Chapter 9 - The Bench by the Fountain
The Glenview Oak Country Club lobby smelled of cold marble, wet cedar, and the faint, sulfurous tang of an emergency oxygen tank.
Two paramedics from the municipal fire rescue squad were kneeling on the green-and-gold runner beside the indoor fountain. Their heavy red trauma bags sat open on the floor, surrounded by plastic tear-away wrappers and the thin, transparent tubing of a non-rebreather mask.
Grandma Evelyn was sitting upright on the velvet bench.
She had her navy jacket off, folded neatly across her knees. Her white cotton blouse was unbuttoned at the throat, where a silver lead wire ran from an adhesive patch on her clavicle down to the portable monitor resting on the paramedic’s knee.
The green line on the small LED screen was jagged, erratic, jumping like a hooked trout, but the digital readout for her pulse was settling: 92... 88... 84.
Daniel was on his knees in the puddle of water that had splashed from the fountain basin.
He didn't care about his bespoke midnight-blue trousers. He didn't care about the satin lapels dragging through the damp carpet. His forehead was pressed into the fabric of Evelyn’s navy skirt, his hands clutched around her thin, stocking-covered ankles, his shoulders heaving with the violent, ragged sobs of a twelve-year-old boy who had just realized he had burned his own house down.
"Grandma," Daniel wept, his voice muffled by the wool of her hem. "Grandma, I’m sorry. I didn't know. I swear to God, Grandma, she told me she paid you on Tuesday. She showed me a bank transfer on her phone... she said you were all taken care of..."
Evelyn’s right hand—the one with the flour still ground into the grain around her fingernails—rested on the back of his neck.
Her touch was light. Her fingers moved through his dark, gelled hair with that same, rhythmic, circular motion she had used when he had the croup at five years old, sitting on the edge of her clawfoot tub while the hot water ran.
"Hush, Danny," she whispered, her voice weak behind the plastic mask, but clear as a bell in the vaulted stone lobby. "Don't carry on so. You’ll get water on your nice shirt. It’s a very handsome shirt."
"She made you spend your pill money," he choked out, lifting his face. His eyes were red, swollen, his nose running into his lip. "You were sitting out here in the cold... alone... while we were in there drinking forty-dollar champagne."
"I wasn't alone, Danny," she said, her eyes flicking up as my shadow fell across the fountain. "Leo was here. Leo always brings the truck around."
The older paramedic, a burly guy with a graying mustache named Miller, looked up at me as I approached. He had an empty plastic ampoule of sublingual nitroglycerin in his gloved fingers.
"You the grandson?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said. "How’s the rhythm?"
"Supraventricular tachycardia," Miller said, peeling the adhesive backing off a second monitor lead. "Her pressure spiked to two-ten over one-fifteen. She was about two minutes away from an acute coronary event when we pushed the nitro. The rhythm is converting back to sinus now, but she needs six hours of observation at St. Francis."
"I don't need a hospital, young man," Evelyn said, trying to lift her hand to wave him away, though her fingers were trembling so hard she could barely clear her lap. "I just need to go home and take my water pill. Leo has the truck out front."
"You're going in the ambulance, Grandma," I said, crouching down until my eyes were level with her mask. "And I’m riding in the back with you."
The heavy brass doors from the conservatory swung open.
Ashley stood in the archway.
She had her silk robe pulled over her fringed reception dress, but she had lost one of her feathered slippers; she was standing lopsided, her left heel bare against the cold marble floor. Her makeup was completely ruined, black mascara running in thick, greasy tracks down her jawline, her mouth pulled into an expression of pure, cornered hatred.
"Daniel!" she yelled, her voice bouncing off the high limestone walls. "The ambulance is blocking the valet! The guests can't get their cars! Tell them to move it around to the kitchen loading dock!"
Daniel didn't stand up.
He rose slowly to his knees, his hands leaving Evelyn’s skirt. He turned his head toward the woman he had married three hours ago.
The look on his face wasn't anger.
It was the look you give a strange dog that has wandered into your kitchen and bitten your child: cold, absolute, and permanent revulsion.
He reached up to his left hand.
The gold band—the eighteen-karat band Ashley had insisted on buying from the designer jeweler in Water Tower Place because the family heirloom ring our grandfather had worn was "too clunky"—slid off his knuckle with a faint, greasy click.
He didn't throw it at her.
He dropped it into the small, square pocket of the floral purse sitting on Evelyn’s lap.
"Daniel?" Ashley gasped, taking a half-step forward onto the damp runner, her voice dropping from a screech to a sudden, terrified whisper. "Daniel... what are you doing? The minister is waiting in the library to sign the state license. We have to file the certificate on Monday."
"Go home, Ashley," Daniel said.
His voice didn't carry through the lobby. It didn't echo. It was flat, quiet, and final as a gravestone.
May you like
"Daniel, you can't do this! We have the honeymoon! The flights to Antigua leave at six tomorrow morning! The hotel is non-refundable!"
"Then take Courtney," Daniel said. He turned his back on her, reached down, and took his grandmother’s small, blue-veined hand between both of his. "She likes salads."
