Carter appealed directly to him. “Buddha, do you have a moment to help Archie move his things into 612 and change the sheets on his bed in 610? We’re going to place Oscar in 610 with Rodney.”
Buddha took another enthusiastic slurp from his shake. “Sure, no problem.”
Judy scribbled furiously in her chart.
Instead of feeling vindictive, Carter walked back to his office wondering if he had acted too impulsively in showing up Judy. He had achieved the desired result without considering the long-range implications. By the time he sat back down at his desk to finish the paperwork of Oscar’s admission, he realized she had gotten the better of him again.
As he filled out Oscar’s drug history, Carter had little doubt that the kid needed treatment. The question was whether Oscar would accept the help, or if he had survived on the streets for so long that he couldn’t surrender.
Something else puzzled Carter: why Oscar had lied about how he was arrested. The police report stated that Oscar had shown up at the emergency room of Saint Jude’s, about seven blocks from the mission, with the old man on his back, shouting and screaming that the wino couldn’t be dead. A police officer admitting a domestic violence victim arrested Oscar for his belligerence when the emergency staff’s repeated efforts to quiet him failed. Later that night, Oscar confessed to killing the old man.
The wet snow had greased the roads. The other drivers braked and jerked as though they had never driven in winter. Carter cursed them through the windshield. The six-mile commute to his apartment, which usually took ten minutes, took nearly an hour that evening. All the stops and starts on the highway must have taken their toll on his ’82 Prelude because the engine rattled with a strange and probably malignant new symptom. By habit, he turned up the volume on the radio. Sting’s new hit took over. He sang along on the chorus, “All this time the river flowed endlessly out to sea…”
Stuck in traffic, he felt like he was stuck at sea. His thoughts returned to work. That morning, when Sister Mary Xavier had entrusted him with Oscar’s intake, she had told Carter how pleased she was with his work. His thoughts skipped past that moment to the conflict with Judy. By the time he pulled up to his apartment building, a knot gripped his shoulders.
He parked, checked the mail—a telephone bill and a coupon for pizza delivery—and climbed the two flights to his apartment. Slipping the key in the lock, he felt a fleeting wish for someone on the other side to ask about his day.
After dinner—curried chicken reheated in the microwave, leftover from an immemorable date the previous Saturday night—he sought relief in a hot bath by candlelight. No sooner had he settled into the comforting warmth than the phone split the mood. He resisted the impulse of curiosity to get out of the tub and pick it up. The machine answered it on the third ring.
“Carter?”
Mom.
“It’s Thursday night, March first. Remember March first?”
Damn. He had thought of it earlier in the week, jotted a reminder on his desk blotter to send a card, but the clutter of papers had obscured the note.
“Your brother called this evening, had Kelly Jr. sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ We didn’t hear from you and wondered if something might be wrong. It’s not like one of you boys to forget. With all that bad weather we hear you’re having up there, we got worried. We thought maybe you’d gotten into an accident or something. I almost called the hospital to see if you’d had the sense to stay there and wait out the snow, but—”
Carter snapped off the machine. He trudged along the wet trail of carpet back to the tub.
She called back. He counted seventeen rings before she gave up. He braced himself for the phone to ring again. It didn’t, but it might as well have. The expectation shattered the serenity he had sought in his bath.
Carter used to crawl into her bed to have her scratch his back. While his dad snored in the room next door, she ran her fingernails across his back and told him stories of the pretty little girl who grew up an orphan. She had never known her father. When she was two, her mother died of cancer, and she was placed in the local convent, where the Sisters of Mercy raised her. Sequestered in a small town, she knew she didn’t want to be a nun. She liked boys. Summer afternoons she wandered the convent gardens and fantasized about living the glamorous life pictured in magazines. To wear a fur coat, have a purse for every outfit, a closet just for shoes; to go to dinner parties that did not start until eight, the theater, the symphony, her husband dashing in his black tie; lazy summer afternoons lounging at the country club pool, winters at the beach. Her hand would rest idly on Carter’s back. As her dreams grew, so did her intolerance for the small town and convent. She still attended daily Mass, but she stopped going to the soda fountain, shunned school dances, and only dated boys with cars who could take her to the city.
When she was eighteen, she met a medical student doing his residency at the county hospital. He was not dashing, but he was stable and dependable and handsome enough. He could promise her the good life. She fell in love. For a period, while they lived in a five-bedroom, four-bath house in Edina, she was happy to watch her dreams spread out before her: the dinner parties, the country club, her two sons. Then, when Carter was three years old, his dad accepted a position at the Mayo Clinic. Rochester, another small town, reminded her too much of her childhood.
The rest, Carter had to fill in for himself. Somewhere after the move, probably not long after, the drinking escalated. He remembered coming home from school and learning to look for her cognac glass about the house as a predictor of the evening. Often, if the bottle itself was in plain view, she would fall asleep in the den before fixing supper. He would put out her cigarette left burning in the ashtray and take off her shoes. On those evenings, his dad made dinner in the microwave and told the boys to let her sleep, that she was worn out, but Carter could never figure out from what.
Some days when he came home from school, the house would smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven and she would have two glasses of milk waiting on the table for the boys. She met them at the door and hugged them until they begged her to please let go so they could eat the cookies. But if the slightest thing went wrong, say Carter accidentally knocked over his glass, she might scream hysterically and disappear into the den, leaving the spilled milk to drip over the table’s edge onto the kitchen floor.
Some evenings, she woke up in the den and argued with their dad. Carter would find her later sitting at her vanity, the top to her crystal decanter missing among the perfumes, her cheeks streaked with mascara.
“Don’t cry, Mommy.” She sniffs and hugs him. He can feel her cheek moist against his. Finally, the tears cease, and he leaves her alone with her decanter. He walks out of the bedroom feeling big and proud inside, the smudge of black on his cheek a badge of her love.
Seared into Carter’s mind, more vivid than any memory, actually a feeling rather than a specific event, are those days when he is five years old and his older brother is away at school. He spends those days with her walking in the arboretum, among the fragrant stalks of flox, the colorful beds of azaleas, and the sweet-smelling honeysuckle vines, just he and his mom, alone together with the day all theirs. Carter climbs trees, but she is never far away, always watching him.
One day, while he waits for her to return from the restroom, he picks a bouquet of different colored roses, carefully snapping the stems. When she walks out, he pulls the bouquet from behind his back. “Here, Mommy.”
She stoops to accept the bouquet. “Carter, I told you to wait for me here without moving.”
He thinks at first he may have done something wrong. He had been afraid of it when he picked the flowers, knowing she wouldn’t let him do that if she were watching. But when she smells the flowers and he sees a tear slip down her cheek, he forgets where one of the thorns had poked under his fingernail.