Sammy clears his throat uncomfortably. He’s a skinny guy in a short-sleeved dress shirt and a straw fedora, with the longest nose I’ve ever seen. “And may I just say,” he adds, “I’m real sorry about this, Heather. But in our line of work, you know, it happens.”
“Our line of work?”
I look down at the myriad forms, some yellow, some white, some pink. Since Cooper and I aren’t married yet, I haven’t been able to put him on my New York College health insurance plan, which is excellent. Being self-employed, Cooper is also self-insured, by some plan I believe he found in his favorite reference guide, the phone book. It is the worst insurance in the entire country. I know, because as his bookkeeper, I’m the one who’s had to deal with the company.
You should see the other guy, Cooper had said. If the other guy is worse off, we might be sued. The police might show up to investigate, or the guy’s friends might show up first, to finish the job. Maybe that’s why Cooper’s asked Hal to come over with all his guns . . .
“Heather, Jessica and I have talked about it, and we’ve decided we’ll go,” Nicole says suddenly, tugging on my shirt sleeve.
I blink at her, startled. “I’m sorry, what?”
“We’ll go get the prescriptions filled, the pills and the crutches,” Nicole says, speaking to me slowly, as if I’m a child. “And then we’ll leave, I swear, if that’s what you want us to do.”
“And I swear I won’t take any of Cooper’s pills,” Jessica adds. “Even though I have nothing to do this weekend, so they’d be excellent for recreational purposes. But I’m really trying to cut down on my recreational drug use and go entirely herbal. And cut down on my alcohol intake, too, of course.”
I look from Sammy to the wad of forms in my hands to the twins. Suddenly I want to cry. Not from feelings of depression, but from gratitude, and, yes, even love. I may not have a family—one I like, anyway—but I seem to have friends.
“You’d do that?” I ask, my voice breaking a little.
Nicole’s jaw drops in shock. “Heather, yes. Of course!”
“Duh, Heather,” Jessica says, rolling her eyes. “We’re your bridesmaids, remember?”
“Which reminds me, you have your final fitting tomorrow.” Nicole bites her lower lip, then releases it, and asks in a rush, “You still want us to be there, right? Both of us?”
I’d forgotten all about the fitting. At this point I can no more imagine squeezing in time for a fitting than I can remember the dress I chose so many months ago—but really it was only last May, right after Cooper proposed, when we’d been planning on an elopement.
But I do know one thing.
I say to the twins, tears filling my eyes, “Of course I want you there. Both of you.”
I surreptitiously check the sidewalk before allowing them to leave, making sure it’s free of lurking white Escalades, then triple lock the door behind the twins and turn to demand of Sammy, “All right, who was it who did that to Cooper? Tell me the truth. Was it a guy named Hamad?”
“Hamad?” Sammy looks confused.
“Sammy, don’t play dumb with me. I know this fight Cooper got into had something to do with me, or Hal wouldn’t be here, insisting I carry a gun to work tomorrow. So tell it to me straight. Was it more than one guy? Were they foreign? Were they driving an Escalade?”
Sammy looks even more confused. “There was only one guy, and he wasn’t in an Escalade. His name was Ricardo.”
I stare at Sammy, dumbfounded. Now I’m the one who’s confused.
“Ricardo?” I echo. I’m certain I haven’t heard him correctly. “Ricardo is my mother’s boyfriend. Or ex-boyfriend, I guess. She says they’ve had a falling out . . .”
“Exactly,” Sammy says. “But not to worry. From what I understand, Coop took care of that creep good. When this Ricardo jokester is released from the hospital, where he’s currently being treated for the broken nose and pelvis Cooper gave ’im, he’ll be taken straight to the Tombs, then on to Rikers, where scum like him belongs. Coop, he knows how to handle his business, you know what I mean?”
I murmur, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” because I can’t think of anything else to say.
27
Here’s to the groom,
A man who’s lost his heart,
Though he’s kept his head.
Anonymous
Cooper and I are finally alone in his former bedroom—unless one counts Lucy, passed out in her dog bed on the floor, and Owen, the cat, perched on top of Cooper’s old chest of drawers, staring at us with slitted yellow eyes.
The painkillers they’d given him in the hospital are finally wearing off, but Cooper is reluctant to take the ones Nicole and Jessica went to so much trouble to get. Pharmacists no longer hand bottles of controlled substances over to just anyone, it turns out. They will only give them to the person to whom they are prescribed, and that person must show a photo ID, or at least a piece of identification proving they live at the same address as the person to whom the pills are prescribed.
Fortunately Jessica and Nicole have the same last name as Cooper, and also possess mighty powers of persuasion—or at least incredible powers of persistence. It’s possible they simply wore the pharmacist down with their nagging. This is how they secured ponies—one for each of them—from their parents at an absurdly young age.
“I don’t like them,” Cooper says when I offer him one of the pills. “They make my head feel fuzzy.”
This comes out sounding like “Day bake by hade beel bunny,” because of his mouth injury.
“I don’t care,” I inform him. “You need sleep, in order to heal. It’s called pain management. If you don’t take a pill now, you’re going to wake up screaming in agony in a few hours.”
“Wow,” Cooper says, obediently accepting the pill, along with a glass of water (into which I’ve inserted a straw for his sipping convenience). “Has anyone ever told you that you have a terrible bedside manner? I’m glad I was never a soldier gassed in the front lines of the Great War, and you were never my nurse.”
“I never would have volunteered to be a nurse in the Great War,” I say, taking the water glass away from him when he’s swallowed the pill and setting it on the bedside table. “I would have volunteered to be a sharpshooter, and apparently excelled at it, according to Hal.”