his head. “Don’t come out front. Don’t even let him know you’re here.”
Or maybe it was Pete the cop was looking for. The idea hit him as a jolt to his belly. That made so much more sense. After all, Pete was the runaway. Justin had his father’s permission to be here.
Pete still wished with all his might that Justin would not come around to the front yard. Pete wouldn’t want his friend to be forced to answer questions. Wouldn’t want him to have to decide whether to lie to the law on Pete’s behalf.
And now the cop car wasn’t moving at all.
A single uniformed officer stepped out of the cruiser. He was lanky and tall, and Pete thought the man looked intimidating even from above. Something about his size and the determined way he walked.
Pete watched, his heart pounding, a high lump in his throat. He expected the cop to march up to the front door, but he didn’t. Instead he moved to the front windows, first on one side of the house, then the other. He looked in, shielding his eyes from the midmorning sun.
Then he walked back to his cruiser and drove away.
A moment later Justin came around to the front yard and searched in the bushes on either side of the front door.
He did not look up.
It might have been ten minutes later, or it might have been fifteen, when Justin finally, finally gave up. He was a determined player, Pete had to give him that.
“Olly, olly, oxen free-ee,” Justin called out.
Pete was just making his first move to down-climb the tree when he saw the police cruiser coming back.
He froze, and waited.
This time the cop, the same single cop, walked right to the front door and pounded out a strong knock that made Pete’s blood feel frozen.
A long, heart
-hammering pause, and then Dr. Lucy came and opened the door.
“Yes?” she said.
Pete could hear her well from his perch in the tree. They looked far away to him, the two figures, but their voices carried.
“You know a Calvin Bell?” the policeman asked.
Which surprised Pete, who had been strangely sure this was all about him. What would the police want with Mr. Bell? He hadn’t run away from anything.
“What if I do?” Dr. Lucy asked.
Pete could hear the stiffening in her voice.
“Seems a woman called down to the plant for him. Something about his son. We thought that might be you.”
“What do you want with Calvin Bell?” she asked.
“Nothing, really,” the cop said. “He’s not in any trouble. We just thought it was strange. You know.”
“No,” she said, her voice turning to steel wrapped in sandpaper. “I don’t know. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“What’s your connection to Bell and his son?”
“No connection. I barely know them.”
“You weren’t driving around town with the man?”
“You can drive around town with a man you barely know.”
“Why would you, though?” the cop asked.
He shifted his cap aside with one hand and scratched his head with that same hand. As if it were literally a head-scratcher of a question he’d just posed.
“His son was injured in an accident. I put in some sutures. That’s it. That was the end of the thing. And none of that is illegal, so I’m really questioning this use of police time.”
“You know it’s illegal to practice medicine without a license, right?”
Pete watched the doctor shift from foot to foot. But it wasn’t a nervous gesture. Not at all. She was getting fed up. Pete knew her plenty well enough to tell.
“It’s a pretty good bet,” she said, “that anyone who’s well trained enough to practice medicine has learned somewhere along the way that there’s licensing involved. Yes, I know that. I’m licensed to practice medicine in this state. I just usually don’t. So now that we know for a fact there’s no illegality going on anywhere around here . . .”
She swung the door closed. Or, anyway, she tried to. She swung it toward closed.
The cop raised one beefy hand and stopped it with a whump.
“There happens to be a law against miscegenation,” he said.
This time it was his voice that sounded formidable and hard. But Pete had never heard the word before and had no idea what it meant. So he didn’t know if the doctor was guilty of it or not. He knew only that her face turned frighteningly dark.
“I met the man on Friday,” she said, sounding not the least bit cowed. “We didn’t get married in the forty-eight hours since then.”
Pete wished he could see the look on the cop’s face, but mostly what he saw was the flat top of his uniform cap.
“Miscegenation is more than just mixed marriage, ma’am. It’s any kind of . . . you know . . .”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“Relations.”
“Meaning?”
“Don’t make me say it, ma’am.”
“You’re going to have to.”
“Sex relations.”
A brief pause. Pete’s brain crowded with sudden thoughts. Was that true about Dr. Lucy and Mr. Bell? He couldn’t imagine it would be. They had met so recently. They were not married. That mattered. Didn’t it?
“How dare you,” Dr. Lucy said. Quietly. Her voice was just above a whisper, but it made cold shivers run down Pete’s back. He could picture icicles dangling from each word.
The gravity of the moment almost knocked Pete off his branch.
“Just calm down, ma’am.”
