A few minutes later a couple of orderlies moved Teresa to a room upstairs, with Sally and John following along behind the gurney. “We’ll be keeping an eye on her till she comes around,” a nurse told them. “You might want to go down to the cafeteria and have something to eat. It’ll take your mind off it for a bit.”

“I don’t know if I should leave her,” Sally said. “I feel responsible for getting her this way.”

“There’s really nothing you can do for her right now,” the nurse told them. “You might as well take a break.”

“Sally,” John said, “from what I could see of the dynamics of the accident, there wasn’t anything you could have done to avoid it.”

“Well, maybe,” she replied, “but if I hadn’t fucked up my life so thoroughly I wouldn’t have been here anyway.”

“It could have been the same thing somewhere else,” John told her. “Look, she’s right. You need to go relax a bit, and getting something to eat would help a lot. Let’s go. Teresa isn’t going anywhere, and she won’t even know we’re gone.”

“I’ll know I’m not here for her,” Sally shook her head, “but you’re right, I could stand something to eat. Do you know where the cafeteria is in this place?”

“Yes, but it’s hospital food, and you know what that means,” John smiled. “Everything sort of tastes like pine tar, at least what there is of it. There’s a fairly decent restaurant not far away. I’m buying. Come on.”

“Well, all right,” she said reluctantly.

A few minutes later they were in the Toyota. Warwick’s Restaurant wasn’t exactly a top-of-the-line eatery, but it was good food and open twenty-four hours, which made it a popular place for cops and EMTs to stop. Besides, John didn’t think Sally would be up for a top-of-the-line place, anyway.

“Wow, this is nice,” she said when they walked into the thoroughly average restaurant. “Teresa and I haven’t had much money to eat on, so I’ve been trying to let her eat as well as I can, while I’ve been the one eating the ramen noodles.”

“I thought you look a little underfed,” John replied seriously. “Eat well tonight, Sally. It’s on me.”

They had sat down and the waitress had brought water and menus before Sally said anything. “John, this is very nice of you. I’d almost think you were trying to put the make on me.”

“Not this time,” he said. “In fact, these days I don’t operate the way I used to in high school. Three wives have had much to do with that.”

“You’ve really been married three times?”

“I prefer to think of it as married once and made a huge mistake two other times. It would have been four if I hadn’t gotten lucky. And maybe the first time was a mistake, too. I sometimes wonder about that. You said you’d been married.”

“Not for long,” she sighed, “and I feel like I was lucky to get out of it when I did, let alone get out of it at all. Let’s not talk about that right now, John. I’m in a bad enough mood already.”

“Fine by me. I was just trying to make a little conversation and get your mind off your daughter.”

“Oh, I understand,” she said. “John, it’s just you’ve been very nice to me, nicer than I deserve, and I can’t help but wonder what you’re up to. I mean, if you want to put the make on me, fine. I’ll do what I have to do to help out Teresa.”

“No strings attached, I promise. Like I said, I don’t operate like that anymore.” Even if he did, he thought, Sally wasn’t all that appealing right now, tired, straggly, wrought up and nervous. Even if those didn’t apply, he couldn’t make himself believe that her attitude would allow her to be appealing to him. “I certainly wouldn’t take advantage of you in the fix you’re in,” he continued. “Now, back in high school I might have thought differently, but that was then and a lot of things have changed in that time. I guess I had to grow up sometime.”

“I don’t know,” she shook her head. “I guess I still remember you from high school, sniffing around all the girls and making it with a lot of them.”

“I’ll be the first to admit I got around a lot,” John told her, “and I tried for even more than I got. But that jazz got old after a while.”

“So what happened between you and Mandy? Were one of you cheating on the other, or something?”

“I wasn’t cheating on her,” John said flatly. “I don’t think she was cheating on me, or if she was, I never got a hint of it. I’m still a little surprised that we got together and then that we stayed together as long as we did.”

He went on to tell the story. He and Mandy had been an item for a while in high school, but it hadn’t lasted until graduation. They drifted even further apart when they went to different colleges, and John mostly figured that was that. Then Mandy had decided she didn’t like freezing her ass at Northern Michigan University in Marquette about the same time he decided he didn’t like all the U of M people patronizing him in Ann Arbor because he went to Eastern Michigan. Independently, they’d each transferred to Wayne State, where they were surprised to meet each other again one day. They had a date for old time’s sakes, and not surprisingly it wound up in bed in his grubby off-campus apartment. And then another and another; somewhere along the way he’d looked up and realized she’d moved in with him.

