One Good Friend Deserves Another (19 page)

“Okay, hon, see the one with the silver hair? The nice-looking guy with the firm jaw? He’s recently divorced.”

“Sophia, come on.”

“Look, his suit fits loosely around the middle, like he’s not being home-fed anymore.”

“Maybe he’s just working out or losing weight.”

“He’s wearing wrinkled pants, like he left them in the dryer. And his tie isn’t quite right. All a man like that is looking for is some easy tail.”

Marta leaned back, disbelieving.

“Trust me on that one. Okay, the one with the good build?” Sophia chin-nodded to the athlete, just taking a seat at the fourth table. “He’s a total dinger. Twenty bucks says he doesn’t have a job and he’s living with his mother.”

“Sophia, you can’t—”

“The jeans. They’re ironed.”

Marta noticed, with sudden alarm, that there was most definitely a crease in the denim.

“And that young one,” Sophia added, “with the off-the-rack suit?”

The man Sophia referred to had a bright face, cleanly shaven, and Marta thought he looked cute, if a little puppyish for her taste. “No, no, you can’t possibly knock him. It’d be like stepping on a kitten.”

“Hon, the first thing he’ll do is ask if you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal savior.” Sophia fixed her with a direct, open look. “I’m not pulling your leg. I’ve met this guy before.”

A strange, squeaking sound came out of Marta’s throat. She glanced longingly toward the exit, imagining herself rising from this chair and fleeing the bar. Her boss, Nathan, was still at the office, running his fingers through what was left of his hair. The table in the conference room groaned under piles of papers in which were hidden the vital elements she would need to posit the argument that the SEC had no reason to step in and prevent the merger of these two rare-earth mining companies. How much nicer it would be to spend the evening ferreting out those precious little nuggets of lawyerly dysprosium, cerium, and yttrium—and lose herself in a world she understood.

“Oh, hon, I’m going at it too hard, I see that. But it’s not all bad, believe me. Look, here’s my best piece of advice.” Sophia leaned even closer, for the guys were nearing their tables. “Go for the husky one.”

Marta blinked. Sophia was nodding to a short guy whose thinning hair formed a Caesar-ring around his head.

“He has no confidence, none at all.” Sophia’s voice dropped to a hush. “Look at the way his gaze is darting around. He’s taken stock of his competition, and he knows he hasn’t got a chance with those party girls. A guy like that, Marta, he’ll
worship
you. And I’m calling dibs.”

Marta felt the muscles in her neck tightening. “Sophia, is this what you usually do at these events?”

“Honey, my goal is success.” Sophia tugged on the hem of her suit jacket to show a little more red lace lingerie. “My goal is to find a marriageable man. My secondary goal is to avoid having my ego crushed by discovering on Monday morning that because I went for the obvious ringers and dingers, I don’t have a single match.”

Marta felt as if a one-hundred-and-forty-pound point guard had just slammed her off the court. Her ears rang. She couldn’t breathe. She told herself she was not like Sophia. She told herself that it was date-weary cynicism she was hearing. She told herself that she shouldn’t let Sophia’s whiskey-voiced advice destroy her well-laid plans before she’d even started.

“Why?” Marta clutched her chest as the question wheezed out of her. “Sophia, why do you keep doing this?”

“Because I’ve got big plans, hon.” Sophia plastered on a wide smile as a guy approached her table. “And I want my white picket fence.”

C
ole, I’m not sure we should be doing this.”

Dhara settled at the desk in her apartment, pulling a robe across the tank top she’d worn to bed. Cole’s pale face loomed on her computer monitor. A glance at the digital clock showed that it was eleven at night. She hadn’t heard a word from him since they’d separated the afternoon he’d been discharged from the hospital. He’d been drifting in and out of her thoughts, a dark cloud of worry. Tonight, she’d taken his phone call with bated breath. She thought it might be something serious, something medical.

It wasn’t. He sounded lonely.

He sounded like he needed a friend.

“You’re my doctor, Dhara. Nobody will question it. I just told them I wanted to consult with you.”

“About online poker?” In another computer window, she busily logged onto the Web site. “I don’t think this falls within the normal bounds of a doctor-patient relationship.”

“I didn’t give them specifics. For all these guys know, I could be asking you about heart palpitations or unspecified pain.”

“You’re not fooling anyone. They’re experts at addict behavior.”

“True. But they’ve been giving me a free pass these last couple of days, while they taper me off the meds.”

“How’s that going?”

“Fine.”

“Because sometimes when—”

“It’s fine, Dr. Pitalia. No problems at all.” He ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up wildly. “Are you logged on yet? I don’t see your username on the list.”

