IV
“Didn’t know this was going to be a house call, kiddo. Thought you asked me over for a party.”
“Sorry, Elsa, I really am. I didn’t know she was sick until I picked her up at school. Give me credit for not running her by the clinic while you were swamped with other patients, though. I did have that much sense.”
“What’s sensible about failing to take a sick child to her doctor?”
“I’m her doctor.” Stevie placed a basket of Tostados and a plastic container of cheese dip in front of Dr. Elsa, then filled her champagne glass with a domestic burgundy. A small wine-red shadow danced on the countertop beside the glass. “I’ve done this so many times I’m practically infallible. Look, she’s sleeping, Elsa, gathering strength before your very eyes.”
From their vantage at the breakfast bar they could see Marella’s inert form lying sprawled in a jumble of quilts in the den. She did seem to be resting comfortably. Stevie’s bucket-carrying labors had ceased shortly after six when she had disinfected everything in sight with Lysol before attempting to prepare dinner for Teddy and herself. The pungent smell of that commercial product had not yet completely faded.
“I hope I don’t get what she’s got,” Teddy said from the kitchen table, where he was supposedly doing a social-studies assignment. “Three guys at B-ball practice was out this afternoon on accountuv the trots.”
“That’s a lovely sentence,” Stevie remarked.
“Diarrhea, then.”
Stevie grimaced. “Come on, Teddy!”
“Try Montezuma’s revenge,” Dr. Elsa advised the boy. “It’s not exactly what you mean, but it sounds a whole lot prettier.”
“Teddy, why don’t you just go upstairs to finish that?”
“It’s cold up there, Mom.”
“Turn on your electric blanket. You’ll be going to bed in another hour or so, anyway. Give it a chance to warm up.”
Wearing one of his father’s hand-me-down fishnet sweaters, Teddy entered the cold dining room and closed the door behind him. Then Stevie and Dr. Elsa could hear him clomping toward the front foyer, there to begin the climb to his chilly bedroom. You couldn’t afford to run every space heater in the house, but Teddy would hardly risk freezing to death giving Dr. Elsa and Dear Old Mom ten or fifteen minutes to themselves. He was a smart boy. He knew why she had sent him upstairs, and he would fiddle around up there blowing breath balloons and tracing the furry rime on his windows with a fingernail—until, Stevie hoped, they had had time for at least one meaty confidential exchange.
“I’m thinking of quitting this ulcer-making business,” she said, swirling the wine in her champagne glass. “I’m thinking of going back to teaching.”
“Because your stupid typewriter broke?”
“Lots of things besides, Elsa. Marella being sick, Teddy growing up, their daddy surrendering to his disease—surrendering in spite of everything he used to tell me about tackling the future head-on.”
“Get your typewriter fixed.”
“I feel like he ran out on me, Elsa. That’s a horrible thing to say, I know, but he just stopped trying. You told me he had cancer—Dr. Sam did, anyway—and he started acting like somebody confined to Death Row with no hope of pardon. Overnight he was a different person, a stranger.”
“Get your typewriter fixed.”
“Damn it, Elsa! I told you this afternoon I wanted to talk. Why are you trying to shut me up?”
Dr. Elsa rolled the burgundy in her mouth as if it were Lavoris. “I’m not a shrink, Stevie, just a small-town lady doctor who doesn’t know Sigmund Freud from Freda Stimson.” Freda Stimson ran a florist’s shop on the Alabama Road just west of town.
“You’re a friend. Friends listen, Elsa.”
“I’m listening. Besides, one way or another you’ve told me all this before. Ted was a wonderful fella who didn’t face death in a way you could admire. The last year of his life spoiled your good opinion of the previous fifteen or so you’d known him. You resent him for doing that to you, and you feel guilty for not being able to get past your resentment to the fella he was before I diagnosed his cancer.”
“Exactly.”
“A hotshot shrink in Atlanta would charge you fifty dollars for that little analysis. Then he’d ask you back for nine more sessions.”
“That’s why I asked you over, Elsa. You see through all the crap to what’s really important.”
“Get your typewriter fixed.”
“Elsa!”
“Listen, honey, you couldn’t admire Ted because he seemed to give up, right? Right. So your solution to a problem a whole lot less troublesome than his—a broken typewriter, for Tilly’s sake—is to hoist your slip up a broomstick and holler, ‘Uncle!’ Now that’s admirable, I take it.”
Stevie poked her little finger into the cheese-dip container, licked it clean, and closed her eyes against the merciless irrefutability of her friend’s logic. Right through the crap to the core of the matter . . .
Finally she said, “Fifty-two dollars to replace a cable, Elsa. I just don’t have it. Just like I can’t afford a hotshot Atlanta shrink. Even if I had fifty-two dollars, I wouldn’t give those jerks at PDE the satisfaction.”
The older woman took a prescription pad from her purse, tore off a sheet, and began writing on it with a pencil. “Here’s the address of an office-supply company in Columbus with a typewriter service in the back. Hamlin Benecke and Sons. Sam swears by ’em. He swears by anybody who’s cheap, but we knew the Beneckes socially some dozen years back. Don’t see ’em anymore except when we’ve got a typewriter problem—they sold their lakeside cottage up this way in ’70 or ’71—and it was one of their boys got that manual you was wrestling with this afternoon in something like working order. Last autumn they gave us a discount on our electric machine. I’ll give ’em a call in the morning to let ’em know you’re coming in. Tell old Hamlin you can’t afford to be kept waiting till Memorial Day to get your typewriter back, either. That okay by you, Mrs. Joyce Carol Shakespeare?”
Stevie indicated her consent by laying one hand on Dr. Elsa’s wrist.
A knock on the heavy wooden door connecting the kitchen and the unheated dining room startled both women. “ ’S all right if I come back in now?” Teddy shouted from the other side. “I’m freezing my buns off.”