The Side of the Angels (23 page)

I'd barely hung up with Ron when Margaret, who liked to man the switchboard, came over to announce, “Your cousin is on the phone.”

She was wearing a clay brooch shaped like a pilgrim's hat. If there's one thing I hate, it's seasonal jewelry.

“Lou-lou, how are you-you?” I said, an old joke we'd found funny when we were ten.

“Wrong cousin.”

“Johnny? What's up? Are you okay?”

“Of course I'm okay.”

He rarely made phone calls from work. The place was far too loud and busy. In the background, one of the mechanics was testing an exhaust system. I could hear him revving the engine and the clearly audible roughness still left.

Johnny yelled, “Larry, make sure you tighten the joints on that intake pipe.”

I said, “You guys used a replacement part, didn't you? He's never going to get it totally quiet now. I hope Larry told the customer. It'll save money but he won't get as quiet a ride.”

“God, Nicky. Don't you think I know my business?”

“Most customers don't understand replacement parts. They worry they're getting shortchanged. You have to explain it to them up front, that's my feeling.”

“I didn't call to hear your views on replacement parts.”

“Why did you call?”

“To hear your lovely voice.”

“Johnny. Spill.”

“It's Louise. She's really hurt Betsey's feelings, and for no reason. I don't know what's going on with her these days.”

“What did she do?” I hoped that Louise had thwarted Betsey in another tasteless wedding idea. I wouldn't put it past Betsey to try to incorporate her cat in the wedding party, perhaps as flower girl.

“She told Betsey she wouldn't be a bridesmaid, and she gave her no good excuse at all.”

“A bridesmaid? Betsey already has all her bridesmaids, doesn't she?”

“One dropped out. She was waiting for her Foreign Service assignment, and she got it. So she'll be in New Delhi in June, and that's too far to fly back even if they'd let her.”

“So Betsey thought of Louise, of all people? They aren't even close. They don't even go shopping together.”

“She thought it would be nice to have someone from my family.”

“And she didn't think of me?”

I made sniffly weeping sounds.

“She said that you once told her that you thought most weddings were hokey bourgeois displays and that you wanted to be married on Burnside Bridge at Antietam, at dawn, with only a battlefield guide or two as a witness. She said that you said the slaughter of the Civil War was a fitting metaphor for the future of most marriages.”

“I was joking around. Although the Burnside Bridge is very erotic, Johnny. You should go there sometime with someone fun.”

“Betsey said that you also said that you'd once deliberately exposed yourself to the Hong Kong flu to get out of a bridal shower.”

“So I'm not on the short list?”

“Not even if she has to get Boy George to stand in, in full drag.”

“Damn. And I was looking forward to wearing the dress.”

Like most brides, Betsey did not want to be upstaged by her bridesmaids. Unfortunately, the linen potato sack that Betsey had chosen for the wedding dress left very few
less
appealing options for the bridesmaids' attire. Betsey had finally decided on a hideous button-down blouse and skirt combination, chosen ostensibly for its post-wedding usefulness. The fabric was a pale blue sailcloth, and the blouse had elbow-length sleeves and a wide pleated collar. You could upholster a sofa with all the excess material in the skirt. Not an outfit for Louise, whose pink-and-white complexion was washed out in anything but simple lines and subtle, warm colors.

“Betsey asked Louise very tactfully, she said, and Louise turned her down flat.”

“Louise didn't even want to do a reading at the wedding, Johnny, remember? Why would she want to be a bridesmaid? Especially a substitute bridesmaid. Can't Betsey ask anyone else?”

“She decided that since her half of the wedding party is blond so far, she needs another blond.”

“Well, how
could
Louise ever resist a compliment like that? What's gotten into the girl?”

“It's not that much trouble, Nicky. It's one day of her life.”

“It
is
that much trouble, Johnny. That just shows how much you
know. It's going to the damn shower, and buying the dress, and getting shoes dyed to match it, and getting measured for fittings once the dress comes in. And getting thingies to go in your hair.”

“Thingies?”

