The Development (8 page)

The lady gamely handed her wineglass to her neighbor, pulled three panties from the bin, called out "We who are about to
try
salute you!" and spun the first item boardward, where it fell two feet short. "Out of practice," she admitted. Amid the bystanders' chuckles and calls of encouragement she tossed her second, which reached the board but then slid down, as had the host's demonstration throw.

Somebody called, "Not everybody who drops her drawers gets what she's after," to which someone else retorted, "Is that the Voice of Experience speaking?" But Ms. McCall's vigorous third toss looped a red thong undie on the board's upper left peg, to general cheers. Tom Hardison retrieved and presented it with a courtly bow to the contestant's applauding husband, who promptly knelt before her, spread the waistband wide, and insisted that she step into her trophy then and there.

"What fun." Susan sighed and took Dick's hand in hers. "I wish
we
were more like that."

"Yeah, well, me too." With a squeeze, "In our next life, maybe?" He glanced at his watch: almost nine already. "Want to hang around a while longer, or split now?"

Incredulously, "Are you
kidding?
They haven't awarded the prizes yet!"

"Sorry sorry sorry." And he was, for having become such a party-pooping partner to the wife he so loved and respected. And it wasn't that he was having an unenjoyable evening; only that—as was typically the case on the infrequent occasions when they dined out with another couple—he reached his sufficiency of good food and company sooner than Susan and the others did, and was ready to move on to the next thing, to call it an evening, while the rest were leisurely reviewing the dessert menu and considering an after-dinner nightcap at one or the other's house. To his own surprise, he felt his throat thicken and his eyes brim. Their good life together had gone by so fast! How many more so-agreeably-routine days and evenings remained to them before ... what?

Trying as usual to accommodate him, "D'you want to watch the game," Sue asked him, "or circulate a bit?"

"Your call." His characteristic reply. In an effort to do better, "Why not have a go at the game yourself?" he proposed to her. "You'd look cute in a thong."

She gave him one of her looks. "Because I'm
me,
remember?" Another fifteen minutes or so, she predicted, ought to wind things up, gamewise; after the prizes were handed out they could probably leave without seeming discourteous. Meanwhile, shouldn't he maybe go check on Doc Sam?

Her husband welcomed the errand: something to occupy him while Susan made conversation with their hostess, a couple of her golf partners, and other party guests. He worked his way barward through the merry grape-bobbers, their equally merry encouragers and referees ("How many left down there? Let me check." "No, me!" "Hey hey, no hands allowed ..."), and the occasional two or three talking politics, sports, business. Couldn't immediately locate his tennis pal, in whose present position he himself would ... well, what, exactly? Not hang around to
be
in that position, he hoped and more or less re-vowed to himself. Then he heard the old fellow (but who was Dick Felton, at age five-and-seventy, to call eighty "old"?) sing out raucously from the living room, to the tune of "Oh Holy Night":

"
O-O-Oh ho-ly shit!
..."

Sam stumbled out onto the lanai, doing the beer-bottle-microphone thing as the Hardisons had done earlier, but swigging from it between shouted lines:

"
The sky, the sky is fall-ing!
..."

Smiling or frowning people turned his way, some commenting behind their hands.

"
It is the end
...
of our dear
...
U-S-A!
..."

Dick approached him, calling out as if in jest, "Yo, Sam! You're distracting the thong-throwers, man!"

"And the grape-gropers, too!" someone merrily added. Thinking to lead him back inside and quiet him down, Dick put an arm around the old fellow's bony shoulders. He caught sight of Pat Hardison, clearly much concerned, heading toward them from the food tent. But as he made to turn his friend houseward, Sam startled him by snatching the machete from it's sheath, pushing free of it's owner, raising it high, and declaring, "If there's no red wine, I guess I'll have a bloody mary."

"Sam Sam Sam ..."

