“Did he?”
“Just her feelings,” she says. “But that’s bad enough. I mean, last week Jett’s mom complained because I was having her son recite the Pledge of Allegiance along with the other children, but now it’s okay for him to assault another child because the room mother brought in Apple Newtons and Hi-C? I can just imagine what she’s gonna bring in when it’s her week to be room mother. Tofu, probably. Edamambo or whatever they call it. Like that’d go over big with the children.”
“Crazy, huh?”
“Meet the mother halfway, Marian said. Have him stand with the others but just not recite the pledge. So what can I do? She’s the principal. I just wish she wasn’t so wishy-washy. I been thinking more and more about getting my master’s in administration instead of reading. I tell you one thing. If I was in charge at that school, things would be different. I’d back my teachers, not tell them to bend over backward to please the parents. I mean, if she doesn’t want me to teach her son to show some respect for the flag, maybe she should homeschool him out at that organic farm thing they’re part of. But anyway, that’s enough about school. How was your day?” I open my mouth to tell her, but notice that she’s looking over my shoulder. “Oh . . . my . . . Lord,” she says.
“What?”
“There’s Miss Bascomb, my old earth science teacher.”
I turn to see who she’s looking at. “The woman in the red dress?”
“No, the next table over.” I spot two heavy-set women, both of them in jeans and orange T-shirts, matching close-cropped gray hair. They’re drinking Lone Stars, too. “Well, I guess I owe my girlfriend Janisse an apology. She always used to insist that Miss Bascomb was one of those.”
One of those lesbians, she means. It feels like a gut shot. Like she’s slamming my mother, even though she’s probably not even making the connection. “Got your gaydar up, huh?” I say.
“I used to tell her, ‘Janisse, just because she wears pants all the time and has posters of the Cowboys and the Spurs all over her classroom, that doesn’t prove a thing. Maybe she’s just a sports fan. Maybe skirts make her look too hippy.’ And Janisse would go, ‘Girl, you’re just naïve. She’s got a softball trophy on her bookcase. Drives a muscle car for crying out loud.’ Whenever Janisse had to go to her room for extra help, she’d make me go with her even though I was getting straight A’s in science. She was afraid Miss Bascomb would try and recruit her.” Okay, that’s enough, I feel like saying. But what the hell am I getting so defensive about? She’s not the one who’s connecting the dots between those two dykes over there and my mom. I am. It’s my problem.
Our drinks arrive, and when the waitress goes to put down Casey’s wine, she spills a little on her. “Sweet Jesus, look what you just did!” she says, loud enough so that the people at the next table look over. Casey’s sopping at the spill like she’s gotten half the glass dumped on her instead of just a little dribble. The waitress apologizes and rushes off to get her some extra napkins. “It’s okay,” I assure Casey. “White wine’s not going to leave a stain.”
“It most certainly will, Andrew. Do you realize how delicate silk is? That’s what I hate about these chain restaurants. It’s not only that the food is so-so, but the service is unprofessional.” In other words, this never would have happened if we’d gone to that hibachi place.
“She’s new,” I remind her. “She’s nervous.”
“Oh, then I guess that gives her the right to slop whatever she wants on her customers. Well, there goes her fifteen percent tip.”
When Xan returns with more napkins—a stack of them—Casey instructs her to make sure she reports the spill to her manager. “I’ll try and treat the stain when I get home, but if it doesn’t come out, I’ll have to bring it to the dry cleaner’s and give y’all the bill.”
Xan yes ma’ams her. Apologizes again. She asks if we need a few more minutes or we’re ready to order. “Babe? You know what you want?”
She slaps her menu shut. “Just a Caesar salad,” she tells me.
“Appetizer- or entrée-size, ma’am?” the waitress asks, short-circuiting Casey’s preferred ordering process.
“What?”
“Did you want the smaller Caesar or—”
“That’s all I’m having. A Caeser salad, dressing on the side.”
“Yes, ma’am. Dinner size then. Did you want anchovies on that?”
Casey shoots her a look like she’s an imbecile. “No, I do not, thank you.”
