I shake my head. It would not be possible to feel any worse than I do. My stomach heaves again. I swallow obediently. I want to sleep and she keeps rubbing my hand, sponging my face, telling me to wake up. I just know she’ll be in here later trying to give me a sleeping pill.
Later, I wake up in a different room. As the fog recedes, the first thing in focus is CM’s worried face. I smile weakly with relief She scrapes a metal chair up close to the bed and takes my hand in both of hers.
“How are you feeling?”
“Never better. Did anyone get the license number of the truck?”
She gives a little nervous giggle and presses my hand against her cheek. “God, I was so worried about you. How did Mac know how to reach me?”
“Your phone number’s in my wallet.”
“He seems like a pretty nice guy.”
“We’re just friends.”
“He asked me to call your mom, but I thought I’d better wait till you were conscious …”
“Thank you for that.” I sigh. “All I need is her fluttering around here like Florence Nightingale. I’ll call her when I’m safely ensconced at home. What day is it?” Sunlight’s poking around the window blinds, illuminating various metal contraptions with plastic bags full of liquid connected by tubing to several of my orifices. There’s a needle taped in my arm.
“Sunday afternoon. The snow’s already melting.”
When I try to shift my weight, a quick turn of the screw makes me gasp. “Shit. I think they left a scalpel inside.”
“It’s your incision, dum-dum. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t cough, sneeze, laugh, or breathe.”
The sound of knuckles on metal draws our attention to the doorway, where a very young guy with hair as curly as mine, and a stethoscope hanging around his blue surgical scrubs, stands grinning. “How’s it going?” Naturally, he’s talking to me, but he’s looking at CM.
“Are you the one who did this to me?”
“Guilty as charged, Your Honor. And it’s a pretty bang-up job, all modesty aside. You don’t have to leave,” he says as CM gets up.
“I’m just going to run down to the gift shop and see if they have any more of these in spring fashion colors.” She tweaks my plastic hospital bracelet. His head about swivels off his shoulders as he watches her go. He drags his eyes back to me.
“How do you feel today?”
“Like the magician’s assistant who’s been sawed in half. When can I go home?”
“Whoa, easy there. You are one very fortunate lady. You were about that close”—he holds his thumb and index finger together—”to a ruptured appendix. In fact, I lifted that puppy out and as soon as I set it in the bowl, it went. Your friend got you here just in time.”
“I assure you, I’m grateful to all concerned, but I’d like to go home.”
He gives me a bemused smile. “Tuesday. Maybe even tomorrow. As soon as you can pee by yourself. And when you can promise me you won’t drive a car for at least three weeks—”
“I can promise you that now. I don’t have a car.”
“And that you won’t do a lot of walking around for at least two weeks—”
“How am I supposed to go to work?”
“You’re not. And I don’t want you lifting anything heavier than a sandwich for about six weeks.”
“You must be joking. I’m a baker. Lifting’s half the job.”
“Not for the next six weeks it isn’t.” He shakes his head. “You need to understand that you’ve just had major abdominal surgery. It’s going to be an absolute minimum of six weeks before you can resume a normal routine. Particularly if your normal routine is very physical in nature.”
I fold my arms and stare at him. “Well, fine. You want to come home and wait on me?”
“It’s not the worst offer I’ve had, but I can’t spare the time right now.” He gives me a charming smile, but at the moment I’m way beyond crabby. “Ms. Morrison, all kidding aside, your body needs a certain amount of time to heal properly. That’s just a fact of life.”
“Here’s my fact of life. I live alone. Things have to be done and I don’t have a guy named Cato hanging around waiting for instructions.”
“Do you know what adhesions are?”
“Should I?”
He sighs. “No. But if you don’t let your body heal properly, you will. And it won’t be a pleasant experience.” By the time he finishes describing adhesions, bowel obstruction, abscess, chronic pain, and future surgeries in lurid detail, I’ve reluctantly accepted my new status as invalid.
