One Good Friend Deserves Another (13 page)

“I get it; I get it.”

“If you’d been asking about Tito last year, it would have been a different story. Last year, he brought two girlfriends home to meet his
abuela.
”

Marta stifled her unease. She knew a guy like Tito wouldn’t be single forever. At every family event, he brought a pocketful of coconut bars and
dulces tipicos
and mango candies for the kids. He’d swing around the little ones and wrestle with the older boys. And when he finally emerged from the tumbled pile, he’d make teasing remarks about how good she’d look in a long white dress.

But eight years ago, she had still been in her twenties, and she’d had a darn good reason for pushing marriage and babies far, far down the Life Plan list.

“The Mexican-American girl from Arizona,” her mother said, “I met her one Sunday in Washington Heights. A doll, she was, sweet as could be. But no, not good enough for Tito’s
abuela
. She spoke trash Spanish, she says, and so Tito lets her go. But when Tito brought home that Russian girl from Brighton Beach—oh.” Her mother stopped swinging her medallion long enough to bury it in her fist and raise it to the sky. “A thousand Hail Marys, at least, every single morning. The poor old woman wore out her knees.”

Marta glanced longingly toward the counter where the owner was taking his time with the cappuccino. “Honestly, Mom, do you think his grandmother would love me so much if she didn’t know that my family came from the same village in Vieques?”

“All I’m saying is that you should thank God he’s still
single.
Aunt Azucena tells me there’s been no one for months and months. And your Aunt Fidelia told me at Jojo’s baptism that Tito didn’t even bring a date to Eduarda’s first communion last May.”

Marta jerked up from the cradle of her hand. “Oh God, Mom, tell me you didn’t say anything to Fidelia.”

“I just asked about Tito,” she said, avoiding Marta’s eye, “I asked about a lot of people.”

Fidelia was the biggest gossip in the family. Her mother may as well have posted it on the Facebook family page. “So now the whole Puerto Rican World Wide Web knows I’m sniffing around Tito again.”

“Whose fault is that, when you’re doing crazy things like this? You have a knack of making yourself a curiosity.”

“Mom, any unmarried girl over the age of fifteen in our family is an object of curiosity. You think I haven’t heard the rumors? If it weren’t for Carlos these past years, Fidelia would be whispering that I’m a lesbian.”

“Well, I’m hoping,” her mother said softly, “that Tito is your last pair of boots.”

Marta tried to field that verbal hit to the solar plexus. Nobody, nobody could find that spot quicker than her mother. Nobody, nobody could strike it with the same unerring force.

“Attenzione! Caldo.”

Marta jumped. The café owner slid two mugs of cappuccino across the table. The milky foam, swirled with caramel streaks, steamed visibly. Beside them he placed two curled claws of a flaky pastry, oozing fresh white cream that Marta estimated would be the equivalent of three hours on the treadmill.

“Buon appetito.”

Marta’s churning stomach did an extra little flip for good measure. She watched her mother take a sip of the cappuccino and lick the foam off her top lip.

“Ay, Marta! You were right. Good coffee, very very good. But those…” She made a face at the pastries between them. “
Dios mío.
A full day’s worth of calories and fat.”

Marta nudged the plate closer. Her mother had a terrible sweet tooth. “We’ll walk it off later at the street fair.”

Her mother hesitated, eyeing the pastry. “Two miles, at least.”

“That’s a promise.”

Then Marta raised the cappuccino to her lips only to set it right back down. In the building across the street, the door to the gym swung open.

Tito stood framed in that open door.

A tingling started in Marta’s fingers and worked its way to her toes, then started its way back up all over again. She’d forgotten how fit he was. His chest under the gray T-shirt was a little more barrel-vaulted, his hair a little more salt than pepper, and his swagger as bold as always. There on the sidewalk stood the man she’d once loved, swinging a duffel bag in his hand.

“Ay, Marta,” her mother murmured. “I last saw him across the pews at Santino’s confirmation, oh, what, two years ago? He hasn’t aged a day.”

Marta felt a little light-headed. She clattered her cup into its saucer. She really needed to calm down, to act natural, to pretend this was just a casual encounter of two old lovers. Maybe two new lovers.