“Okay. Got it. And you, sir?” I order the seafood ravioli, Alfredo sauce instead of marinara. “Good choice,” she says. “That’s my favorite dish on the whole menu. Any appetizers for you guys?” Ooh, boy. She’s just hit another nerve. Casey hates it when people refer to women as “guys.” Blames the “feministas” for the fact that everyone does that now. I’ve heard her pal, Dr. Laura, use that word, which is probably where she got it. Casey thinks that woman walks on water.
“What do you think, babe?” I ask her. “You feel like splitting an order of calamari?”
“Those deep-fried rubber band thingies? I don’t think so.” Now I’m an imbecile, too.
I sneak the waitress an apologetic look. “Guess not,” I tell her.
“Okay then. I’ll put this right in for you guys.” Ouch.
When she walks away, Casey-Lee starts in about fried food and fatty sauces. “You keep eating like that and you’ll have a coronary by the time you’re forty. Why do you think Daddy had to get that triple bypass last year? Clogged arteries from eating the same kind of thing you just ordered.”
Plus the fact that Daddy’s fifty or sixty pounds overweight and twice my age. And I doubt all those bourbon and branch waters are all that good for his ticker either. “I did a six-mile run this morning,” I tell her. “I’m guessing my heart can handle a little cream sauce every once in a while.”
“Fine,” she says. “What do I know? I’d just like to be your wife, Andrew. Not your widow.”
Yup, bad idea: a midweek meal. “You should have just told me if you were too busy to go out tonight. You seem so stressed-out.”
“I’m fine,” she insists. “I wanted to see you. We’ve gotta eat, don’t we?” She sips her wine. I drink my beer. “So what was your day like?” she asks again. Maybe this time she’ll let me answer.
Crazy, I tell her. “We got six new patients on the ward that I had to do intakes for. They’re just back from Afghanistan. Got deployed over there for the troop surge.”
“Oh, you mean the troop surge our ‘antiwar’ president ordered?” She makes little quotation marks with her fingers when she says “antiwar.” “Maybe now he realizes what poor George W was up against.”
What George W created and Obama inherited, I feel like saying. Although I’ve let her assume otherwise, I voted for Obama last year. Not that I’m too happy with the way he’s been handling things so far. The economy, the wars. “A couple of these new guys we got had to be medevaced out of there,” I tell her. “They’re in bad shape. Some of the worst I’ve seen.”
“The worst how? Physically?”
“One of them, yeah. He’s got a TBI. A gunner, twenty-one years old. Took shrapnel in his head and his neck. He’s already had three operations. Brain surgery, facial reconstruction. Poor guy doesn’t even remember the day he got hit.”
“Well, that’s probably good. Right?”
“Maybe. But at least it’d give him a context, you know what I’m saying? Why he’s struggling to put sentences together. Come up with the names of simple objects on cards. Today when I was doing his assessment, I held up this one card with a picture of a banana on it. ‘I know what it is,’ he told me. ‘Give me a minute.’ But you should have seen the look of defeat on his face when he finally gave up. When I told him what it was, he started to cry. He’s probably never going to be a hundred percent.”
“That poor thing,” she says. “When I was volunteering at the V-A with my women’s fellowship last year, it broke my heart to see s
ome of those boys. Bandaged heads, missing limbs. I know they have an important job to do over there, but still. I get down on my knees every single night and pray for them.”
See? She’s in a bitchy mood tonight, but she’s got a good heart.
Casey’s cell phone chimes inside her purse, and when she takes it out and reads the text message she’s just gotten, she says it’s from some woman on some committee she’s on—that she’d better respond. Watching her text her back, I recall the day I met Casey-Lee. She was sitting in the solarium, reading some Stephen King story to a couple of our walking wounded. Engaging those guys who would otherwise be sitting in their rooms, absorbed in their misery. Stephen King and a beautiful blonde paying attention to them: it probably did those soldiers more good than all the medication and talk therapy our team was providing. And then a few days later, when I walked into that church service hungover from the night before, there she was again. . . .