They lived together like that for over two years while they finished college. Along the way both of them had decided they didn’t like Michigan winters and decided to move to Florida at the first opportunity. Their spring break trip had led directly to the job at Suncoast Medical Supply, and eventually the chance to buy Harry, the owner, out.

“It was a pretty damn tough time,” he explained. “We had a good name, but an absolutely unknown product and a lot of sales resistance. I had to discount price down to where I was making nearly nothing to be able to get some units going out the door for the sake of generating some word of mouth. I was trying to do three or four people’s jobs because I didn’t have the money to pay anyone, and I didn’t have the money to pay myself, either. Mandy and I were just about down to living out of the car and surviving on ramen noodles ourselves. Well, finally, one day she couldn’t take it any longer, packed up her shit, and left. I was pretty pissed about it, but that actually made it a little easier, since I didn’t have to feed her as well as me.

“Anyway,” he continued, “not a month after she left I got my first really big sale. Like I said, I’d discounted things so much I still didn’t make much money off it, but it got my foot in the door in a couple other places. It took another year before I had things back under control. I’ve always thought if Mandy had been willing to stick it out just a little bit longer we might still be together.”

“What’s she doing now?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he shrugged. “Earlier today I had a call from her father, who lives north of the bridge. It seems she’s walked out on her current husband, but that’s absolutely all I know about it. I do know she’s bounced around a lot since she left me, but I don’t know many of the details.”

“Have you seen her since she left you?”

“Oh, yeah, several times. We’re still friendly, if not real close. We even kicked around the idea of getting back together a couple times, but when we talked it over, it was always inconvenient for one or the other of us. Or, at least it didn’t seem like a good idea, which might amount to the same thing; I don’t know.”

They sat and talked while their food came, and then while they ate it. That was one thing John appreciated about Warwick’s: they didn’t mess around getting the food served. There might be people who came in there to shoot the shit, but often people wanted to get in and right back out again. He particularly appreciated Warwick’s unspoken policy about feeding EMTs who dropped in for a meal – if they had to leave on a call in the middle of it, Warwick’s would make up a new one when they returned, and not charge extra for it.

While they ate, John tried to probe her a little lightly about where she’d been, and what she’d been doing, but he didn’t get much info in her responses. It was apparently something she didn’t want to talk about much, and he could understand that. This day had been traumatic enough for her without getting into other uncomfortable subjects, but he suspected there had been things go past she was not particularly proud of anyway.

Sally did seem to be feeling a little better after they ate. Some of the color had returned to her skin, and she seemed perked up a little bit. “That was the best meal I’ve had in ages,” she said. “I really appreciate it, John.”

“No big deal,” he said. “It’s the least I can do for a fellow ’88. Let’s get back to the hospital and see how Teresa is doing.”

Back at the hospital it seemed that Teresa was doing about as well as could be expected. She’d come out of the anesthesia, but was still pretty groggy and uncomprehending of what was happening to her. John mostly stood back and watched as Sally tried to let Teresa know she was there and that she cared for her, but the girl didn’t seem too aware of it.

After a while, a nurse came in and administered a sedative. “It’s going to take a while before she sleeps it off,” she said. “You might as well go get some sleep yourselves.”

Sally was ready to spend the night in a chair at her daughter’s side, and it took no little talking for John to talk Sally into coming home with him. It was clear to him she needed some sleep too, and sitting up in a hospital chair was not the way to get it. “She won’t know you’re gone,” John told her. “I’ll bring you back in the morning.”

Finally Sally accepted his urgings; the fact that she was pretty tired herself had the most to do with it. The two of them got back in his Toyota and drove across town to his house in a subdivision near the end of Tuttle. They had to wind around in the subdivision a bit before they came to his house, on a lot not a lot larger than the house itself, tightly packed in with its neighbors. John hit the garage door opener, and drove the Toyota inside. “Well, we’re here,” he said as he shut the car off and closed the garage door. “Home sweet home, such as it is.”

“John,” she commented absently, “this is a nice house. I’ve never lived in a place this nice.”

“It’s too damn big for just me,” he snorted, although privately he also thought it was a nice house, one to be proud of. He kept it immaculate, if a touch on the spartan side. “It’s just two bedrooms, which is one too many for me most of the time, but it’ll do for now. We’ll have to work out what we’re going to do with Teresa when she gets out of the hospital.”