“How dare you come stand at my door and accuse me of cohabitating with a man I’ve known only a couple of days? Who the hell do you think I am? For that matter, who the hell do you think you are? You can’t possibly prove what you just accused me of, and I know you can’t, because I know it never happened. So here’s what we’re going to do now, officer. In the next thirty seconds or so you’re either going to arrest me for a crime, something you actually have evidence to charge me with, or you’re going to get the hell off my land. This was still the United States of America last time I checked.”
A long, freighted silence fell. Pete felt as though it might prove fatal, that silence. Maybe not to either one of them, but to him.
Then the cop touched the brim of his cap, but did not lift it.
“You have a good day, ma’am,” he said.
He turned on his heel and walked back to his car.
Pete could hear Dr. Lucy mumbling to herself, but he couldn’t make out every word. She seemed to be wishing the officer something in return. But, from the sound of it, it was not a wish for a good day.
Then she slammed the door, closing herself back into the house.
Pete waited for the cop to drive away, then carefully—very carefully—climbed down toward the yard. The cores of his arms and legs were shaking, and he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. He hung from the lowest branch by his arms, then dropped lightly onto the grass. Or as lightly as he could, anyway.
“Ow,” he said out loud.
He walked around to the backyard, where he found Justin standing, looking confused.
“Oh, there you are,” Justin said. “Why didn’t you come out when I called ‘Olly, olly, oxen free’?”
“I was up in a tree,” Pete said. “Took me some time to get down.”
“Oh, a tree. I never thought of that. What’s wrong with you? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“You want to be it now?”
“Not really,” Pete said. “I don’t really feel like playing anything. I need to just go and lie down or something.”
Chapter Fifteen: Dr. Lucy
She stood with her forehead pressed to the door. For how long, she wasn’t sure. And she was shaking. But it was only due in slight measure to fear. For the most part it was rage causing the shaking. Abject, bottled rage.
Calvin’s voice made her jump the proverbial mile.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
She wasn’t. But she also wasn’t keen on sharing her reactions to such a moment. So she shook it off as best she could, right in front of him, almost on command.
“I hope I did the right thing by not coming to the door when I heard what it was about.”
“Yes! Definitely. That would only have made things worse.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” he said.
He stepped in closer and held out his hand as if offering it for her to take.
For a moment she stood back, away from the idea of touch. As though she didn’t know what it was, or why he would offer it. But she was shaken, and off-balance, and almost robotically she accepted the gift. She reached out and squeezed the hand, and they stood that way for a time with a bizarre amount of space between them.
She could feel her hand still shaking and she assumed he felt it, too.
“I’d offer you a hug,” he said, “but I’m figuring it’s just that sort of thing that got us into this mess to begin with.”
His voice was gentle, and it softened everything up inside her, but not in a good way. Especially in the part of her that was trying to shake off the upset. It made that job harder—shone a light on the fact that she could only force it back behind a partition. She couldn’t literally make it disappear.
She offered no reply.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
She stepped away from him almost defensively, and dropped the hand.
“No, I’m not.” Then she collected herself and began again. “Oh, I’m sorry. What a foolish thing to say. Old habit. It’s mostly anger. I shake when I’m really fed-up mad. I’ve been alive nearly forty years and I’ve never once had a policeman speak to me that way, or treat m
e like that.”
“I have,” he said.
“Well, it’s quite a shock to me,” she said.
“And I hope it never happens to you again as long as you live, Lucy,” he said, gently holding her by both upper arms as if for literal support. “But I worry you may have stepped into a time where you’ll keep running into it, now that you’ve associated yourself with me in people’s minds. I’m sorry if that’s the case. I don’t wish it on anybody, least of all you. I’m only forewarning you for your own safety.”
Silence.
She just stood. Not speaking. Not thinking. She would need time to untangle every thread of her mood before a process like thinking or speaking could find a clear path through.
If the officer had been standing in front of her in that moment she would have struck him with her fists.
“I’ll say one thing,” Calvin said. “You’re a force to reckon with. A brave woman. You really stood right up to that man.”
She pulled a long, cleansing breath and blew it out again. Audibly.
“Sometimes you have to let people know you won’t be intimidated,” she said.
“Still think we can pretend the world isn’t out there? Even for just one day?”
Oddly, she laughed. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe because she refused to cry.
“It would help if the world would stop banging on the door,” she said.
A few moments later, after Calvin had gone to the kitchen to make her a cup of tea, Justin came wandering through the living room looking tired and dispirited. And without Pete.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked him. “Is he counting while you hide? You’d better hurry if that’s the case.”
“He doesn’t want to play anymore. He seems upset. But I don’t know why.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Yes, ma’am. He says he’s fine. But it doesn’t seem like he is.”
“Where is he now?”
“Talking to Prince.”
Dr. Lucy rose from the couch and made her way into the examining room, where Pete lay on his belly on the floor, nearly nose to nose with the wolf-dog.
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