Free Last Call by Laura Pedersen

says, ‘I think our time is almost up. Why don’t you make an appointment for next week with my secretary?’ ”
    Hayden supposed that Bobbie Anne would have to mark him down with the talkers and rose to leave. He’d been there for slightly over an hour.
    But she playfully tugged at his sleeve and he sat back down on the couch. Then Bobbie Anne pulled her sweater over her head and placed his right hand on her left breast. And she kept her hand there, upon his, for a moment, while she leaned in to kiss him on the lips.
    Now, when Hayden fantasizes about the event, it is this part he always finds the most exciting, her hand on top of his, his hand on her breast. And then the kiss.
    They made love until they tasted of each other. The great fire in Hayden’s nature magnified him as a lover, and when she climaxed he wanted to believe that it was real. Yet he had to face the fact that a woman in Bobbie Anne’s business either faked orgasm or didn’t bother at all. And so he didn’t ask.
    “You’re awfully sensuous under that wry Scottish exterior,” she remarked while they were getting dressed. Bobbie Anne’s life had been hard and she was wise in many ways, an emotional clairvoyant of sorts who knew what was on his mind without being told.
    “I . . . I like a woman.” He realized that this sounded rather silly. But it was true. He’d been with a fair number of women before falling in love with Mary. “I mean . . . I like their softness, their voices, their thoughts, the way they see the world so differently.”
    The next morning when Diana appeared from Westchester for her weekly inspection, she took one look at Hayden’s gaunt face and sallow skin and trundled him off to the doctor. He was too tired to protest, which only served to alarm her even more. Tests followed. Hayden was not dismayed by the hepatitis diagnosis since it could be treated. The liver cancer could not, unless he wanted to be a guinea pig in some unproven drug trial with a mile-long list of side effects. Hayden’s first thought was not about himself but about Diana and Joey. Who would watch out for her when he was gone? And who would ensure that Joey would learn all the things about life that a mother cannot teach her son? This last issue particularly troubled him. With his life suddenly being wrenched from Hayden without his permission, suicide was out of the question for the time being and life had all of a sudden become very precious.
    When Hayden’s insurance agency announced they were closing the Brooklyn office Diana insisted that he accept the early retirement package with full health benefits rather than try and commute into Manhattan every day. And much as he would have liked to continue working to the very end, he did not want his coworkers to witness his inevitable decline. Hayden was known throughout the entire company as the perpetually energetic and good-natured colleague who was quick with a joke and a smile, and that’s how he wanted to be remembered. Not as some washed-up salesman who everyone was humoring because of illness, who brought everyone down by serving as a constant reminder of their own mortality, that life could indeed turn on a dime, and there was no insurance policy on earth to stop it from doing exactly that.
    Hayden never returned to Bobbie Anne for professional reasons, but they’d remained friends and often chatted in their adjoining backyards. Sometimes he baby-sits her apple-cheeked little girls on weekends while she shops and runs errands. And when she arrives home he’ll burst into a rousing chorus of “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean,” much to the delight of her daughters, since he changes Bonny to Bobbie, and the twins gleefully chime in
“Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bobbie to me.”

chapter eleven
    H ayden is aware that time should fly now that he’s officially dying, but the hours between leaving Rosamond and picking her up again three days later crawl by as if he’s a