When Mac calls Monday afternoon to see if I want company, I announce that I can pee by myself. I haven’t been this proud of going to the john since I was potty-trained.
He laughs. “Does that mean you need a ride home?”
“If you could, I’d appreciate getting out of here ASAP. This place is depressing. It’s full of sick people.”
“Unfortunately, that means another ride in the smogmobile.”
“I apologize for any snide comments I might have inadvertently let slip about the Elky.”
“Inadvertently, my ass.”
I have to clamp my teeth firmly onto my tongue. “Mac, I most humbly beg forgiveness.”
“Okay, you’re forgiven. What time can you leave?”
“As soon as you can get the bucket of bolts over here.”
He was right about one thing. It’s been a long time since I had this much attention. Of course, for the first few days, I’m too drugged out on Vicodin to enjoy it. CM fills my freezer with soup and casseroles; she helps me bathe and French-braids my hair. Ellen and Diane bring me bread and scones and muffins.
Tyler brings me cookies and a wood-block print of a loaf of bread in warm shades of brown and rust.
“Tyler, this is wonderful. This should be hanging in the bakery. Can you make another print of it?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs, looks embarrassed by the fuss.
“In fact, I think we need T-shirts.”
“What for?”
“To sell, my little nonlinear friend.”
“You mean T-shirts with my design on them?” Her eyes flicker with interest.
“Exactly. And maybe coffee mugs, too. Why don’t you ask Ellen to call me?”
“Totally inflammatory. By the way, Linda says hi.”
“Right.”
“No, really. She totally misses you.”
“Tyler, stop. It hurts when I laugh.”
Mac brings me cassettes for my boom box, and books, which he reads aloud when I’m too groggy to focus. As you get older, you forget how nice it can be to hear a story instead of reading it. It calls up all these primal race memories of storytellers squatting around a campfire in the jungle darkness.
After a week, I stop taking painkillers, so I’m perfectly capable of reading to myself, but he keeps doing it because we both enjoy it. On the three-week anniversary of my grand opening, he shows up at nine-thirty in the morning with a white bag and a copy of The Great Gatsby. I crawl back under the covers while he makes coffee.
“If it wasn’t for the pain, I could get used to this. Sleeping late, having people bring me food and music, read to me.”
“Enjoy it while you can. As soon as you’re up and about, I’m planning to get sick so you can read to me.”
“Does that mean I have to drive you to the hospital in the smogmobile?”
“No, I’ll get sick at home. Elky would never run for you.” He sets a plastic tape case down on the kitchen table. “Here’s another tape.” “Who is it?”
He’s pawing through my cupboard. “Don’t you have any clean cups?”
“Yes, CM washed everything. There’s no telling where she put them. Who’s on the tape?”
“Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke.” He hands me a cup of coffee and tosses the white sack on the bed. Inside is one perfect golden croissant, still warm.
“Oh, Mac, thanks.” I inhale the buttery scent. “Is this from Le Pan
ier?”
“Of course. You don’t think I’d dare to bring you a crescent roll from Phoebe’s, do you?”
I clutch my stomach, panting. “Oh, don’t make me laugh.” I take a bite of the croissant and the hundred butter-crisp papery layers shatter into toasty shards. “Oh, God, this is so perfect. Thank you so much. You want a bite?”
“No, I had one on premises.” He sits down in the club chair, props his right boot on his left knee.
“You’re out early for a Saturday.”
He flips the pages of the book. “Actually, I haven’t been home yet. Kenny and I went out last night and ended up at a party on Capitol Hill.”
I feel a weird little jab in my stomach nowhere near my incision. “Was it fun?” I ease out of bed and creep carefully to the stove for a refill. “You want any more?”
“You finish it.” Just a breath, then, “Laura was there.”
“Did you talk?”
“No. She was with somebody.”
“How did that make you feel?” I curl back down on the futon, balancing my cup.