Returning to his carol parody, "
Fall ... on your swords!
" Sam sang. "
Oh hear ... the angels laugh-ing! ...
"

Too late, Dick sprang to snatch back the blade, or at least to grab hold of it's wielder's arm. To all hands' horror, having mock-threatened his would-be restrainer with it, Sam thrust it's point into his own chest, just under the breastbone. Dropped the beer bottle; gripped the machete's carved handle with both hands and pushed it's blade into himself yet farther; grunted with the pain of it and dropped first to his knees, then sideways to the floor, his blood already soaking through his robe front onto the lanai deck. Pat Hardison and other women screamed; men shouted and rushed up, her husband among them. An elderly ex-doctor from Stratford—whose "toga" was a fancied-up set of blue hospital scrubs and who earlier had complained to the Feltons that the ever-higher cost of medical malpractice insurance had pressured him into retirement—pushed through the others and took charge: ordered Tom Hardison to dial 911 and Pat to find a bunch of clean rags, towels, anything that he could use to stanch the blood flow; swatted Sam's hands off the machete handle (all but unconscious now, eyes squint shut, the old fellow moaned, coughed, vomited a bit onto the deck, and went entirely limp); withdrew and laid aside the bloody blade and pressed a double handful of the patient's robe against the gushing wound.

"Bailey, you idiot!" he scolded. "What'd you do
that
for?"

Without opening his eyes, Sam weakly finished his song: "
It was the night ... that my dear ... Ethel died ...
"

"We should call his son in Stratford," Sue said, clutching her husband tearfully.

"Right you are." Dick fished under his caftan for the cell phone that he almost never used but had gotten into the habit of carrying with him. "Where's a goddamn phone book?"

Pat hurried inside to fetch one. "Tell him to go straight to the Avon Health Center!" the doctor called after her.

Men led their sobbing mates away. A couple of hardy volunteers applied clean rags to the blood and vomit puddled on the deck; one considerately wiped clean the machete and restored it to it's owner when Dick returned outside from making the grim call to Sam Junior.

"Jesus," Dick said, but gingerly resheathed the thing. The EMS ambulance presently wailed up, lights flashing; it's crew transferred the barely breathing victim from floor to stretcher to entranceway gurney to vehicle without (Susan managed to notice) spilling a drop of his plentifully flowing blood onto the carpeting. The ex-doctor
—Mike Bowling,
his nametag read,
Spartina Pte
—on familiar terms with the emergency crew from his years of medical practice, rode with them, instructing his wife to pick him up at AHC in half an hour or so. The Feltons then hurried to their car to follow the ambulance to the hospital, promising the Hardisons (who of course had their hands full with the party's sudden, unexpected finale and the postparty cleanup) that they would phone them a report on Sam's condition as soon as they had one.

"I can't believe he'll live," Sue worried aloud en route the several miles into Stratford, the pair of them feeling ridiculous indeed to be approaching the hospital's emergency wing in their outlandish costumes. "So much blood lost!"

"Better for him if he doesn't," in Dick's opinion. The sheathed machete, at least, he left in the convertible, cursing himself for having included it in his getup but agreeing with Susan that in Sam's desperate and drunken grief he'd have found some other implement to attack himself with, if not at the party, then back at his house in Oyster Cove. Their headdresses, too, and any other removable "Roman" accessories, they divested before crossing the parking lot and making their way into the brightly lit ER lobby. The few staff people they saw did a creditable job of keeping straight faces; the visitor check-in lady even said sympathetically, "Y'all must've been at that party with Doctor Dowling ..." The patient's son, she informed them, had arrived already and was in a special standby room. They should make themselves comfortable over yonder (she indicated a couch-and-chair area across the fluorescent-lighted room, which they were relieved to see was unoccupied); she would keep them posted, she promised.