She let the subject drop. There were medical folks at the rehab facility monitoring his progress. If there were a real physical problem, he would have consulted them first. She knew he didn’t want to discuss his situation with her. Especially not now, in the gloom of their respective bedrooms, as they connected to an online poker chat room where, in the tentative early days of their relationship, they’d spent many an idle hour.

“The real problem,” he said, “is that tomorrow is my first group session. This conversation of ours is the last sane contact I’ll have with you and the rest of the whole wide world. Tomorrow, I’m isolated with the other loons.”

She flinched at the description. “Cole, you understand there are reasons for those rules?”

“Oh, I understand. Tomorrow we go digging into my psyche. You know that isn’t going to be pretty. Don’t want to let those dragons out into the world. Got to keep them caged.”

“So you can slay them, Cole. So you can slay them.”

“That’s really why I called you tonight. I need one last night of normal living before they excavate my brain. I wouldn’t want to spend it with anyone but Dhara Pitalia.”

She dropped her gaze, concentrating on the five cards being digitally dealt to her on a background of green baize. She never knew how to react when he said things like that. His words triggered warm feelings, but also confusion and guilt.

“You know,” she said, slipping a loose tress behind one ear, “we’re probably being monitored.”

“By who? Krishna? Ganesh?”

“No, no. The rehab people.”

“No way. Cut me three cards.”

“They probably watch all your communications with the outside world.” She gave him three cards and cut herself two. “They’re trying to separate you from bad influences.”

“You’re my doctor, not a bad influence.”

“Unfortunately, there are some unscrupulous doctors who might supply prescription drugs, and so your counselors would be remiss if they didn’t monitor even these conversations.”

“Well, they won’t monitor this. We have doctor-patient privilege.”

“You signed away all that when you entered the facility.”

“Fuck, really?”

“They are doctors, too, you know. We’re all trying to help.”

“Well, I said ‘cut me three cards,’” he said, tilting his head back in his bare-walled room, as if shouting to some hidden microphone. “That’s absolutely not code to send me three bottles of Jack. We’re just playing an honest game of online poker here.”

“Cole!” Dhara laughed. “There might be people sleeping.”

“Are you kidding? This place is full of vampires. We sleep all day, and we’re up all night. I’ve got a full house, by the way.” He leaned into the monitor with a smirk. “You know, being here is a lot like being at your mother’s house trying to figure out a way to sneak around the relatives for a moment alone with you.”

Her breath hitched. She remembered one particular night Cole had spent at her family’s home. When he got up in the middle of the night, he bumped into her father in the hallway. She felt a shower of fresh shame. “Cole, you insisted that you were just going to the bathroom.”

“Oh, no. I lied. I was totally looking for you.”

“Cole!”

“I’d have started peeking in bedroom doors if your father in his underwear hadn’t glared at me like he was about to shoot me with Brahma’s arrow.”

Once again, she turned her attention to her cards, stumbling for a response. She saw them—a face card, two clubs, a blur of red diamonds—but couldn’t seem to make any sense of the hand. She didn’t know whether to laugh at his audacity or chide him for being disrespectful.

“Sorry, Dhara.” He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. I know you don’t like to talk about the past.”

“No, no. It’s okay.” She shoved the curl behind her ear again, though it was already snug. “You won, by the way. All I have is a pair of threes.”

“It’s just that we have such a history, you and me.” Cole pressed the icon to deal a new hand. “And old habits are hard to break.”

“Well, that’s why you’re at rehab, right?” she said brightly, hoping to veer away from the intimate. “You’re there to break some bad habits.”

“Yes, but not all of them. There are some habits I’m very fond of, Dhara. Some habits I’m hoping for a chance to start up again.”

Dhara fixed her gaze on her keyboard. She stared at the letters of the middle row, faded to flecks of white. She felt a knot develop between her eyebrows as she remembered that tomorrow she’d be traveling to New Jersey with her mother, to peruse henna designs at a small shop in Edison.

Oh, Krishna, what was she doing? She was engaged to another man. A woman engaged to one man didn’t idly chat online with a former lover. Even if that former lover was still an old friend.

“Cole,” she murmured, “why don’t we just stick to five-card stud, okay?”

Dhara saw Desh long before she reached the bocce courts in John Walker Park. He was standing with two older men watching a third lobbing a red ball. As the ball landed, Desh laughed with a quick flash of teeth.

Her heart did a little lurch. She tugged nervously on her
dupatta,
the long blue scarf that matched the tunic and loose pants of her
shalwar kameez
. Her thoughts clattered like so many bocce balls. Maybe it had been a mistake to wear the traditional Indian garb today. Maybe she should have transferred the ailing jazz musician to hospice by now. Maybe this rain was going to destroy her hopes for a distracting game. Maybe there was no gentle way to break a good man’s heart.