Her mother tapped the table to get her attention. “Come on, Marta. He’ll be here in a minute. Fix your lipstick.” Her mother’s quick eyes took in Marta’s crisp, white shirt and the few gold chains swinging around her neck. “That top button doesn’t need to be done.”

“Mom!”

“A little cleavage wouldn’t hurt. What’s the problem? Why must you always dress like you’re going to work?”

Marta undid a button just as she noticed a taxi pulling up in front of the gym. She stilled as Tito approached the taxi. Why would Tito be getting into a cab? It was Saturday morning, after all, and Tito always came to this café after the gym for coffee and a cigarette, before venturing to the bodega for the afternoon shift.

Her mind raced as Tito leaned down to the passenger-side window. About five years ago, Tito’s father had retired to a beach condo just up the coast from West Palm Beach. Tito was now in charge of his father’s whole empire, spread across all five boroughs, a chain of buoyant little neighborhood stores that stocked rows and rows of Goya canned goods,
sofrito
and plantains, and candles embossed with the image of the Virgin Mary next to lottery tickets and Chiclets and cigarettes. Perhaps the heavier duties he had now didn’t allow him the same indulgences he’d enjoyed when he was just the carefree manager of one store.

Then suddenly, Tito straightened up, tossed the driver a bill, and pulled open the passenger-side door. A woman unfolded herself from the back of the taxi. A tall, slim African-American woman, wearing a full headscarf and a flowing dress.

“Mom?”

Tito took the woman’s hands. The couple slid unerringly into a rumba. As if from a very long distance, Marta noted that they danced very well. The woman had a nice line to her back and professional grace.

“Mom?” she repeated, watching how the couple’s feet moved as if they danced on a smooth parquet floor. “Have you heard…has Tito taken up dancing competition again?”

Her mother made a strange, choking sound.

Then Marta looked again and saw what her brain was denying. She saw how Tito’s gaze lingered on the woman’s face. She saw how his smile dimmed to something wistful, an expression that was terribly, terribly familiar.

“Come on, Marta.” Her mother shot up and grabbed the cardigan off the back of her chair. “We need to leave. Through the back exit. Right now.”

Marta stumbled to her feet, knocking the table slightly, sending a splatter of coffee over her untouched pastry. Her legs didn’t seem to be responding to her urgency. She grasped the handle of her tote, jerked it toward her, rattling the chair.

This wasn’t possible.

A Puerto Rican mother and her two hundred and seventy-two blood relatives couldn’t be wrong.

But as Marta stumbled through the back room, tripping over boxes to the alley exit, Tito’s loving laughter rang in her ears.

L
ook, here she is. Prettiest doctor in the whoooooooole damn place.”

Were it any other patient making comments on her looks, Dhara might have made a diplomatic but pointed remark before launching into a discussion of the patient’s medical situation. But the man lying in the bed with a sweat-stained fedora on his belly was old Mr. Rivers. Those words, spoken in his whiskey-roughened voice, came across as echoes of a courtlier past.

“Glad to see you in good humor, Mr. Rivers.” Dhara picked up the chart hooked at the end of the bed. “You’re feeling better today?”

“Dewey, girl. Just call me Dewey. Everyone else does.” He lifted the fedora off his stomach and gestured to the man seated at his bedside. “Ain’t that right, Curtis?”

The grizzled saxophone player—a fixture in the room since Dewey had been brought here to recover from the week’s multiple procedures—lifted his face from fiddling with his sax. “Dewey it is,” he said, as he glanced at Dhara over his Coke-bottle glasses, “to everyone but them who owe him money.”

Dewey laughed, a deep chuckle that weakened into a choking cough. “Now it’s me who owes everyone else money and that won’t work out so well for them, now will it, Dr. Pitalia?”

“There’s still some juice in your motor.” She scanned the chart for the latest EKG results, electrolyte levels, and vitals. “We’ll just have to see. You may be up and playing the trumpet before you know it.”

“Yup,” he said, nodding against the pillow. “Surely I will, in a choir of angels.”

Curtis waved a finger at him. “Maybe you should brush up on the fiddle, boy, just in case the devil’s coming your way.”

“Ain’t no devil coming my way.”

“Sure about that? I was with you in Juárez, you remember.”