And so they sat, side by side on one of the dark gray plastic-cushioned couches, Sue's left hand clasped in Dick's right; they were too shocked to do more than murmur how sad it all was. On end tables beside them were back issues of
Time, Fortune, People, Chesapeake Living, Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream.
The sight of their covers, attention-grabbing reminders of the busy world, made Dick Felton wince: Never had he felt more keenly that All That was behind them. If Dr. Dowling's wife, per instructions, came to retrieve her husband half an hour or so after he left the toga party, Sue presently speculated, then there must be a special entrance as well as a special standby room, as more time than that had passed since their own arrival at Avon Health Center without their seeing any sign of her or him. Eventually, however, the receptionist's telephone warbled; she attended the message, made some reply, and then called "Mister and Miz Felton?" There being no one else to hear, without waiting for them to come to her station she announced Dr. Dowling's opinion that there was no reason for them to stay longer: Mr. Bailey, his condition stabilized, had been moved to intensive care, in serious but no longer critical condition. He had lost a great deal of blood, injured some internal organs, and would need further surgery down the line, but was expected to survive. His son was with him.

"Poor bastard," Dick said—meaning either or both of the pair, he supposed: the father doomed to an even more radically reduced existence than the one he had tried unsuccessfully to exit; the dutifully attentive but already busy son now saddled with the extra burdens of arranging the care of an invalid parent and the management of that parent's house until he could unload it and install the old fellow in Bayview Manor, across and downriver from Heron Bay Estates, or some other assisted-living facility.

"Loving children
do
those things," Sue reminded him. "Sure, it's a major headache, but close families accept it."

Lucky them,
they both were thinking as they drove back to HBE, through the main entrance gate (opened by the night-shift gatekeeper at sight of the Resident sticker on their Toyota's lower left windshield-corner), and on to their Rockfish Reach neighborhood, Sue having cell-phoned her promised report to the Hardisons as they left the AHC parking lot. How would either of themselves manage, alone, in some similar situation, with their far-flung and not all that filially bonded son and daughter?

"We wouldn't," in Dick's opinion, and his wife couldn't disagree.

All the partygoers' cars were gone from Loblolly Court, they observed as they passed it, but lights were still on in #12, where cleanup no doubt continued. By the time they reached their own house's pleasantly night-lighted drive and entranceway, the car's dashboard clock read the same as their Shoreside Drive house number: 1020. Noting the coincidence, "Now
that
means something," Susan said—a Felton family joke, echoing Dick's late mother (who'd fortunately had a devoted or anyhow dutiful unmarried middle-aged daughter to attend her senile last years in western Maryland). But her effort at humor was made through suddenly welling tears: tears for herself, she explained when her husband remarked them as he turned into their driveway; tears for them both, as much as for poor Sam Bailey.

Dick pressed the garage door opener button over the rearview mirror, turned their convertible expertly into the slot beside their station wagon, shifted into Park, clicked of the headlights, and pressed the remote button again to roll the door back down. Instead of then shutting off the engine and unlatching his seat belt, however, after a moment he pushed the buttons to lower all of the car's windows, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back wearily against the driver's headrest.

"What are you doing?" There was some alarm in Susan's voice, but she too left her seat belt fastened, and made no move to open her door. "Why'd you do that?"

Without turning his head or opening his eyes, her husband took her hand in his as he'd done back in the hospital waiting room, squeezing it now even more tightly. "Shit, hon, why not? We've had a good life together, but it's done with except for the crappy last lap, and neither of us wants that."

"
I
sure don't," his wife acknowledged, and with a sigh back-rested her head, too. Already they could smell exhaust fumes. "I love you, Dick."

"I love
you.
And okay, so we're dumping on the kids, leaving them to take the hit and clean up the mess. So what?"

"They'll never forgive us. But you're right. So what?"

"We'll each be presumed to have survived the other, as the saying goes, and neither of us'll be around to know it."

The car engine quietly idled on.

"Shouldn't we at least leave them a note, send them an e-mail, something?"

"So go do that if you want to. Me, I'm staying put."

He heard her exhale. "Me too, I guess." Then inhale, deeply.