Casey believes that there’s no such thing as coincidence. That it was the Good Lord’s plan to bring us together. Which was why it hadn’t worked out with that other guy she’d almost gotten engaged to: the up-and-coming attorney her father had hand-picked for her. The first time I went over to their house, they still had a picture of him and Casey on their refrigerator: Waco’s answer to Barbie and Ken, they looked like. Not that I’m complaining about her looks. When she stopped me outside the church that day—surprised me by saying she recognized me from the hospital—and I took a chance and asked her out, I was shocked when she said yes. I’m still shocked, sometimes. I like it when we walk into a club or a restaurant and heads look up. . . . But more than once, I’ve imagined Big Daddy’s reaction after that first time I went over there. His last name’s what, Casey-Lee? Oh? What kind of a name’s that? He got some chinky-Chinaman in him? What’s that? Irish and Eyetalian, too? Well, that boy’s a real mongrel then, idn’t he? . . . A first lieutenant? Well, that’s fine, honey. I’ve got nothing but respect for the U.S. Army. You know that. But a nurse? Kind of a nancy-pants career choice, don’t you think? And what can nurses make? Fifty thousand, maybe? Fifty-five tops? That may be a decent salary for a woman. But for a man? A breadwinner? . . . Yeah? Well, what’s that thing I heard at our last training? That one out of five of the ones coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq are suffering from some kind of mental illness? Sounds to me that mental health’s more of a growth industry than real estate lawyering, wouldn’t you say, Big Daddy? Not that I’m being fair. Just because I can imagine him saying that shit doesn’t mean he said it. I’m just glad they took that picture off their refrigerator, that’s all. And maybe Casey’s right. Maybe we did come together because of some divine plan. She brought me to Jesus, didn’t she? Helped to ground me in a spiritual life when I was flapping around in the wind? Getting wasted on beer and weed, wasting my time and money on porn. My sister can argue all she wants to about how it wasn’t our parents’ fault that none of us grew up godly, but we’d been raised to be skeptical about religion. Love thy neighbor, sure, but not because Jesus Christ said so. Support the Democrats because they work for the common good and Republicans are just out for themselves. But it’s not that black and white. Casey’s plenty charitable: reading to the walking wounded, volunteering with Big Sisters. Whenever she talks about that little girl she used to take places, she lights up. . . . My parents, my sisters: voting for Obama was a foregone conclusion for them, but not for me. I remember standing there in that voting booth at the base, looking at both those levers, still undecided. It was McCain’s cancer that finally convinced me to pull the lever for Obama. Palin was just too inexperienced. I couldn’t see her being a heartbeat away from the presidency.
“Earth to Andrew,” Casey says. “Where have you just been?”
Looking over at her, I realize she’s finished texting and put her phone away. Rather than tell her what I was thinking about, I get back to what my day’d been like. “No, I was just thinking about this other guy that came in today. He’s got PTSD something fierce. I’m in the middle of doing his intake, right? And there’s this loud crash somewhere else on the ward. He jumps up, starts going all crazy on me like we were being fired on instead of someone out on the floor just dropped something. I couldn’t talk him down. Couldn’t even keep him in the room we were in. He runs out on the floor, wild-eyed and screaming. Ended up, me and LeRoy had to straitjacket him and get one of the docs to sedate him.”
“It’s so sad,” she says. “I just wish these wars weren’t necessary. I hope those 9/11 hijackers are burning in hell.”
I nod. “This guy’s my age. He’s got two kids already and a third one on the way. Makes you wonder if the ones coming back in bad shape are ever going to get their heads back on straight again. Or if they’re gonna end up on the scrap heap like all those Vietnam burnouts. You know?” But I can tell her mind’s gone someplace else.
“So did you get someone to cover for you this coming weekend?” she asks. Here’s my opening—my chance to tell her that I might be going back for my mom’s wedding.
“Yeah. I switched rotations with Josette. Her boyfriend’s coming down the weekend after, so it worked out great. I’ve got tomorrow through Monday now. So I was thinking—”
“Good. Don’t forget the prayer breakfast on Saturday morning. It starts at nine. You better write it down.”
Maybe I should wait until after we eat. Or at least until I decide for sure what I’m doing. Why get her upset if I’m not going? “No, I’ll remember. You have to speak at that breakfast, don’t you?”