Dewey’s face split in a grin, showing a full set of strong, tobacco-yellowed teeth, a grin that squeezed his eyes into merry crescents and made his chest bob with quiet laughter. Curtis laughed too, a deep-chested rumble. Dhara gazed at both of them with affection, the power of their friendship a palpable thing.

She laid the chart at the end of the bed and slipped the buds of her stethoscope in her ears. “Well, let’s hear what’s going on in there, shall we?”

“Oh,” Dewey said, “here comes my favorite part of the whoooole day.”

“You’re a dog, Dewey.”

“Mm-hmm, maybe I am, but you’d be thinking the same thing if you had this sweet-smelling child with the glossy, black hair leaning over you.”

“Maybe I ought to have a heart attack myself then. You always did hog the stage.”

Dhara listened more to their banter than she did to the murmuring rumble, whooshing hisses, and telltale pitches of Dewey’s straining heart. This sort of examination wasn’t really necessary—she already knew what was going on inside him from the sheaf of lab tests attached to his chart—but patients, especially the older ones, expected it. And there was no gauging the power of simple human touch.

Dewey had an old-tobacco scent, though he claimed he hadn’t had a cigar in years. It was as if the lazy blue smoke of too many late-night jazz clubs had cured his skin. During the weeks he’d been in the hospital, she’d learned that he, Curtis, and a variety of other aging musicians now living in a brownstone on 136th Street had once played in all the best clubs in New York. Dewey liked to boast that he’d learned the trumpet at the knee of Satchmo, though Curtis called him on it, saying that seeing the great man play one night at the Apollo didn’t count for nothing.

She took the opportunity while listening to his heart to compare what she’d read on the chart to what she heard—noting the gurgle of a chamber not completely emptying, the
shhhhh
of backflow from problems with a valve, the odd and slightly off-beat, scrambled electrical signals. His heart was managing all right, but mostly by improvisation.

Dhara straightened and pulled the stethoscope from her ears. “I’m going to scale back on your meds a bit, Dewey.” She picked up the chart and clicked her pen. “I’ll send the nurse in a little later.”

“Fine, fine, Doctor.” His attention had already drifted to the shining brass instrument in Curtis’s hands. “Curtis, why don’t you play the lady something bluesy? Something slow, something real Yardbird. That’s ol’ Charlie Parker, Dr. Pitalia.”

Curtis swung his sax around and fixed his lips on the mouthpiece. The plaintive sound of a soulful riff filled the room. Dhara bowed her head to the chart, trying to find some hope in the numbers blurring before her. No matter how many times she scanned the test results, she could see only one conclusion. When a heart labored through so many hard playing, hard working years, the options for treatment become fewer and fewer.

Dhara hooked the chart at the end of the bed and lingered a moment, watching the two men. This kind of devotion was a lovely gift. She mostly saw it among elderly spouses—a husband joking about his attempts to cook for himself, or a wife teasing her ailing husband about how she was going to employ a brawny young man to change the lightbulbs once he was gone. All the while, thrumming beneath their banter, shimmered a gentle, loving vibration, the same sort of devotion she sensed in this very room.

It might be a few days, it might be a few weeks, but with Curtis playing the saxophone at his side, Dewey would probably have a gentle passing.

And for reasons she couldn’t completely understand, the thought of Desh drifted through her mind. She remembered the way he lobbed the ball to the end of the bocce court in one fluid, graceful motion. She thought of the way he offered his arm when she hopped about, trying to get gravel out of her sandal. She thought about when she looked up and found his deep, kind gaze resting upon her.

Her beeper went off, startling her. Curtis didn’t flinch in his playing. Dhara glanced at the device hooked onto the pocket of her lab coat and saw that a patient in distress had come into the emergency room. With a nod to both men, she made a silent exit.

She took the elevator to the lower floor and walked briskly to the nurses’ desk.

“Dhara!”

She turned to find a woman leaping out of a chair. The redhead, wearing pink fluffy slippers and an oversize Spock T-shirt, charged across the hall to meet her.

“Kelly.” Dhara’s mind shifted into emergency mode and sifted swiftly through the possibilities. “Is it Wendy—Marta?”

“No, no—”

“Someone you work with?”

Kelly seized Dhara’s arms, her face stricken. “No, it’s not any of them.”

And Dhara stared into Kelly’s wild blue eyes, watching her expression as Kelly’s mouth opened and closed with indecision.