He leans his head back against the chair and laughs. “You can take the girl out of California, but you can’t—”
“Okay, okay. I just thought you wanted to talk about it. If you don’t, fine. Why don’t you put the tape on?”
“Because I’m reading and I don’t want you to be distracted. You can listen to it later.”
I close my eyes and listen as Mac becomes Nick Carraway, lost in the glittering world of the Buchanans, and I recall hazily that after reading Gatsby for the first time when I was sixteen, I wanted to change my name to Jordan. Now he’s at the part where Daisy tells Nick about the birth of her daughter. “ ‘And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ “
He snaps the book shut. “Sorry. I’m really tired.”
“That’s what happens when you stay out all night. Go home and get some sleep. Leave me the book.”
He tilts his head from side to side, rubbing the back of his neck. “God, I’m stiff.”
“Come here. My dad always said I gave good neck rubs.”
“Don’t go ripping anything.”
“Sit down and shut up.”
He lowers himself to the floor, stretching his long legs out in front of him, and I sit cross-legged on the bed, massaging the stiff cords at the base of his skull. Everything’s fine until I start thinking about it. Mac and I don’t touch each other. It’s an unwritten rule with us. A little nudge with an elbow is about as far as we’ve ever gone. Now I remember why.
Because I’m imagining my fingertips on the smooth curve of his back. I’m staring at the hollow where his neck joins the shoulder, wondering how it would feel under my mouth. God, no, this is all wrong. I need a friend, not more complications.
“Okay,” I say, too cheerfully. Slap his shoulder. “That’s it. I’m a little sore. I guess everything really is connected to your stomach muscles.”
“Thanks.” He doesn’t get up or turn around.
When my mother was trying to teach me piano, she explained about the una corda pedal, the one on the left. When you depress that pedal, the entire action and keyboard shift just slightly, nearly invisibly, to the right, so that the treble hammers strike only two of the three strings. The pianist continues playing just as before, but the music is different, softer. That’s how the world has just shifted.
A knock on the door makes me jump, sending a twinge through my incision. Mac scrambles up.
From my angle, I can’t see the porch. I can only see Mac’s face, the neutral expression that drops like a curtain after the play. He steps back and Gary walks in, both arms hidden by giant bundles of pale yellow roses.
I find my voice. “Gary! What are you doing here? I’m sorry. This is my friend Mac McLeod. Gary Travers.” They exchange some kind of genetically encoded male information at a glance and then Gary shifts the flowers so he can shake hands.
Just so nobody misunderstands, he bends down to kiss me. I try to make it a short one.
“I better get going.” Mac picks up his denim jacket.
I look around Gary and the roses. “Mac? I’ll talk to you soon.”
After the door shuts behind him, Gary off-loads the roses onto the kitchen table. He hangs up his leather jacket and sits down next to me, taking both my hands.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because there was no need to. I figured I’d be seeing you next week. How did you know?”
“I talked to your mom yesterday. If I’d known, I could have been up here taking care of you.” He lifts my hands to his mouth.
I give him a smile that’s meant to be reassuring. “All my friends have been taking care of me.”
“Like Mac?”
“Yes, like Mac. He’s the one who took me to the hospital when I got sick.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, Wyn. Maybe I shouldn’t have barged in like this, but when your mother told me you’d had emergency surgery, I panicked.”
“You and my mother.” I smile. “It was all I could do to keep her from getting on the next plane up here. But I’m fine. I’ve had my stitches out, and it’s just a matter of resting until everything finishes getting stuck back together.”
“Then that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
The way he holds my face in his hands, as if I were some treasured work of art, is guaranteed to neutralize any leftover pockets of insurgency. His kiss is gentle but insistent, and it makes me want to do things I know I can’t do yet.
He painstakingly cuts the stems of all the roses and arranges them in my only container, a galvanized bucket. There are so many that they look embarrassingly spectacular.
