Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(106)

"Tres—"

Asante spoke my name as if he were just now realizing which Navarre I was. I liked the way he said it.

"Enjoy your dinner," I said.

I left him staring at his Cowboys helmet desk lamp, with his children screaming for him to come to the table. His wife, a pleasant-looking fat woman, smiled at me on my way out. The table was set, and the kids were jumping up and down in their seats, anxious to say grace. I’d never smelled better homemade tamales in all my life.

65

"Do I look all right?" Lillian asked.

We both knew the answer to that was “yes," but I confirmed it for her anyway.

We’d just made it past the security guard and the journalists in the lobby and were now in the Northeast Baptist elevator, going up. Lillian and I were both wearing black for what lay ahead this afternoon, so I was grateful to be out of the noonday sun for a while. Even after several minutes in the hospital’s industrial strength air-conditioning, the inside of my linen jacket felt like the liner for a bag of microwave popcorn. I made a conscious effort not to imagine what the inside of Lillian’s clothes felt like. She was wearing a black sheath, Jackie O. style, with no stockings and black sling-back leather pumps. Her coppery hair was pulled back with a wide black grosgrain ribbon. Around the scoop neckline of her dress she wore her mother’s pearl necklace, the one Angela Cambridge had worn the night Dan got shot. The last was a fashion choice I could’ve lived without. After a week of recuperation, Lillian’s color was healthy again. The summer tan showed off the freckles  on her shoulders, chest, and face. Her bare legs looked just line.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly how I could tell, just from looking at her, that she’d spent the last week crying, some of it yelling and breaking things, but I could. Her eyes weren’t red, nothing about her looked shaken or distraught, yet there was a kind of post-flood quality to her. Her features looked harder, weathered, as if her face had been scoured of everything that wasn’t absolutely essential.

The elevator door slid open on the second floor. We followed signs to the orthopedics wing, down a fluorescent-lit corridor that was an obstacle course of wheelchairs and food carts. Toward the end of the hall, one of the private rooms had a security guard in front of it.

As we headed that way, Lillian took my hand and squeezed it. "Thank you for coming with me."

I squeezed hers back, then released it. "You’ll do your part of the deal later."

Lillian managed a smile. "It’s funny. Dan’s the one I’m nervous about seeing. You’d think . . ."

She let the thought go.

The security guard let us through with no problem. Inside, Dan Sheff was lying in bed in the middle of what seemed like a commercial for springtime. The drapes had been pulled back, so the white walls and newly mopped tile floor glowed with huge squares of yellow Texas sunshine. Multicolored flower arrangements exploded all over the windowsill. Dan’s built-in bedside radio was playing Vivaldi or Mozart or something equally peppy—it wasn’t Lightin’ Hopkins, that’s all I knew. The usual hospital odors were overpowered by warm flowers and Polo cologne. Everything about Dan’s bed was white and crisp—his pajamas, his neatly turned down sheets, the thick gauze bandages that encased his right hand and leg. Even his IV looked like it had been recently polished.

Dan didn’t look quite so good as his room. His complexion was pasty, the lines around his eyes tightly drawn from days of lying around in pain. His hair was all canary—wings. The way he focused on us, slowly and with great effort, made me suspect he was on some pretty serious medication.

His smile seemed genuinely friendly, though. “Hello, Lillian, Tres. Come to see my Purple Heart?"

He wasn’t kidding. Somebody had brought him an old Purple Heart medal in a little display case and set it on his nightstand, next to a vase of daisies.

I came up to the side of the bed and shook Dan’s good hand. Lillian came around on the other side. I looked at the war medal.

"Your dad’s?"

Dan smiled sleepily. "Mother had one of my cousins bring it to me. I guess it was her idea of a reminder--where I come from, where my loyalties are."

"Or it could be a peace offering," I suggested.

Momentarily, anxiety and anger tightened up his face, making him look once again like the Dan Sheff I knew. Then the tension unraveled. Maybe it was the drugs that kept Dan so content. If so, maybe he’d agree to lend me some for the rest of today.

“A peace offering." He sounded dryly amused. "Fat chance."

Dan started telling us about his condition. He clidn’t sound bitter. He talked about the surgeons at BAMC removing the destroyed bones in his hand, closing the hole in his leg, telling him he was very lucky considering the amount of blood he’d lost. The Sheff family doctor had then arranged a transfer to Northeast Baptist for recuperation and daily antibiotic cocktails. Dan was due for reconstructive surgery in a week, then a transfer to Warm Springs Rehab for several more weeks of rehabilitation, learning to walk with crutches and to use a right hand that would only have two fingers. About halfway through his story, Dan reached over and pressed the little button that self-administered his morphine.

While Lillian listened, her face readjusted itself several times. She had the alert, almost alarmed expression, the flickering eyes of a professional juggler who was being thrown a new knife every fifteen seconds. All her effort went into not losing control, keeping everything just barely balanced.