The Best Revenge Page 8

  “Wrong,” Diane replied. “Raoul definitely considers me flawed, but he would consider me flawed no matter how the hell I loaded the damn dishwasher. He loves me anyway. Why does he love me anyway? Because I am much more lovable than I am flawed. That’s what Freud said mental health was, by the way—the ability to feel worthwhile despite your flaws.”

  “No, Diane, Freud didn’t say that. Freud said mental health was the capacity to love and to work. But otherwise, my point exactly. Good try.”

  She frowned at me. Diane didn’t like being corrected, especially when she’d been caught fabricating quotes from dead people.

  The waitress had arrived tableside in time to listen politely to the last few back-and-forths between Diane and me. She pretended to be unfazed by our interchange, however, took our order from Diane, and strolled away into what I still thought of as the nonfiction section of the restaurant.

  “We both know it’s not the dishwasher princess that’s bothering you,” Diane told me. “So what is it?”

  “I prefer to think of her as the Kitchen Aid Lady. But the answer to your question is ‘I don’t know,’” I replied.

  She laughed at me. “Boy, you sure gave that a lot of thought. Are you always this contemplative these days?”

  I smiled at her. “I don’t know what it is, Diane. I just don’t.” From experience, I knew that even if I didn’t know, Diane probably had an opinion or two that she could spare.

  “The diagnosis you blew last year maybe?”

  “What?” I said.

  The waitress returned with our beer. I drank a third of mine in one long draw. There is nothing like the first drink of cold beer on a hot day. Nothing. Unfortunately, that includes the second drink of cold beer on a hot day, so I made the first drink last as long as I could.

  Diane drank half of her beer before she clarified her accusation. “The woman who got blown up on the street outside our office—remember her? Your, um, shall we say ‘miscalculations’—is that too strong a word?—in that case allowed a few people to die, as I recall.”

  I sat back on my chair. “Well,” I said, removing the knife from my chest and preparing to defend myself with it.

  She reached across and rested one hand on my wrist and sipped at her beer with her free hand. “Do I have your attention, now?”

  “You bet, Diane.”

  “You’ve had some tough cases, dearest. That whole situation last year with the kids and the bombs, the whole witness protection thing you got mixed up with before that. Your practice has not exactly been something to envy. I sometimes think that there should be some kind of government-mandated caution sign on your office door. All of it has to have taken its toll on you.”

  I shook my head. Her argument didn’t taste right. “I don’t regret those cases. They’re not what I think about when I have doubts about what I’m doing every day in my office. I end up thinking about cases like this woman and her dishwasher.”

  “What?”

  “The one-step-forward, two-steps-back cases. You know, the depression that won’t crack. The abused woman who keeps going back to her husband. The therapy that should last six months that isn’t any better after a year. Those are the cases that make me nuts. The people who come into the office and dare you to help them change. They’re the ones. It seems most days go by and I don’t think I’ve done anything to help anyone get better.”

  “So? Me neither.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Okay, maybe a little, but I get over it.” She wiped her lips with her cocktail napkin. “You know, I used to think it was my job to help people get better. Now I know I was wrong. My job is to help them get better equipped. The whole give-a-man-a-fish-and-he-eats-for-a-day routine, you know? And I bet you do that every day whether you give yourself credit for it or not.”

  “I don’t know if sitting in that room listening to people is the best way to help them do that.”

  “But that’s what we do, sweetheart.” She had softened her tone in a way that was disarming. “Those are the bricks we lay. If you’ve started hating the bricks, maybe it’s time to reconsider being a bricklayer.”

  “What?” I laughed.

  She laughed, too. “I thought that was pretty good. I didn’t even know it was coming, it just rolled right out of my brain.”

  “It was cute, I’ll give you that. But seriously? I wonder if I’m making a difference, if what I do is truly important. I worry that I’m beginning to lack compassion. This woman, today, I had no empathy for what she’s struggling with. I just wanted to take her by the shoulders, and . . . and . . .”