“Thank you for the flowers. They’re beautiful.”
“I’m glad you like them.” He dries his hands on my dish towel. “I’ll just go out to the car and get my bag.”
My eyes open wide. “Your what?”
“My bag. My suitcase.”
“You mean you’re staying here?”
“Well, yes. Unless you don’t want me to. I arranged things so I could be up here all week.”
“My place is so small …” I feel like my protest is not only feeble, but petty and ungrateful. “You won’t have room to—”
“I’m here to take care of you. I won’t get in the way, I promise. I have a few phone calls I have to make tomorrow, but for the most part I’ll just be your devoted slave.” He bends down to kiss me. “By the way, I hope you don’t mind, I gave Erica and the kids your phone number. And a few people at work. I told them they could reach me here.”
He disappears out the door.
I can stand it for a week. I mean, he rearranges his whole schedule, comes up here with all these flowers. How can I throw him out?
For dinner, he heats up some of CM’s soup. He brought a loaf of Paisan extra-sour sourdough with him and two bottles of a Napa Valley cabernet. It’s like he doesn’t remember that I make bread for a living or doesn’t believe that the Northwest produces perfectly good wines. Or maybe I’m just too grouchy.
I do enjoy watching his butt while he’s standing at the sink washing dishes, a pillowcase tucked into his belt because I don’t own any aprons. At some point, he turns around with his sleepy-eyed smile.
“What are you laughing at?”
“You. In your makeshift apron with your buns of steel kind of rolling back and forth. And I’m not laughing, I’m smiling. Enjoying the after-dinner show.”
“You better not talk like that if you can’t follow through. Remember the theory of rising expectations.”
When he’s finished with the dishes, he takes off his Top-Siders and stretches out next to me. One of Mac’s tapes is playing, one of the less raucous ones.
“Don’t you have anything more romantic than Otis Redding?”
“I think the Big O is pretty romantic. You have to listen to the words. The way they work with the
music. If you insist, I think there’s a Frank Sinatra up there. I know there’s an Ella Fitzgerald.”
Pretty soon Ella’s singing “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and I’m trying not to think about the first night Mac took me to Lofurno’s. Gary pushes up the sleeve of my sweatshirt and tickles the bend of my elbow.
“God, that feels good.”
“When are you going to be seaworthy again?” he asks, nibbling my earlobe.
“I don’t know. The post-op instructions were kind of vague. All it said was something about gradually returning to your previous level of sexual activity. And they don’t even know what my previous level was. I could be Truck Stop Annie.”
“ ‘Gradually’?” His breathing kicks into second gear. “If we have to work up to it, maybe we should start slowly. Now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How about if I just touch you?”
I smile. “How about if I just touch you? You’re the one with a gun in his pocket.”
His breath catches when I run my hand down the ridge in his pants. He unbuckles his belt. I ease the zipper down, and slip my hand inside, freeing up Junior. From the way he jackknifes when I scoot down and take him in my mouth, I surmise that Erica wasn’t into oral sex. After the initial shock, he settles down and lets me make him happy. His Class-5 excitement is a turn-on, but his gratitude leaves me feeling vaguely uneasy. Like most men, he has no idea what to do if he can’t direct.
“That was incredible,” he breathes when he’s holding me later. “I wish I could make you feel good.”
“Gary, you are making me feel good. I like the way you hold me. It doesn’t have to always be about orgasm, you know.”
Apparently, this is a novel concept to him.
The phone rings at seven in the morning and he grabs it before I can even roll over. He spends fifteen minutes going over interview questions for new employees.
“Be sure to give everyone the sheet on drug testing. And let me know how many good candidates we’ve got. If we don’t get at least six, we’ll have to run the ad again.”
By this time, I’m wide awake. I dread having to get my body clock synched up again when I go back to work. When he crawls back under the covers and tries to get chummy, I give him the evil eye.
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