“You know, silk rosebuds or a little tiara or whatever the bride inflicts on you. Betsey's so damn nature-loving she'll want them to stick hay in their hair, for all I know. Anyway, it's a pain in the ass of monumental proportions, being a bridesmaid.”

“I think you're exaggerating.”

“How many times have you been a bridesmaid? By the way, if she agrees to do this, who would you pair Louise up with?”

“Bob Sanders.”

“Bob Sanders? Oh, yeah, she'll have a great time with him. His idea of conversation is reviewing the transmission problems of the 1972 S-Class Mercedes. Why not Dennis Flannery?”

“She's too short for him.”

“Or he's too good-looking for her.”

“Dennis goes through women like Kleenex, Nicky. I'm not putting Louise with him.”

“Yeah, it would be awful if Louise got to spend your wedding with someone charming and self-assured and sexy. Could it be you're jealous?”

“I should have known better than to call you,” Johnny said. I could hear Joey shouting for him in the background.

“Don't you dare get off the phone, Johnny. Now tell me, what do you want me to do?”

“Talk to Louise. Tell her to do this for me, as a favor.”

“As a favor? Forget it. I'm not going to pressure Louise about this. Betsey can hire someone to be her bridesmaid if she's run out of Aryan-looking friends to color-coordinate into her wedding party.”

“My own cousins aren't happy for me,” said Johnny. “I don't expect you to ever give Betsey an even break, but Louise, I thought Louise would come through. It's lousy.”

“Why do you keep trying to force Louise to clap her hands for you? I don't see you clapping your hands for her about Hub.”

“Hub.” He snorted ungracefully. “That little candy-ass.”

“Oh, Johnny. You are so transparent, you know that?”

“Boy, you get an idea in your head and you don't want to let it go, do you? I'll just have to talk to your mother, then,” said Johnny. “I didn't want to bring her into it. See you at Thanksgiving.”

He rang off before I could say anything else. But despite its abrupt end, his call lifted my spirits. I felt that in some subterranean fashion, things were happening with Johnny and Louise. I was only sorry I couldn't think of a way to push them along.

The night before I left to go home for Thanksgiving, I was up until one o'clock folding gold paper napkins into the shape of turkeys, under Margaret's direction, for the St. Jude's “Strikers' Thanksgiving Mass and Gala Dinner.” Eric was not part of these preparations, having been sentenced to a day of banishment by Kate, who'd caught him teasing the hospital security dog again.

“He came this close to being nipped,” she said. “Bill turned his back for a second and Eric had his hand on Punch's collar, saying, ‘I command you to heel, Punch.' He saw some show on public television on dog training. I hate to punish him, but the only thing that seems to cause him any pain is not being here.”

“Punish him more, then.”

“He's a good kid at heart, Nicky. I think he may be so smart that he's bored out of his mind at school, which is probably why he acts up. I'm going to talk to Mary about getting him tested for one of those gifted and talented programs.”

“I'd like to get him tested, all right.”

The day before the holiday I caught an evening flight home. I wanted to stay in Winsack for the dinner, which was going to be the parish's biggest blowout since its one-hundredth anniversary steamers and-corn feast a few years earlier. I'd written flyers for the big event, gone with Father Peter to collect donations from area businesses, and helped decide the crucial issue of round vs. rectangular tables. I'd even done my time on the phones asking people to bring the dull but important supplies—paper cups for the kids, sugar for coffee, and foil wrap for the leftovers which Kate, with great tact,
would make sure went to the families who were the most short of cash right now.

I was putting in a lot of nonbillable hours. Ron would have had an apoplexy if he had known just how many. Somehow I'd gone from being a PR flack with duties apart to being just another person Margaret bossed around in her party planning. It felt good that I did my own shift on the picket line and that Mrs. Crawley said every morning at breakfast, “Well, how are you nurses shaping up today? Any trouble expected out there?” although I'd explained to her again and again that I was not a nurse.

It felt especially good that Tony forgot the bad blood between us enough to ask me, almost kindly, when I'd be back.

