I did.
When I finished, Angie said, “So the upshot is that in addition to not getting the job with Duhamel-Standiford, the world’s worst mother lost her child again, you didn’t agree to help, but someone mugged you, threatened you, and beat the shit out of you anyway. You’re out a hospital co-pay and a really nice laptop.”
“I know, right? I loved that thing. Weighed less than your wineglass. A smiley face popped on-screen and said, ‘Hello,’ every time I opened it up, too.”
“You’re pissed.”
“Yeah, I’m pissed.”
“But you’re not going to go into crusade mode just because you lost a laptop, am I right?”
“Did I mention the smiley face?”
“You can get yourself another computer with another smiley face.”
“With what money?”
There was no answer for that.
We sat quietly for a bit, her legs on my lap. I’d left Gabby’s bedroom door slightly ajar, and in the silence we could hear her breathing, the exhalations carrying a tiny whistle at their backs. The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear—that something could happen to her at any moment, something I’d be helpless to stop—had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.
“Do you remember much of the day you got shot?” Angie asked, throwing another fun topic into the ring.
I tipped my hand back and forth. “Bits and pieces. I remember the noise.”
“No kidding, uh?” She smiled, her eyes going back to it. “It was loud down there—all those guns, the cement walls. Man.”
“Yeah.” I let loose a soft sigh.
“Your blood,” she said, “it just splattered the walls. You were out when the EMTs got there and I just remember looking at it. That was your blood—that was you—and it wasn’t in your body, where it belonged. It was all over the floor and all over the walls. You weren’t the white of a ghost, you were light blue, like your eyes. You were lying there but you were gone, you know? It was like you were already halfway to Heaven with your foot on the gas.”
I closed my eyes and raised my hand. I hated hearing about that day and she knew it.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I just want us both to remember why we got out of the rough-stuff business. It wasn’t just because you got shot. It was because we were junkies to it. We loved it. We still love it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was not put on this earth just to read Goodnight, Moon three times a day and have fifteen-minute discussions about sippy cups.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did. No one was less built to be a stay-at-home mom than Angie. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it—she was—it was that she had no desire to define herself by the role. But then she went back to school and the money got tight and it made the most sense to save on day care for a few months, so she could go to school nights and watch Gabby days. And just like that—gradually and then suddenly, as the man said—we found ourselves here.
“I’m going crazy at this.” Her eyes indicated the coloring books and toys on our living-room floor.
“I gather.”
“Bat-shit fucking crazy.”
“That would be the approved medical terminology, sure. You’re great at it.”
She rolled her eyes in my direction. “You’re sweet. But, baby? I might be doing a great job faking it, but I am faking it.”
“Isn’t every parent?”
She cocked her head at me with a grimace.
“No,” I said. “Really. Who in their right mind wants to have fourteen conversations about trees? Ever? Never mind in one twenty-four-hour period. That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.”
“But that old life was killing us.”
“It was.”
“I miss it so much,” she said. “That old life that was killing us.”
“Me, too. One thing I learned today, though, is that I’ve turned into a bit of a pussy.”
She smiled. “You have, uh?”
I nodded.
She cocked her head at me. “You were never that tough to begin with.”
“I know,” I said, “so imagine what a lightweight I am now.”
“Shit,” she said, “I just love the hell out of you sometimes.”
“Love you, too.”
She slid her legs back and forth across my thighs. “But you really want your laptop back, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“You’re going to go get it back, aren’t you?”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
She nodded. “On one condition.”
I hadn’t expected her to agree with me. And the small part of me that had sure hadn’t expected it this quickly. I sat up, as attentive and obsequious as an Irish setter. “Name it.”
“Take Bubba.”
Bubba wasn’t only the ideal wingman on this because he was built like a bank-vault door and had not even a passing acquaintance with fear. (Truly. He once asked me what the emotion felt like. He was also baffled by the whole empathy concept.) No, what made him particularly ideal for this evening’s festivities was that he’d spent the last several years diversifying his business to include black-market health care. It started as a simple investment--he’d bankrolled a doctor who’d recently lost his license and wanted to set up a practice servicing the kind of people who couldn’t report their bullet wounds, knife wounds, head wounds, and broken bones to hospitals. One, of course, needs drugs for such patients, and Bubba was forced to find a supply for illegal “legal” drugs. This supply came from Canada, and even with all the post-9/11 noise about increased border control, Bubba got dozens of thirty-gallon bags of pills delivered every month. Thus far, he hadn’t lost a load. If an insurance company refused to cover a drug or if the pharmaceutical companies priced the drug out of wallet-range of working- and lower-class folk in the neighborhoods, street whispers usually led the patient to one of Bubba’s network of bartenders, florists, lunch-cart drivers, or corner-store cashiers. Pretty soon anyone living off the health-care grid or near the edge of it owed a debt to Bubba. He was no Robin Hood--he cleared a profit. But he was no Pfizer, either--his profit was in the fair range of 15 to 20 percent, not in the anal-rape range of 1,000 percent.