by Pamela Morsi
Pulling up Tom’s email was something she did with deliberate casualness. She knew exactly what she was doing and why.
She glanced through the subject headings, careful not to open anything. It was mostly notification of shipped orders with tracking numbers or responses to searches for hard-to-find car parts.
But one heading, right in the middle of what were obviously work-related messages, stabbed like a knife in Erica’s heart.
Sounds like you are in love with Clara.
Erica eyed the sender. It was an email address she didn’t recognize. She looked at the heading again. Sounds like you are in love with Clara. She hadn’t read it wrong. That’s what it said. Her heart was in her throat. She heard Tom’s step in the hallway and she snapped the computer shut.
Tom walked into the living room. “Finally, Quint’s sleeping. I thought I might have to read the whole book before he nodded off.”
“Uh-huh.” Erica nodded vaguely.
Tom came over and sat down beside her. She still had his laptop in her hands. He took it from her and set it on the coffee table. “Surfing the net?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
She had. She had found exactly what she’d been looking for. It was the kind of evidence that her mother would use in divorce court. But Erica looked into the eyes of her husband and knew that she wasn’t her mother. She didn’t want to confront her husband. She didn’t want to accuse him or punish him. She wanted to keep him.
“Future view—The Bentleys,” she said. “Five years from today.”
Tom grinned at her. “Five years.”
“Yes.”
“Our small business loan will be paid off,” he mused thoughtfully. “So that should be a big burden lifted.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Quint will be in middle school,” he said. “So we’ll probably be doing soccer or band concerts or science fairs. You know he’s bound to be into something.”
“Of course.”
Tom stared off into space for a moment and then shrugged. “I guess I’m tired tonight. I can’t think of anything else.”
“Will you still be here with me?” Erica asked. The minute she heard the question leave her lips, she wanted to pull it back. But she couldn’t.
Tom’s expression was momentarily puzzled. Then a smile spread across his face and a bubble of laughter escaped his throat. “I will be unless this house burns down. And if we have to move into a tent in the backyard, I’ll be there, too.”
Erica felt an unreasonable sense of relief. She reached for him and began tugging at his clothes.
Tom began his workday whistling. Nine years of marriage and his lovely, devoted wife still had some new tricks up her sleeve or, more accurately, in her jeans. Erica had put a smile on his face last night, and it was still there this morning.
Today was Halloween, and Quint was giddy with excitement. There would be a costume contest in his classroom, and he was ready for it, dressed as Dracula with a knee-length black cape that Erica had fashioned from an old skirt and ninety-nine cents’ worth of vampire teeth purchased at the supermarket. She was using her own makeup to paint his face. She dusted on some very, very pale base that seemed to drain all the color out of his face. Then she used eyebrow pencil to create wrinkles on his forehead. The dark, almost black lipstick applied to his mouth drew attention to his fang teeth, which he joyfully bared for his father while voicing the threat “I’m going to suck your blood!”
Tom thought his son looked more cute than scary, but he kept that opinion to himself.
Erica was in costume as well. With a black suit, black stockings and black shoes, all she needed to add was a pointy witch’s hat and a broom to complete the outfit.
She was, Tom decided, the best-looking witch he’d ever encountered. And he told her so.
She thanked him with feigned casualness, but she was a little shy with him this morning. Tom thought that might be a good observation to have in the bridegroom’s handbook. You’ve outdone yourself in the sack when your wife can’t meet your eyes without blushing.
“I’m coming right home after work,” he promised Quint. “I won’t allow you out in the neighborhood sucking blood without me.”
Quint giggled.
Tom kissed Erica on the top of the head. “I guess it’s too late to warn you to behave,” he said. “You cast a spell on me last night.”
Erica’s cheeks immediately flushed a vivid scarlet, and she widened her eyes and gave a scandalized nod toward Quint. As if their six-year-old would somehow figure out what mommy and daddy had been doing while he’d been fast asleep.