“In three days,” I said. “Try not to settle the strike until I get here.”

I gave him a quick little grin to let him know it was not a criticism.

“I wouldn't dream of settling without you,” he said, and in his voice I heard an echo of an echo of the old teasing affection.

“Well, you know where to reach me if anything comes up.”

“I might call you just to run a few ideas past you,” he said. For the first time since I'd come to Winsack, he wasn't staring over my head or frowning down at his feet. His eyes were weary but they were looking right into mine for the first time in five years.

“Tony, if you need me here, I can stay. My mother's turkey is nothing to fly home for.”

“I remember her date-prune stuffing,” Tony said.

“See? No great loss.”

“You go. It might be the only break you get before Christmas. You've earned it.”

He smiled at me. I could smell his aftershave, which is a brand that comes from the drugstore in a box with a cowboy on it. Once or twice, after we'd broken up, I'd actually opened a box of this cologne and sniffed it, homesick for him. But in the box the stuff had far too sweet an odor, whereas on Tony it acquired, somehow, a scent of cedar and wood smoke.

“Nicky,” he said, “I know I've been—”

A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. It was Suzanne, wafting up the way she always did.

“You're still here,” she said to me. “I wanted to talk to you about the hospital suppliers' issue, but I know you have to make your plane.”

“I have twenty minutes.”

“It's not important. Just another area of wasteful spending that belies their argument that there's no money for that two percent raise or for more staffing. Their purchasing process is positively byzantine. I don't think there's been any competitive bidding around here for years.”

“Can we accuse them of some kind of sweetheart arrangement with the supplier, with the extra profits coming back to Coventry?”

“Maybe. But I don't want to be too hasty.”

She spoke as placidly as if we had years ahead of us for a leisurely explanation of the iniquities of Coventry's sharp business practices. It was the fourth time she'd hinted about having discovered mud I could actually sling at Coventry, then prevaricated. I cast an impatient glance at Tony, but he was staring down at his hands, twiddling a pipe cleaner from a stack Margaret had left on the counter.

“Are you saying you have something we can use soon? I could whisper in the ears of a few reporters if so.”

“Not yet. We shouldn't rush to judgment.”

“It seems to me that if there was ever a time to rush to judgment, it's now.”

I'd had it up to here with her. Here she was with Tony, a light work schedule that seemed to consist of riffling through the pages of audits and calling her cronies to gossip, and a wardrobe that I was ten pounds too heavy to look good in, even if I could have afforded it. Enough was enough.

“Suzanne, you've been here, what, a month? Please, for the love of heaven, give me something that's not embargoed. Give me this, or give me some other damning statistic or unorthodox pattern. Anything. If the feds are investigating these guys, they've got to be screwing up somehow. In that whole pile of papers and annual reports and computer printouts you've amassed, there must be something you can hand me.”

She just smiled, and moved an inch closer to Tony, the inch that spelled the difference between business-collegial and intimate. That
smile of Suzanne's. I'd disliked it from the beginning. That perfectly confident, slow, sweetly unkind smile.

“You're in such a hurry all the time, Nicky. Tony did warn me that you're sometimes too quick to make up your mind. He said it's your only fault. That you made a decision and that was it.”

Now Tony looked up, finally. His eyes were guilty, and I saw that he had told Suzanne the tale of our romance and spared me not at all in the telling.

Well, I hadn't survived four years at St. Madeleine Sophie's to be cowed by a glammed-up bluestocking like Suzanne. I set down my suitcase and reached for a pen.

“I think I'd better take a later plane and go over the details of these purchasing irregularities with you, Suzanne, so that you'll feel comfortable with whatever we do with this. In fact, if I have to miss everything out of Logan tonight my family will understand. They're troopers. Besides, Father Pete said he wished I could be here for the dinner, anyway.”

At the thought of forgoing the promised holiday from my presence, Suzanne grew arch for the first time in my acquaintance with her. Her moment of malice was over, having served its purpose.

“No, no. I'm sure we can put something together once you're back. You go home now to whoever that wonderful person is who sent you those lilies.”