  “Throttle her?”

  We laughed together and finished our beers just in time for the arrival of the tapas. Diane had ordered so much food that it didn’t all fit on the table. She yanked a free chair from an adjoining table and moved a platter of something onto it. She did it so quickly that I didn’t get a clear look at what was on the platter. Before the waitress disappeared, Diane ordered another beer. I shook my head, declining.

  Diane lurched first for the trout, which had made a not-so-seamless transition from swimming in a river with its head attached to swimming in a pool of olive oil, herbs, and white wine without its head attached. She swallowed a big mouthful before she said, “I could send you some custody work and court referrals. That would break the tedium for you.”

  “Ugh. Please, don’t do me any favors. And leave some of that trout, if you don’t mind.”

  She reluctantly shifted her attention from the trout to the eggplant and baby leeks. “You and Lauren have any vacations scheduled? Maybe getting out of town would help. Raoul and I found this great place where we stay sometimes outside of Sedona.” She paused. “That’s in Arizona.”

  I shook my head. “Diane, I know where Sedona is. But no, that’s not a solution. We got away last month.”

  “And look at you now,” she said, making a dubious face.

  “Yeah, and look at me now.”

  “Well,” she said as she sat back on her chair with a cute little drool of olive oil on her chin. “Then I think you’ll just have to suck it up, Alan. I don’t have a clue what you should do.”

  I eyed her for a moment before I said, “I really have missed you. We should do this more often. We really should.”

  She’d already returned her attention to the food. “I know. This problem-solving stuff? It’s my forte. If we come back here and do this come autumn, I’ll really truly order sherry and make it even more authentic.”

  We attacked the food with gusto for a couple of silent minutes. Diane broke the spell by saying, “Alan, you know I’ll do anything to help you. Anything. A few years ago—after that patient was killed by her husband in my office—I had a rough time. I’m sure you remember what a disaster I was. Nothing really seemed to matter to me for a while after the shooting. Nothing. But I muddled through it. I kept working at it. Raoul helped, you helped, my other friends helped, and things, well, they just got better. That’ll happen for you, too. Things will get better.”

  CHAPTER 11

  My wife, Lauren, must have recognized my growing malaise before I did.

  Diane and I returned to our cars after stuffing ourselves with tapas at Triana. I drove straight home.

  Lauren, Grace—our baby—Emily, our dog, and Anvil, our foster dog, and I lived in a renovated caretaker’s house that shared the few remaining acres of a ranch that was high on the slope of the western-facing hills of the Boulder Valley in a neighborhood called Spanish Hills. My happy-hour respite with Diane had spared me most of the after-work traffic, and I was home twenty minutes after leaving downtown.

  Although it wasn’t totally dark outside, the night was almost moonless and my headlights were necessary in order to navigate the way down the dirt and gravel lane that led to our house. The beams illuminated the door to the garage just as I was fumbling on the console for the button that would activate the automatic opener. When I spotted the decorat
ions plastered on the door, I immediately stopped the car. I was parked fifty feet or so shy of the garage, which left me just opposite the front of the house.

  The front door opened and Lauren stepped out. She was dressed in a little cotton sundress that she called a rag and that I adored. She was barefoot. Grace was in her arms, waving, saying, “Daddy, Daddy,” or more precisely, the toddler equivalent. The dogs were both on leashes and I could tell that it was taking most of Lauren’s energy to keep them beside her.

  The word “bucolic” came to mind.

  Domestic visions like that one almost allowed me the luxury of denying the reality that my wife struggled with relapsing/remitting MS. Not quite, but almost.

  I shut off the radio, lowered the window, and said, “Hi, sweets,” as I gestured toward the garage door, which was crisscrossed with yellow ribbons and adorned with a huge bow that had been fashioned to look like a giant rose. I knew that my wife, who wasn’t particularly craft-oriented, had received some significant help with the bow. I asked, “What’s going on?”