“I’m giving the opening greeting. Remember? Which is why I don’t want to see you walking in late. By the way, you know who’s sitting at our table? Mayor DuPuy and her husband. And did I mention that John Ashcroft and his wife will be there? Traveling down from Missouri? My mother says the Ashcrofts are big in the Assemblies of God Church. They’re sitting just one table over from us, so I’m sure we’ll get to meet them. You should wear your uniform, not your civvies, okay? What was Ashcroft again? Secretary of state?”
“Attorney general.” Gee, maybe he’ll sing that song of his at the breakfast—the one they’re always making fun of on The Daily Show. Jon Stewart, Colbert: they go over the top about the conservatives sometimes, but they can be pretty funny.
“Oh, and I have to go early and help set up the table decorations, so you won’t need to pick me up. You just need to get there.”
I nod. “And that thing with your parents is the same night, right? What time does that start?”
“Six o’clock. Drinks first at the house, and then we’re heading on over to Diamond Back’s for dinner. The reservation’s for seven thirty, but my parents want you there for the cocktails, too, Andrew. This is a real big deal for Daddy. His top clients and their wives are going to be there, so you can’t be late for that either. I’d feel a lot better if you wrote this stuff down. Or I could e-mail it to you. Why don’t I do that?”
Yeah, why don’t you, darlin’? Wouldn’t want to screw up Daddy’s schedule. I guess I’d just better stay put this weekend. It’s not like my mom’s expecting me. “Good idea,” I tell her. “Hey, did you just say ‘clients?’ Plural? I thought it was just that one couple, the Hatchbacks or something?”
“The Halbachs,” she says. “It was supposed to be just them, but now he’s invited the Rutherfords, too. Cubby Rutherford isn’t exactly a client yet, but Daddy’s been working on it. Cubby’s a big real estate guy. His company’s building that new high-rise that’s going up on Highway Six.”
“The one past the Richland Mall?”
“Uh-huh. He owns lots of properties here in Waco, and in Fort Worth, too. Daddy got wind that he’s unhappy with his present firm, so he’s been getting chummy with Cubby. Playing golf with him, taking him skeet shooting at his hunt club. If Cubby decides to switch to Commerford and Crouse, he’ll be Daddy’s biggest client. So the stakes are high. Mommy’s as nervous about Saturday night as a kitty cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
Texas talk, I think. Give her a smile. “Why’s that?”
“Because Cubby’s wife is a Reformed Baptist deacon and Judie Halbach’s got a mouth on her. Gets a few drinks in her and starts cussing like a ranch hand. Talking about gun control, and how going to that clown school cured her depression. In the last election, she campaigned for the Democrats against Governor Perry. Mommy says she’ll just die if Judie gets lit and starts in about that. I mean, the Perrys and the Rutherfords are personal friends. But Daddy says they can’t uninvite the Halbachs at this point. Johnny Ray Halbach’s a big client, too.”
“Well, maybe I could sit next to this Judie and, if she starts mouthing off, spill some wine on her.”
“Ha-ha, very funny,” Casey says. She looks down at her dress again. Presses a fresh napkin against the stain which, to my eyes, isn’t even visible. “I keep thinking club soda’d be good to treat this with before it sets, but I’m not sure because it’s silk.” To change the subject, I ask her how our wedding plans are coming along. Big mistake. “Ugh,” she says. “Don’t remind me. My mother got a call yesterday from my girlfriend Abilene?”
“The bridesmaid I haven’t met yet, right? Your college roommate?”
“Abby’s my maid of honor, Andrew,” she says. “I’m glad at least one of us is focused on what’s only going to be the biggest day of our lives.”
“Yeah, point taken,” I tell her. “Because hey, it’s only another fourteen months till showtime. I’d better get with the program, huh?”
She gives me a look. Hitches her hair behind her ear in that way I used to think was so cute. Now I find it annoying. Last time when we went out and I started counting how many times she did it, I got up into the teens.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks.
Yup. “Nope. Just trying to offer a little comic relief.”