Free Ordinary Life by Elizabeth Berg Page A

turned toward me. “Come on, sweet refuge. Save me.”
    He lay down on the bed, and I started loosening the tape around the edges of his dressing. “I wanted some ribs,” he said.
    “Pardon?” My voice was muffled, coming from behind the mask I wore.
    “I wanted some barbecued ribs, you know, all overdone and smoky and falling off the bone. I ate about half of one, and oh, man …”
    I cleaned off the insertion site. No drainage, no redness, no swelling.
    “I threw it all up, goddamnit. And then I got this pain. Jesus!” He looked at me. “I can have as much morphine as I want, right?”
    I nodded. “We’ll keep you comfortable, Richard.”
    “You promise, right?”
    “I promise.” Here was what I’d been waiting for. An opening. A chance to provide some real comfort. I finished taping his new dressing on.
    “You know what, Abby?”
    His eyes were so weary. I laid my hand on his shoulder, pulled off my mask. “What?” I asked softly. I could stay for a long time. He was my last appointment for the day. I sat on the bed beside him.
    “You can’t promise shit.”
    I sat still.
    “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
    I swallowed, stood up. “I’ll do my best to keep you comfortable, Richard.”
    “That’s better,” he said. “Now say, ‘But I have no idea how all this is going to go down.’ ”
    I said nothing. He raised his eyebrows at me. “Done for the day?”
    “Is there anything else you’d like me to do?”
    “Yeah. Leave.”
    I left.
    When I arrived at Ida’s, I rang the doorbell and heard a faint “Come in.” I opened the door but ran into something that prevented its opening fully.
    “Ida?” I called. “The door’s blocked.”
    “Oh! Just a minute.”
    I stood on the front porch, waiting. I heard a screen door bang, and saw that the woman who lived next door had come out to survey me, moving her head from side to side in short, reptilian jerks. She was a thin black woman with wiry white hair, wearing a housecoat and fuzzy slippers and huge glasses on a beaded chain. Her hands were on her hips and she was scowling furiously. “You that nurse?”
    “Yes. I’m Abby.”
    “
I
know.”
    I smiled at her and for a moment she stopped scowling. But then her face grew fierce again and she pointed her finger at me. “I’m ’on tell you something. You lucky to be alive!”
    “Well.… Yes.”
    “Das what I said!”
    “And how are you today, Mrs. Johnson?”
    “Don’t be fooling with me, now.”
    “I’m not.”
    “All right, then.” She closed her door at the same time that Ida opened hers. “Frankie’s got an engine in here,” she said. “He’s going to fix it up and the guy’s going to pay him a lot of money for it, and then we’re going out for a steak dinner.”
    I stepped past a greasy engine laid out on newspaper.
    Frankie, sitting at the table with his coffee cup of what was probably whiskey, said, “And what else?”
    “Baked potato.”
    “And …?”
    “Cheesecake!” she said, and then looked quickly over at me. “I can cheat sometimes. Sometimes I can just cheat.”
    I said nothing. What the hell, I was thinking. We’re all lucky to be alive.
    Toward the end of the week, Richard was watching an old black-and-white movie when I arrived. A man and a woman, both wearing huge shoulder pads, were standing in an office pretending to talk business, but mostly making eyes at each other. Richard nodded at me in a way that was almost friendly. “How are you?” I asked, and then instantly regretted saying something he’d surely use against me.
    But he only stood up and said, “A little better, actually. I’ve been able to get around the apartment pretty good today.”
    He headed for the bedroom and passed Laura, coming out. She was adjusting a brightly colored scarf around her neck. “Gotta go to work,” she said. “But could I talk to you for just a minute first?”
    We went into the kitchen and Laura said, in a whisper, “I