  Simultaneously, I was silently reviewing the gift-giving occasions of which I had apparently lost track—anniversary, no; her birthday, no; Valentine’s Day, no. Christmas? Hardly.

  Lauren smiled. Her anthracite hair had grown long enough that she could hook it behind her ears. Her violet eyes sparkled in the light reflected from my headlamps as she shook her head a little and said, “Open your present. Don’t worry, you didn’t forget anything.”

  “Open the garage?” I asked.

  She nodded in one grand motion and said, “Yes.”

  I touched the button on the transmitter and waited as the garage door began to roll up its tracks. The huge bow was decimated just as the interior lights kicked on, and I saw that an unfamiliar vehicle had been backed into the place in the garage where I usually parked my car.

  I recognized it, but I didn’t. And then I did.

  My first car had been a very used red-with-white-top 1964 Mini Cooper. I’d loved her. Absolutely loved her.

  She hadn’t loved me back, though.

  In retrospect, I’d made the same mistake with the Mini that I would make years later with my first wife, the one who shared my bed before Lauren. I went for the flash and the feel and let the passion of love-at-first-sight overwhelm any objectivity I should have been able to muster.

  I called my Mini Sadie. She was every bit as gorgeous and high-maintenance as my first wife had been. And just like my first wife, Sadie was an adorable girl who responded to a firm touch, but who, alas, had an aversion to rough roads.

  I poured money into Sadie. Money I didn’t have back then. Her weakness wasn’t old Persian rugs—that was one of Merideth’s, my ex’s, many indulgences. Sadie’s weakness was her electrical system. The wiring in my old Mini was inhabited with more gremlins and spooks than the tackiest B movie I’d ever taken her to the drive-in to see. No matter how much I invested in making Sadie content with the flow of her electrons, she was never satisfied. She consumed generators, alternators, solenoids, and wiring harnesses the way Madonna consumed lingerie. Where electrical components were involved, Sadie always seemed to be going for a good poker hand: One of something wasn’t enough—she wanted two, three, four of a kind. Her house was never full, though. Never.

  I left Sadie after three tough, expensive years. I sold her to an ex–Army Ranger, someone I hoped could find the fortitude to discipline her and make her toe the line. But I never forgot her.

  Apparently Lauren had never forgotten my lame stories about my love affair with Sadie. Because sitting in the garage in front of me was the distinctive front-end grill of a brand-new, red-with-white-top BMW Mini, the incredibly-difficult-to-find, even-more-difficult-to-purchase, recently reincarnated version of my once-beloved.

  I hopped out of my old car, took one step, and then I stalled. I wanted to move in two directions at once. I wanted to rush to the Mini and I wanted to rush over and hug my family. To Lauren I said, “You . . . you . . . how did you . . . they’re so hard to . . . Is this mine? Is this really mine?”

  She smiled.

  “Why? What did I do to . . . ?”

  “I thought you would like it. Do you? Do you like it?” she asked, and I made my decision, running toward her, not the car.

  The dogs broke free of Lauren. My instincts told me to watch out for Emily, our big Bouvier des Flandres. I knew from experience that Emily could take me down at the knees with one exuberant sweep of her solid flank. But I should have kept an eye out for Anvil, too. Sixteen pounds dripping wet, Anvil was a miniature poodle currently groomed to resemble a small sheep. He was without an aggressive gene lurking anywhere on his strands of DNA. But Anvil was tricky the way ferrets are tricky.

  I dodged Emily’s playful greeting, shifted my weight, rolled my ankle a little—just enough to compromise my balance—and then I tripped trying to avoid Anvil. The crack I heard as I extended my arm to cushion my fall on the gravel warned me that something bad had happened as I hit the dirt.

  The pain that exploded up my right arm confirmed it.

  The humerus is the big bone that runs from the elbow up to the shoulder. Breaking it makes a lot of noise and causes a lot of pain. Trust me. The crack sounded like a gunshot in a closed room and the pain was enough to make me wish for my mother’s shoulder to cry on.