“Were you living here when Mandy left you?”

“No, we were living in a trailer park across town, closer to the office. Nice place, good neighbors, very friendly, but when you get down to it, it was a trailer park. I bought this place just before I got married to Lisa, and it wasn’t bad for the two of us. Or, for me and Susan later. But it’s been a damn good investment and the location is good. Who knows, maybe I’ll get married again someday, but I’m in no rush.”

“I get the impression you’re pretty sour on women.”

“Well, some women, anyway,” he shrugged. “Lisa, Susan, and Julie in particular. We might as well get inside.”

“Julie was the girl you almost married, right?”

“Yeah, and after it was over with I was damn glad we managed to not tie the knot. It wouldn’t have been any more successful with her than it was with the others. “

Sally got out of the car and glanced across the garage at a canvas-covered car. “You have another car, I take it?”

“More or less,” he said. “A ’78 Jaguar V-12 E-type,” John smiled. “It’s mostly a pain in the neck. English car, you can’t drive it across a mall parking lot without a thousand-dollar repair bill, so I don’t drive it much. I’ve had it for years, but I drive the Toyota most of the time. Once in a while I’ll risk taking it out on the street.”

“Did it set you back a lot?”

“Could have been worse,” John smiled. “I got it from Lisa’s brother, back when we were married. He had a little legal trouble and his defense attorney wanted to get paid up front. Just as well, he wound up doing time anyway.”

“I’ve known a few men like that,” she sighed as she followed him into the house. “Too damn many of them, in fact.”

Inside, the house was rather open, with no wall separating the kitchen and the living room; through sliding doors a back patio could be seen, with a tiny pool and a classic redwood hot tub. “My bedroom is over there,” he said, pointing to the right, to a room that opened onto the patio as well as the living room. “The spare bedroom is back on the other side of the living room. I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of a change of clothes for you, but I could give you a T-shirt or something and wash what you have on.”

“I’d appreciate that, John,” she replied. “You know I don’t have a thing with me.”

“Yeah, well, no problem. Tomorrow we’ll head over to the police impound lot and see if we can rescue your stuff.”

“What there is of it,” she shook her head. “Teresa and I had to leave some things behind when we moved. We, uh, didn’t want people to know we were leaving.”

Probably because she was way the hell and gone behind on her rent, John thought without saying anything. Well, it was to be expected. It had to be hell to be running that close to the wire. Even he and Mandy hadn’t had it that bad when she left him, and it had only been for a short time. He had the impression that things had never been much better for Sally. “Shit happens,” he commented.

“Don’t I fucking know it,” she sighed. “God, John, I’m so tired I have a headache that’s got me half blind, but I’m still so worried about Teresa I don’t think I could sleep.”

“Well, normally I’d say I have the answer to that,” he smiled. “The hot tub is up and running, all I have to do is take the cover off. But like I said, I don’t have anything you could wear in the house, except maybe one of my T-shirts, and you know how quick that would turn transparent if you get it wet.”

“Oh, hell,” she snorted. “John, among the things I’ve had to do over the years to keep food on the table and a roof over Teresa’s and my heads is be a stripper. That’s what this job in Atlanta was, anyway. Enough men I don’t know have had a good look at my bare snatch that I don’t care if someone I know sees it.”

“Your choice,” he said, “but I wouldn’t mind a good soak myself. I’m up for it if you are.”

The hot tub was just outside a sliding glass door from the master bedroom. It took her only an instant to have her clothes off, while he was still sliding back the covers of the hot tub. As he did, he couldn’t help but steal a look at her. She was thin, not stylishly thin but undernourished thin; downright bony, in fact. Even a quick glance revealed to him that her breasts had been enhanced, and none too well; even in the low light of the patio they looked fake to him, too stiff and rounded to be natural. She probably hadn’t even been any great success as a stripper, he thought; while she was a potentially good-looking woman, she seemed too careworn and bedraggled to incite a lot of interest. He realized if he’d been the owner of the strip club, he’d probably have let her go, and that might have been what had happened.

He kept his mouth shut about his thoughts as they swung up onto the deck and stuck their lower legs into the water to get used to it. “Are you sure it’s all right to be naked out here?” she asked, nodding toward the lighted window of the neighbor’s house only a few feet away.

