Nevertheless, this Magnolia neighborhood was a big step up from the walk-up apartment where I was raised. I suppose there were plenty of people back then, including my own grandfather, who called my mother a “loose” woman because there was no man in our lives and no ring on Mother’s finger. Her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle wreck soon after she got pregnant and before they had a chance to marry. Defying her father’s wishes, Mother refused to give me up for adoption. Instead, she had raised me entirely on her own. At the time I was interviewing Mrs. Fisk I had no idea that one day in the far distant future I would be reunited with long-lost members of my father’s family.
At the time, I regarded Mrs. Fisk as a mean-spirited gossip, a little too eager to condemn her attractive young neighbor to anyone who would listen. It seemed likely that any number of old biddies had probably concocted and spread similar stories about my own mother. In many close neighborhoods and small towns, the single mother was, and still is, a target of scrutiny, if not suspicion.
But even if it was true—if working as a lady of the evening turned out to be Frankie and Donnie’s mother’s only means of support—she must have been successful in her line of work. After all, Magnolia Bluff was one of Seattle’s solidly middle-class neighborhoods. If a working gal was able to earn enough money to maintain a house there, she had to be more of a call girl than a streetwalker, one with a well-heeled, generous clientele with maybe a few power brokers added into the mix.
I may have been relatively new to the force, but I was smart enough to figure out that in a pissing match between power brokers and a uniformed cop, I was the one who was going to come up with the short end of the stick.
In other words, Mrs. Fisk’s comments combined with what Mac had said earlier about the mother in question made me more than happy to give Frankie and Donnie’s house a wide berth. By the time we finished our canvass of the neighborhood and returned to the patrol car, the enticing aroma of grilling burgers had done its trick. It was now long after dinnertime, and we were both famished.
“Dick’s?” he said, putting our police-pursuit Fury in gear.
“Amen,” I said.
And that’s where we headed, for Ballard and the nearest Dick’s Drive-In.
When the first Dick’s opened in the fifties, it was in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. For a kid too young to drive back then, it was close but no cigar. The only way to get there was to drive. I was a junior in high school when the one in Ballard opened, and it was cause for a school-wide celebration. That’s where we headed now.
We were parked in the car munching burgers and fries when Mac said, “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.”
For a moment I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my burger or about the shapely carhop who had just delivered our food. Turns out it was neither.
“I’m talking about Frankie and Donnie’s mom,” he explained. “The woman may have been mad as all hell, but she was a dish, all right—blond, stacked, and gorgeous.”
That was when I finally got around to telling him what Mrs. Fisk had said about Frankie and Donnie’s mom. When I finished, Mac shook his head sadly. “Too bad. She’s probably out of my league.”
“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “You’re married.”
“That’s right,” he said. “But I’m not dead, and neither are you.”
Somewhere along the way I had fallen back asleep. When I awoke again it seemed like I was still smelling one of Dick’s hamburgers, but it turned out Mel was sitting in the chair next to my bed, munching away on a burger of her own.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” she said. “When are you gonna wake up? It’s time.”
It took a moment for me to make the transition from the world as it was in 1973 to the world as it is now, and it was quite a jolt.
“That was weird,” I said.
“What was weird?”
There was a lot of stuff in my head right then that I didn’t particularly want to discuss with Mel Soames. Generally speaking, we didn’t talk about my life with Karen back when the kids were little or about what I referred to as the “good old days.” Discussions of those always seemed to introduce a certain level of tension into the conversation.
I suppose I need to clarify this some. I’m not talking about old love affairs here. I’m referring to my carousing days when I’d have a drink or two before going to work without giving it a second thought. That, by the way, is one of the reasons I’m in AA now. So rather than go into any of those gory details with Mel, I glossed them all over.
“I was dreaming about hamburgers,” I said, “and here you are eating one.”
“Sorry about that. I was hungry, but don’t expect me to share, because you’re not allowed solid food yet. Jackie will be back in a minute.”
“Who’s Jackie?”
“Your nurse. She’s on a break, but she gave me strict orders before she left. You can have water or you can have broth. That’s it.”
Right that minute, neither water nor broth was very high on my wish list. In fact, I still had to fight to keep my eyes open.
“Whatever they gave me really knocked me on my butt,” I said.
“It’s supposed to,” Mel told me. “It’s called anesthesia.”
The same nurse reappeared—the stout one. This time I noticed that her name badge said she was Jackie Morse. That sounded familiar. Wait, Nurse Jackie. Wasn’t that a television show of some kind? From what I remembered of the show, that particular Nurse Jackie wasn’t exactly a picture of sweetness and light. It turned out this one wasn’t, either.
“Okay,” she said after checking my vitals one more time, just for the hell of it, “let’s give that broth another try.”
She handed me a cup with a straw in it. The stuff inside the cup was no longer hot—far from it—but to my surprise, when I swallowed a sip, it actually tasted good.
“We’ll wait long enough to check your vitals one more time, Jonas,” she said. “If you’re still steady as she goes, we’ll get you wheeled out of here and up to your room. That way you’ll be somebody else’s problem.”
When people call me by the name of Jonas, I can never quite wrap my head around the idea that I’m the person they’re addressing. Of course, in Nurse Jackie’s case, when she used the word “we,” it wasn’t the royal we, by any means. It was the dismissive form of the word, the one favored by grade school teachers talking down their noses to classrooms full of bored kids.
It must have been the better part of another hour before Nurse Jackie finally pronounced that “we” were sufficiently recovered for me to leave the recovery room. As two uniformed attendants wheeled me into the hallway, I felt as though I had finally graduated from one of the levels of Dante’s Inferno. They rolled me down the hall, into the elevator, and then up into a room that was bigger than some hotel rooms I’ve seen. It had windows, a view of other buildings, and room for more than one bed, although only one bed seemed to be called for at the time.
Once in my new digs I was sufficiently awake to be less concerned about Nurse Jackie and far more worried about what was to come. What if my new knees didn’t work? What if I fell flat on my face the first time they tried to stand me up? What if I was destined to spend the rest of my life on one of those little scooters that