Tom winked at her. “See you this evening, witch,” he said.
He was whistling on the road, all the way to the shop.
It looked like it was going to be a great day. All his employees showed up on time ready to work. Hector was quiet once again. He looked pale, Tom thought. His recent bender hadn’t done him any good, that was for certain. Gus, on the other hand, appeared to be in a very lighthearted mood and was anxious to complete the job from the day before. Cliff was back to being strange and secretive.
And the newest member of Tom’s team showed up looking clean shaven and, if not neatly pressed, at least mostly unwrinkled.
“You told me to come back today,” he said, as if Tom might have forgotten their conversation of the previous evening.
He nodded to Briscoe, acknowledging their discussion. “I talked it over with my wife,” Tom said. “We’re going to give you a shot at this.”
He saw the reaction in the young guy’s shoulders that could only be relief.
“I’m starting you out at minimum wage, so I don’t know that you’ll do much better than you did at the pizza place,” Tom said. “But if you work hard and show yourself to be able to learn, we may be able to do better.”
“Okay,” Briscoe said. “That sounds all right to me.”
“You’re on probation for the first couple of months,” Tom said. “If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out. You may not like this kind of job, or you might not be able to pick it up.”
The young guy nodded, adopting a casual unconcern that was at odds with his eagerness.
“Let me get you a T-shirt with our logo,” Tom said. “That’ll make you look more official. And you need to get yourself a better pair of shoes, something that you can accidentally drop a transmission on without breaking your foot.”
Briscoe looked down at his dirty sneakers and nodded.
Tom took him out and introduced him around. All the guys were initially friendly.
“Where’d you work before?” Gus asked him.
“Pizza Village.”
The silence in response to that revelation was to be expected. Cliff gave Tom a look of disapproval.
“Briscoe is going to be a helper to all of us until he finds his feet. He’s going to free you up to do the jobs you do best.”
It was an overly optimistic interpretation, but he wanted all of them to understand that he wasn’t taking on a new mechanic. He was just hiring a hand.
“I guess if we get hungry, we can always send him out for a fourteen-inch Supreme,” Cliff said.
Gus snickered in appreciation.
“I don’t expect he’ll be rebuilding an engine by this afternoon,” Tom said. “But he’s young and willing to learn. I think we’ve all been there.”
Tom’s tone was deliberately stern. He wanted this to work, and it wouldn’t if the other guys treated Briscoe as if he wasn’t part of the team.
“You can follow me around today,” Tom said. “You’ll get a chance to find out what these other fellows know soon enough.”
For Tom, of course, the downside of having a new and untrained employee was that he would have to let the guy shadow him for the next few days, maybe for a few weeks. Even after that he’d have to watch him closely for a good long while. It was a risk and an inconvenience. But everything about
business, especially a business with employees, involved risk and inconvenience.
He took Briscoe to the fourth bay.
The young guy whistled. “Nice car,” he said.
At least the kid had some taste.
“You’ll see a lot of nice cars here,” Tom told him. “Not all of them will be in pristine condition. Some of them are going to be so modified that they’re unrecognizable as the vehicle they started out to be. Some will look so rough, you’ll wonder how they made it out of the junkyard. But no matter what they’re like or what they’ve been, you can’t disrespect them. They mean a lot to their owners, so they need to mean a lot to us.”
Lovingly, Tom threaded his fingers through the Buick grill and opened Clara’s hood.
Damn, I love this car, Tom thought to himself. Deliberately he pushed the thought away. It wasn’t his car and it never would be. He was fixing it up for Guffy, and she was going to sell it to somebody probably very far away. In fact, he’d received another email from the guy in Seattle who was interested in the Buick. Tom still thought the guy was a dealer, but he portrayed himself as simply the middleman for an interested buyer.
Tom leaned over the engine for a long moment before resuming his talk with Briscoe.