  In my case the treatment for a supracondylar humerus fracture involved immobilizing my arm in a cast that locked my elbow at a roughly sixty-degree angle. Over the next twenty-four hours I would learn that sixty degrees is the incorrect angle for almost everything that a human being might choose to do over the course of a typical day.

  Think about it.

  The ER doc who evaluated me at Community Hospital was a friend of mine named Marty Klein. After the orthopod he’d called in for a consultation had left the hospital to return to his family, Marty supervised the construction of the cast on my arm. Finishing up his project with the application of a bright red outer coat—based on the flimsiest of evidence, Lauren and I were both of the opinion that red was Grace’s favorite color—he commented that the cast was going to severely hinder my participation in the summer bicycling season.

  I nodded silently. I was already lamenting that fact. Bicycling was my Xanax. And summer was high season for my habit.

  Dr. Marty added, “But there’re two good things. One, you’re lucky you don’t play golf, and two, you’re lucky that piece-of-shit car of yours is an automatic. If it was a stick, you wouldn’t be able to drive it for a while.”

  I thought of O. Henry and launched into a maudlin, self-pitying explanation about the brand-new—I stressed the “yet-to-be-driven”—BMW Mini that was sitting in my garage. As I completed the story, Marty seemed almost as bummed as I was. He was a car nut; I didn’t even have to point out to him that the Mini came with a standard shift.

  He eagerly offered to come over and take me for a ride, though.

  I wanted to cry.

  CHAPTER 12

  I dread displaying visible injuries to my patients. Even a simple Band-Aid on my cheek from a razor injury was likely to require an hourly—or more accurately, every-forty-five-minute—recounting of whatever had caused the defacement. One patient out of three or four would be sure to express doubt about my explanation that I’d cut myself shaving, and we’d end up going back and forth about my denials that I didn’t really have malignant melanoma.

  There was always a subset of patients who would not notice whatever damage I was displaying on my body. These were the patients whose own maladies or characterological predilections had left them so self-involved that they were either unable or unwilling to register the Band-Aid that was on my face, or the jaw that was swollen from my just completed root canal, or the cherry red cast that was holding my right arm at an impossibly inconvenient angle.

  Despite the fact that Lauren had encouraged me to take some time off work, I drove myself to the office the day after my poodle-induced tumble. The hours would pass mor
e quickly, I was surmising, if I was occupied with other people’s problems than if I was focusing solely on my own.

  My schedule those days had me working late on Thursdays, so my initial appointment wasn’t until ten. While I awaited my first patient’s arrival my arm was still throbbing and the ibuprofen I’d been downing like Altoids after a tuna and onion sandwich was turning out to be an inadequate defense against my agony. It was going to be a long day.

  Lauren had called Diane, told her about my humerus, and warned her that I was in the process of making some testosterone-induced masochistic statement by showing up at the office. Diane was actually sweet about it. She brought me coffee and a bagel and apologized profusely for filling me with the beer that she was certain had led to my accident. I reminded her that I’d only had one beer at Triana and assured her that I didn’t hold her responsible for the tumble.

  Good, she replied. Because she didn’t either. She had just been acting polite.

  I was already truly tired of having a broken arm by the time I welcomed my new patient at two forty-five that afternoon. We shook hands awkwardly in the waiting room—his right hand, my left—and I led him down the hall to my office, a walk that typically takes only about ten seconds. I spent the entire ten seconds berating myself for the slight mistake I’d made when I’d recorded my new patient’s name in my appointment book the day before.

  The man who took the seat opposite me wasn’t Thomas Cone, which is the name that I’d written in on the 2:45 line in my book. He was actually Tom Clone, the man who’d just been released from the Colorado State Penitentiary after DNA testing had cast considerable doubt upon his conviction for a brutal murder that had taken place in Park County in the late eighties.