And in an instant of terror, Dhara knew.

Cole.

Dhara strode into the flurry of activity, slipping into professional mode to keep herself from trembling. Surrounded by nurses, residents, and the attending ER doctor, Cole lay on a hospital bed. His appearance was just as Kelly had described it—as gray as an old flounder gasping for air at the bottom of a boat.

Dhara let instinct guide her as she took her place among the staff swarming around his bed. She ran her fingers over his brow to get his attention—and tried not to think about how many times she’d done that before, in different circumstances, loving the way his hair resisted her efforts to straighten between her knuckles.

His panicked eyes rolled to her, and she imagined she saw recognition in the hazel depths.

The attending doctor presented her with rapid-fire particulars, dragging her attention away from his face. “Patient came in complaining of shortness of breath, palpitations, pains in his chest, in obvious distress. EKG presented with atrial arrhythmia and heart rate at 210 bpm. Administered Versed and cardioverted…”

She listened, her fingers still in his hair.

Our children will have your curls and my color—little urchins with curly black hair.

“…blood gas level, complete blood panel, chest X-ray being developed right now. We’ll be taking him to ICU to wait for the tests.”

Dhara glanced back at Cole. His eyes were still fluttering. He’d just woken up from the Versed, confused at the activity. She considered what she knew. Considered whether it was within ethical bounds to use her personal knowledge of the patient to order a few tests beyond the ordinary. And then, with one eye on the jagged pattern of his EKG, she beckoned to the nurse gripping a chart and a fistful of blood vials destined for the lab.

Dhara wrote an order for one more test.

Cole rested peacefully in the ICU. Dhara had taken the opportunity to return to the waiting room to reassure Kelly that he’d come through the crisis. She’d promised to tell her more when the test results came in. Now Dhara slipped her way back quietly, needing a moment now that the crisis had passed, to look at him not as a doctor but as a woman.

The first moment she’d ever laid eyes upon Cole Jackson it was fall of her junior year, and the enormous sycamore in front of the library had just begun to drop its yellow leaves. She’d been distracted by a physics problem, mulling it over as she kicked her way home. She probably would have walked right by the students playing Frisbee had a Frisbee not careened its way across the grass and scraped to a stop at her feet.

She’d looked up to see Cole loping toward her, wearing a pair of jeans that sagged on his hips and sporting a faded T-shirt from some Portland bluegrass festival. The breeze had smelled like apple cider as it caught under his hair. Only then could she see him clearly—a lean face, a wispy beard darkening the line of his jaw. His smile had widened as he bent over and retrieved the Frisbee. Then he’d straightened, revealing a pair of laughing hazel eyes.

Now he lay gray against the pillow, his hair flattened with sweat, looking older than his thirty-seven years. He was still hooked up to an IV and an EKG, and the machine whirred quietly beside him. As she’d focused on working on his body today, one part of her mind had noted the familiar landmarks—the tight constellation of freckles on his chest, the little mole that marked him just to the northwest of his navel—but they’d paled in comparison to how he’d changed. It had been nearly a year and a half since they’d broken up, and Cole was a man profoundly altered.

He shifted his head on the pillow. His lids fluttered open, and he fixed his eyes on her. Though woozy from the sedative, Cole started, and something bright passed through his eyes—something hopeful and exuberant.

He said, “Can’t resist me, can you?”

She pushed away from the door frame and wandered deeper into the room, drawn by his raspy voice. “I thought I’d see how you’re feeling.”

“Oh, you can’t hide behind your medical degree. I know you too well.” His shoulders tensed as he tried to push himself higher in the bed. “I know exactly why you’re here.”

“I’m here,” she said, crossing the space that separated them to place a gentle hand on his shoulder, “to make sure you don’t overexert yourself.”

“It’s my classic good looks.” Lines from the oxygen mask still lingered around his mouth. “My raw, animal magnetism. Admit it, I’m irresistible.”

She noted that sweat glistened on his skin and smeared remnants of gel remained on his chest where they’d cardioverted his heart back into rhythm. She looked into his bloodshot eyes, rimmed with purple shadows, and felt a rush of admiration. It was just like Cole—even in a situation such as this—to act devil-may-care. She could tell that it took all of his energy to maintain the teasing expression on his face.