“No problem,” he said. “That window is up high, and the shades are always drawn anyway. The guy who lives there by himself is elderly, and we sort of have the agreement that if he’s peeking and sees something, he doesn’t have any right to be upset about it. I do have the screen of plants here to keep it from being too blatant, and he knows I’ve been back here with one naked woman or another over the years, and not all of them have been lovers, at that. Sometimes it’s just social.”

“You mean a date, or like that?” she smirked as she gingerly slid down into the water.

“No, just friends over, usually a couple, sometimes two. Occasionally I’ll have a date along with the party, and once it was even Mandy, long after we got divorced. ‘No swimsuits’ is the house rule, but I’ll bend it if someone’s sensitive.” He smirked and slid into the water himself. “A few years ago, Scott and Sonja Tyler came down visiting friends and relatives to get away from winter for a while. You ever meet her?”

“I’ve never heard the name, but I take it she’s Scott’s wife.”

“Very interesting woman, dark-skinned, very diverse multicultural background. Very handsome woman. By that I mean not intentionally gorgeous, well, like Jennlynn; but with a natural inner beauty that’s very casual and very striking in her own way. I’ll admit that there was something about her that made me have fantasies about what she looked like in the nude. We got to talking, and decided to come out here. They headed in to change, and I was out here pouring some wine, so when they came out I hadn’t changed yet. She was wearing a really sexy one-piece, and I sort of smirked, ‘Oh, you want to do swimsuits, huh? I usually don’t bother.’ That swimsuit hit the floor so quick it wasn’t funny, and she said, ‘Oh, we weren’t sure.’”

He stopped and shook his head, then continued, “Damn, that Scott is lucky. Not only does he have one of the most beautiful women on the planet, especially naked, but she’s very bright and tremendously devoted to Scott and their kids.” He let out another sigh, let a second go by, and said, “Jesus, I’d love to have someone love me like that, but I can see it’s not going to happen.”

“Oh, John,” she shook her head, “I don’t know why you should say that. You seem to be a very nice guy. I mean, nothing like the arrogant asshole you used to be, always out prowling to get into someone’s panties.”

“I’d like to think so,” he sighed, “but the fact of the matter is that I’ve got three strikes against me that say you’re wrong. In fact, it might as well have been four strikes, since it was only a fluke that kept it from being four. I decided after Julie there was no point in trying to push my luck when I had that kind of track record. The thing of it is, Sally, you’ve only been seeing the good side of me, and you were probably closer to correct when you called me an arrogant asshole. I’m not easy to get along with. I tend to be a perfectionist, and I tend to be nit-picky. I get focused on things and tend to be intolerant of interruptions. Frankly, it goes with my business. Now I’m only an EMT part-time, but my job is to provide equipment for use in emergency situations, and a mistake there could cost someone’s life. For that reason, I’m very intolerant of errors or incompetence, and it slops over into my personal life. I like things to be done my way. Fortunately I have employees who understand that, but my wives, and Julie, have all wound up calling me a crude, insensitive bastard before they left me. They were probably right.”

“John, it can’t be that bad,” she shook her head as she slid lower into the warm water.

“I’m afraid it is,” he shrugged. “At least I’m honest enough with myself to admit it. Christ, you have no idea how much I’d like to have that kind of a home life, a nice wife, kids, and all that. But I’ve come to understand it’s not going to happen for me, and it’s probably for the best all the way around.”

“Maybe you’ve just made some bad choices,” she said. “I mean, God knows I have, clear back to the time when I let my folks push me into marrying that shithead I wound up with. I got Teresa out of the deal, and she’s been about the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m just sorry I haven’t been able to do for her what she deserves.”

“Well, yeah, four bad choices, no doubt about it. Well, three and a half, if Mandy had been able to stick out the bad days. I’m pretty sure I was no fun to be around back in those days, but I was working my ass off and didn’t have a lot of time for whining or horse shit from her. As it was, she just added to the stress of what already was a pretty stressful time.”

“At least you’re being nice to Teresa and me. God, John, I don’t know what I’d be doing if you hadn’t showed up. To have you offer to help us out with all you’ve offered . . . well, John, that doesn’t sound like a ‘crude, insensitive bastard’ to me.”

“Special situation,” he shrugged. “I’m not married to you, and I’m not thinking I’m in love with you, and you’re not an employee. I’m just seeing an old friend, an old classmate, who needs a bit of a hand. I’ll try to not let my bastard side show very much, but I’m afraid you’re going to see it before you leave here, and you’ll probably be just as glad to leave when you do.”

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