Desh caught sight of her. He raised his hand to indicate he’d be there momentarily. She hoped her smile didn’t look shaky and feeble.
Oh, Krishna.
Marta said guilt was a Catholic thing, fed to youngsters along with the host and the blessed blood, stoked into flames in the confessional box. Several of her colleagues insisted it was a Jewish thing, passed on through the long-suffering maternal line. Dhara thought the Hindu trumped them all: bad behavior meant bad karma and came with the threat of being reincarnated as something slithery.

And if she didn’t let go of her
dupatta
soon, no hot iron would ever be able to smooth the folds.

“Sorry for the wait,” he said, jogging toward her. “We were on the last round. We were up twenty bucks, and Paolo would have killed me if I forfeited.”

He took in the sight of her
shalwar kameez
with what looked like honest pleasure. Shirt clung from the spattering rain, translucent over the swell of his shoulders. He was blinking rapidly. He’d worn his contact lenses today—no doubt, for her.

“I didn’t mind the wait.” She held the palm of her hand toward the sky. “Think we can get in a game before this gets too bad?”

“No chance. The skies are about to open. Have dinner with me instead.”

She hesitated. Dinner meant sitting across a rickety table with nothing to distract them from the topic at hand.

“Just something quick,” he said. “Someplace where we can order at the counter.”

“Sure.” Her heart hovered somewhere in the vicinity of her larynx. “I suppose I could eat.”

“Italian or Chinese?”

“Whichever is closest.”

He set out at a jog, crossing the park toward the storefronts on the facing street. She followed in his wake. A rumble of thunder startled her. He took her arm, guiding her as they stepped off the sidewalk, watching carefully for oncoming traffic before pulling her across the street. They made it to the other side just as the heavens opened.

Desh drew her deep into the restaurant as other customers tumbled in behind them. The place was bright with fluorescent light, scattered with a half dozen battered tables, and smelled of frying meat and steam.

“I know it doesn’t look like much,” he said, as he led her to a two-person table in the corner. “But this place has the best Kung Pao Tofu outside of Chinatown.”

“Sounds good. That’s what I’ll have.”

She sat down and fussed with her wet hair, watching him as he ordered at the counter. The back of his jeans were dusty, as if he’d crouched at the end of the bocce court. She noticed a fold in his shirt, cutting clean across from his left shoulder blade to his right hip. His hair was trimmed sharply at his nape.

Strange, the details you notice when you’re about to say good-bye.

He returned with two Styrofoam cups and handed one to her as he sat down. “It’s not the best tea, but you look like you could use something hot.”

She cupped it in her hands. “Thank you.”

“How is your friend doing?”

She startled, meeting his gaze.

“The one,” he added, “who came into the emergency room a couple of weeks ago.”

Dhara tried not to choke on her tea. His gaze was steady, nonjudgmental but full of unspoken questions. He kept his silence with a half smile while she tried to figure out how he could possibly know.

“My mother,” she blurted, nearly spilling the tea over her hand as she clattered the cup back on the table. “She must have said something to my aunt Nisha. Nisha’s husband is a good friend of one of your cousins.”

“Haresh.” He nodded. “I saw him last Sunday at my aunt Deepti’s house. I was playing carrom with my uncle Raj when Haresh wandered by and asked me how you were holding up. I thought it was an odd thing to ask, until he told me a good friend of yours had shown up at the emergency room and given you quite a scare.”

A friend.
She hadn’t told her family that the friend was Cole, although Aunt Nisha had a sixth sense about these things. Dhara wouldn’t put it past her female relatives to make very specific inquiries.

“It’s a strange coincidence.” He swirled the tea in his cup. “Him showing up, after all this time, in the middle of marriage arrangements.”

Dhara paused, wondering how much she should say. Cole certainly hadn’t planned to come gasping into her emergency room. That had been Kelly’s idea. In any case, Cole’s situation had been building up for so long that it was only a matter of time before he’d show up somewhere in an ambulance. She considered whether it would be an acceptable breach of medical ethics to divulge to Desh the details of Cole’s situation, but then she dismissed the idea. Cole deserved his privacy, and Desh deserved not to be burdened.

“I am sorry you had to find out this way, Desh.”

“The last time we met,” he said, gazing out the window toward the bocce courts, “you made a point of telling me how important he once was to you. It could not have been easy to see him on a stretcher.”

Two images came to her mind: Cole, gray and waxen, gasping for breath, lying on the emergency room bed; and Cole leaping up against a blue sky, all long muscle and sinew, stretching to catch a Frisbee on the lawn outside the library.