William Lashner - Past Due

“I been thinking about things,” he said. “I been thinking about… things.”

“The Sixers?”

“A girl.”

“Should I turn it on?”

“A pleated skirt.”

“Ah yes, pleated skirts. I’ve always liked them myself. Very flattering to the hips.”

“I need to tell you.”

“Sure, Dad. That’s fine. But how are you feeling? It looks like you’re in pain. Are you?”

“What do you think? Whenever I breathe. I haven’t slept in days.”

I jumped up. “Let me find a doctor.” Before he could reply, I was out the door.

“My father’s in a bit of agony,” I told the nurse behind the desk. “You think he could be given something to ease it for a time, maybe let him sleep.” The nurse told me to wait a moment as she went off to find the intern, and I stood dutifully at the nurses’ desk, playing the part of the dutiful son, glancing uneasily at the door to my father’s room, just down the hall.

I didn’t want to hear that he had been thinking of things, my father. I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking about. And I really really really didn’t want to hear about the girl in the pleated skirt that had suddenly popped into his consciousness as he stared un-blinking at his own mortality. The girl who got away, the girl who broke his heart, the girl, that girl, the girl, the one. It was all too sad and ordinary. It didn’t take much to imagine it all in one sad swoop. The shy glances, the sweet romance, and then the cheating, his or hers, it didn’t matter, the cheating and the recriminations, and then the breakup that left him sad and wounded, that left him weak and unguarded, like a boxer ready to fall into an exhausted embrace with the first girl who came along, even someone totally unsuited to him, even someone certifiable, someone like, well, like my mother, from which all his ruin and misery had come, including his only begotten son. No, I didn’t want to hear how with the girl in the pleated skirt everything would have been different, how with the girl in the pleated skirt life would have been more than a sad burden to be shouldered through to death. Because it wouldn’t have been different, my dad’s life, and we both knew it. My father was someone who trudged through life while others floated, a man who set a course of low expectations for himself and then mercilessly failed to meet them, a man who chose bitterness and anger because they just came naturally, dammit, and what do you know anyway, you little bastard.

“Are you Mr. Carl’s son?”

I pulled myself out of my self-absorption to see a set of scrubs and a chart and a woman wearing and holding them both. She was young and thin and her eyes, though tired, were very blue. And she was a doctor, Dr. Hellmann.

“Like the mayonnaise,” I said.

She smiled thinly as if she hadn’t heard that more than a thousand times before and then went right to the chart. “You said your father has been in acute distress, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“We don’t give opiates to COPDers.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s what your father has, it’s why he’s here. But there is something maybe I can prescribe to ease his pleuritic pain. It won’t put him to sleep, but it will let him sleep if the pain is keeping him up. I’ll need to talk to him first.”

“Sure,” I said as I followed her down the hall. “How’s he doing?”

“We’re waiting for the antibiotic to work.”

“Maybe you should pump in some Iron City. That’s his usual medication of choice.”

She looked at me with her eyes narrowed. “Is that a joke?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Try harder next time.”

“How long have you been on duty?” I asked.

“Thirty so far.”

“Maybe after thirty hours nothing is funny.”

“Maybe,” she said, as we reached my father’s door, “but I couldn’t stop laughing at the evening news. That Peter Jennings, he was just cracking me up. You, on the other hand…” She gave me a jolt of her baby blues as she backed into the room. “Wait here.”

I waited. She spoke to my father for a long while and came out, writing on the chart. “The nurse will be back in a moment with the Toradol,” she said. With a toss of her hair, she walked toward the desk without giving me another glance. Hellmann, Dr. Hellmann. Like the mayonnaise.

I stuck my head in my father’s room. “Good news, the nurse is going to bring you something for the pain.”

“It won’t do nothing,” he said. “Whatever they give me, it won’t work. Nothing works. It’s just something else to charge the insurance company.”

“I’m going down to the cafeteria to get a bite. You want anything?”

“Get me a beer.”

“I tried,” I said, “but the cute doctor said no way.”

“She ain’t that cute.”

“Remember old Doc Schaefer you took me to when I was a kid?”

“With the nose hair and the mole?”

“Well, she’s cuter than him. I’ll be right back.”

I went down to the cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee, a soggy egg salad sandwich, a bag of chips. I sat down at a table and had my dinner. I took my time, I was in no hurry. I chewed the egg salad very carefully. I ate the chips one at a time instead of in handfuls. I spent a long while deciding on which color Jell-O for dessert.

When I slipped back into my father’s room, he was lying peacefully, asleep, his wet breaths rising and falling softly like the waves of a distant ocean. I spoke to him and he didn’t respond, but I didn’t want to leave him just yet. I turned on the television. The Sixers’ game was in the third quarter, they were up by three. It looked to be a pretty good game, a game I couldn’t get on my currently cable-free TV. I sat back in the chair, propped my foot on my father’s bed, watched the telly, wondered when Dr. Hellmann might check back in so I could flirt a little more.

It was turning out to be a rather nice visit with the game on and my father asleep and Mrs. Parma’s signed contingency fee agreement in my briefcase. It had worked out just as I had hoped when I went to the nursing station to complain of his pain because I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t want to hear his story about the girl in the pleated skirt. There are some things a son just doesn’t want to hear from his father, and his story of the girl who got away was, I was sure, just such a thing.

And I was right, yes I was, right at least about it being a story I didn’t want to hear. But I was wrong when I thought I had dodged it, because my father, for some perverse reason of his own, which I was only to discover much later on, was determined that I hear it, every damn breath of it, and I would, yes, yes I would.

And in its own peculiar way, his story told me everything I needed to know about the plague that had reached out to kill Joey Parma, the plague of slavery to the past that had doomed Joey’s life, and maimed my own life as well.

“WHAT ARE WEsupposed to do with this?” said Beth Derringer, from behind her neatly organized desk, holding the Parma contingency fee agreement in front of her like a floppy piece of moldy bologna. We were having a firm meeting, which meant that I had strolled into her office, the two of us comprising the whole of the less than prosperous law firm of Derringer and Carl.

“Investigate,” I said. “Isn’t that the first part of our three-part motto? Investigate, sue the bastards, collect gobs of money. I wonder what that would be in Latin. Vidi, vici, contingency fee?”

“Did you get a retainer?”

“Mrs. Parma is seventy-something, she can barely see, she lives off her husband’s Social Security. How was I going to ask for a retainer?”