“My wife tells me that doctors have a motto, something like, ‘First do no harm,”’ Tom told him. “Here in my shop, I like to think the same way. If you’re working over the side of the car or on the front of the car, we don’t want to be scratching the paint with a belt buckle or a dropped wrench or whatever. We always hang some padding for protection.”
Tom indicated the pile of grease-and-oil-smeared fender protectors. The quarter inch of padding, covered by vinyl, had magnets sewn into the hem to help them cling to the car.
Briscoe followed the direction of Tom’s gaze as if taking note.
“When we’re washing things, we need to be careful, too. Harsh soaps and chemicals can be just as damaging to the finish as a metal tool. But when we’re working with water, it’s not like we can use a big old bath mat.”
Briscoe nodded.
“So what I do is spray wax all around the edges of the engine, the tops of the fenders, and the front grille. This creates a barrier in case we have something splashing out.”
Tom liberally sprayed the right side of the Buick with the wax and then handed the can to Briscoe. The younger guy applied it to the left side and the front grille. He worked much more slowly than he really needed to, and Tom had to bite his tongue from rushing the kid. It was just wax, and any excess would just be buffed off. But it was better that the guy was cautious than quick, Tom reminded himself.
Although it was hard to be patient, watching someone take ten minutes to do a job that Tom could do in two.
“That looks good,” Tom said, once the waxing was done. “That’s exactly how it needs to be.”
With plenty of explanation and hands-on help, the two of them went through the proper steps for washing an engine. Tom mostly watched and supervised. However, he was also repeatedly interrupted by customers as people stopped by to leave their cars, inquire about the business or schedule service.
Tom kept a close eye on his new employee, not allowing any of the other distractions of his job to get in the way of what he was teaching the young guy to do.
As he watched Briscoe work, Tom’s mind wandered. He recalled the previous evening with his wife and smiled. Erica was always good in bed. And if he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit he wasn’t that difficult to please. Last night, however, there had been something new, something different.
When the two of them had first hooked up, she’d been hesitant and skittish. Erica hadn’t trusted men very easily. Tom had played it safe to win her over. Still, she’d been pretty wide-eyed when it came to sexuality. That was okay with Tom. Vanilla was actually his favorite flavor. And if, like last night, it sometimes showed up with surprisingly hot and spicy toppings, so much the better.
It took the best part of an hour to wash and shine up the Buick’s engine. But the convertible now looked as good under the hood as she did on the street. In fact, she looked good enough to show to the would-be suitor in Seattle. The guy would be a fool if he couldn’t appreciate such a beauty.
Chapter 16
HALLOWEEN WAS, FOR MOST of the University Hospital employees, the best holiday at the hospital because it was the one holiday when everybody was on the job. And all these very serious adult people got the opportunity to behave like children. Doctors were writing notes wearing werewolf gloves. Nurses were flitting from room to room with angel wings upon their backs. Funny shoes, pumpkin hats and candy corn were the order of the day.
In the Medical Records department, Mrs. Converse was a Dutch girl complete with wooden shoes, an apron and a bonnet. Rayliss was in a bee costume that showed off her legs while disguising her lack of waistline. Lena was a Southern belle in a hoop skirt that made it very difficult to sit in her cubicle. Darla wore her cheerleading uniform from her high school days. And Callie was some sort of vampire vamp with purple hair extensions and a frothy black-and-gray dress that seemed like some sort of ball gown/lingerie hybrid.
There was lots of laughter and camaraderie in the building, but there was also plenty of work to do. No one had the luxury of losing sight of that.
Erica was especially busy. Her in-box continued to provide an endless collection of charts. As well, her first workshop on electronic medical records was rapidly approaching, which was why Melody had decided to arrange a meeting.
Her coworker had been decidedly cool since the horrible lunch when some kind of indiscretion involving Tom had been suggested.
Erica assumed Melody was embarrassed to be associated with the group. Those same gossipy women had suggested things about her own husband Gabe in the past. Undoubtedly she understood exactly how that felt.
As a result Erica had expected a newfound bond between the two of them, but, so far, she hadn’t seen any evidence of empathy.
Her Tom, her wonderful, loving, caring Tom, could not be having any sordid affair. And she chose to believe in Tom, to believe that he was true. Any shakiness in her faith in him had been overcome last night. Her husband may be having temptations, but Erica was sure that he’d not been with anybody else.
Still, there was something going on. And this “Clara” person could be a plant or even a fake identity, but Erica wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
She and Melody laid out the syllabus on the conference table. They had a lot of material to cover and not that much time. Melody was dressed as some sort of sprite-like creature with gossamer wings. Erica didn’t know if she was supposed to be Tinkerbell or a dragonfly, and she didn’t ask.
“I don’t know if we’ll have time for this overview,” Melody said. “Maybe we should just stick to the what and let them figure out the why on their own.”
Erica shook her head. “Everything we know about training tells us that staff members comply better when they understand the reasons for doing it. Maybe we can borrow time from one of the other speakers.”
“We can’t cut Radiology or the Labs,” Melody said. “Mrs. Maizika in Nursing is just terrible.”
“Well, maybe we could cut her short,” Erica suggested. “Just ten or fifteen minutes would be all we’d need.” Melody shook her head. “Think of the politics of that. Mrs. Maizika would have the Vice President for Nursing on the line before you even got off the phone.”
Erica thought about that. Melody was probably right. “Let me talk to Dr. Glover,” she suggested. “I’ll see if he can give us some of his scheduled time.”
Melody looked up at her with surprise. “You’re still talking to him?”
“Talking to him? Of course, I’m talking to him. That’s part of my job.”
The look on Melody’s face was one of distaste. “Well, I’d never speak to him again,” she said sharply. “But obviously I’m not you, and I would never have gotten myself in that kind of situation.”
/> Erica was confused. It seemed odd to put blame on Dr. Glover. The man might have been the catalyst for Callie’s anger, but he certainly wasn’t responsible for anything going on among employees of the Medical Records department.
“I like Dr. Glover,” she told Melody. “It’s not like I’m going to give up a relationship with him just because of something Callie did.”
Callie had apparently lost her position on the EMR team because she didn’t keep her professional relationship with Dr. Glover professional enough. Erica knew from her own experience that Dr. Glover did want to be called Zac and talk like friends.
“Of course, he’s partly to blame as well,” Erica admitted. “But from my point of view, it was really Callie’s responsibility to hold the line.”
Melody raised an eyebrow, her expression disapproving. “Anyway, I am talking to Dr. Glover,” Erica stated flatly. “I can keep my remarks to less than ten minutes. I’ll ask him if he’ll let me have that.”
Which was exactly what Erica did less than an hour later. It was her break time, but due to tons of trick-or-treat snacks everywhere, she had absolutely no need for anything to eat. She made a quick stop off at the ladies’ room and then went downstairs to the Pharmacy.
As soon as she came around the corner, she saw Dr. Glover. He was standing at the counter tapping into a tablet-style computer. He was wearing his white pharmacist coat, and through his head there appeared to be an oversize femur that went in one side of his skull and out the other.
He glanced up and smiled.
“Hello,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit from...the Wicked Witch of the West?”
Erica grinned at him. “Not the Wicked Witch of the West, just the Less Than Nice Witch of Medical Records,” she answered. “And what are you supposed to be?”
He reached up to touch his unusual head ornament and chuckled. “Pretty much what I am every day,” he said. “I’m a bonehead.”
Erica laughed as she was intended to.
“Have you got a minute? I need to ask a favor.”
Dr. Glover was immediately serious. “One second,” he told her. She watched as he approached one of the other employees, and then he disappeared into the back of the work area, only to reemerge through a nearby door marked Employees Only.