Life is Sweet (23 page)

“Where my Walt angsting began.”

There was a pause over the line before Matthew said, “If you have doubts about him, there are ways to clear them up. A DNA test.”

“I'm considering that,” Becca admitted. “But right now it feels . . . odd. I mean, he's in the hospital. He almost died without telling me. So now . . .”

“It's confusing, I know.”

She sighed. “That's the understatement of the day. I know this sounds awful, but I wish I could dial my life back a month. I would tell month-ago me never to pick up strange men on the road.”

“Your month-ago self should have known that already.”

“Month-ago me was incredibly naïve. Present-day me just wants to flee to the hills.”

“You can't do that,” Matthew said. “Tell you what—come over to dinner with Olivia and me tonight.”

“At Nicole's?”

There was a pause. “Uh, no. At my place. Nicole had to go out of town and just called to say she wouldn't be in until late. So Olivia's staying at a friend's after school and the parents will drop her at my place after I get home from work.”

Nicole was going out of town? She'd only just come back.

All sorts of things about this scenario gave Becca pause. “I'm not sure . . .”

“Please?” he said. “Olivia gets bored at my place, but she might actually enjoy herself if you're there.”

She couldn't say she wasn't tempted. It would be good to have someone to talk to about everything that had been going on. And Olivia would be there, which was a plus. Her presence would keep things on a platonic level. No matter how strong her own feelings, Becca didn't want to become more entangled in Matthew's life while his relationship with Nicole was still limping along.

“Okay.”

“Great,” he said. “You've given this worker drone something to look forward to after a long day.”

There was nothing platonic about the anticipation in his voice, but the prospect of seeing a couple of friendly faces at the end of the day was too tempting for her to change her mind. She got the directions to his place and rang off.

She bought her lemons and drove to the hospital. When she went by Walt's room, clutching her cupcake sack, she found him asleep, his hat shading his eyes, siesta-style. She considered leaving the cupcakes by the side of his bed, but then remembered a nurse saying something about a restricted diet. Usually if there were restrictions, sugar and fat were the first casualties. She needed to find out more about that.

In the corridor, a glimpse of Dr. Atar made her think of a way to optimize her cupcake gift. “Dr. Atar?” She trotted after the woman's white lab coat.

The doctor swung around and Becca held out the bag. “I wanted to bring you something, to thank you.”

“Is that something edible?” Dr. Atar asked. “Because I'm running on fumes right now.”

“Cupcakes. Enjoy them.”

“Lifesaver! I should offer you a free appendectomy.”

“Free advice will do,” Becca said. “Would this be a good time to talk to you about Walt?”

The doctor beckoned her and kept walking—double-time, like a person who didn't waste a second more than she had to with trivial things such as getting from one place to another. They stopped at a break area with vending machines at the end of a corridor. Dr. Atar put money in the coffee machine and waited for the mechanism to excrete something purporting to be a cappuccino. Becca regretted not bringing a thermos of coffee with her, too.

They settled at a Formica table and the doctor inhaled a chocolate cupcake.

“I was hoping to see you today,” Dr. Atar said. “You'll be glad to know that your father will be discharged tomorrow. He won't be stuck over the weekend.”

“He's not my father,” Becca said. “Maybe not, at least.”

The doctor sipped her coffee and seemed to weigh whether this was pertinent information for her to know. “Well, just so he has a place to go home to. He needs taken care of, and someone to pester him about sticking to his diet and going to his treatments.”

Usually Becca felt confident of her abilities to pester people, but the prospect of being her newfound father's keeper made her heart sink.

“What about long term?” she asked the doctor. “You said he was at end stage. But if he keeps going to dialysis, he'll be okay, right?”

“Not indefinitely. There are patients who deteriorate, even with dialysis.”

“What about transplants? I read on the Internet that those are more common now. Couldn't he just get a kidney?”

“It's not quite that simple.”

“There are sixteen thousand done per year,” Becca said, flaunting her Google skills.

“Yes, but there are waiting lists. It depends on eligibility and well, frankly, it depends on the patient and his support network. Your fa—Mr. Johnson—has been lax in going to dialysis. When a transplant is done, the surgical team wants to know that the patient will be willing to take the anti-rejection drugs regularly. Otherwise, it's a waste of a kidney. There are somewhere around a hundred thousand people on the donor waiting lists.”

“That sounds sort of cold-blooded. One hundred thousand against the life of my father.”

Dr. Atar leaned forward. “I thought you said he wasn't your father.”

“He isn't, exactly.” Becca shifted in the molded plastic chair. “Just technically.”

The doctor chewed this over along with the last crumbs of cupcake. “It's different if there's a live donor. That cuts out the wait list issue, certainly.”

“A live donor,” Becca repeated. Someone like . . . herself.

She couldn't help recoiling a little. She didn't consider herself a selfish person, but life was difficult enough without hacking out body parts to give to strange men who wandered into her life. Weren't kidneys sort of essential? She wasn't even sure of her relationship to Walt. He was just this person who had happened to her, someone she now appeared to be saddled with.

“If you want, I can give you the names and numbers of the closest hospitals that are on the kidney registries,” the doctor said. “They could tell you more than I can.”

“Thank you.”

Becca got the information and swung past Walt's room again. He was awake. She told him that he would be getting out tomorrow, and that she had plans to take him to see kidney transplant specialists.

“I don't want that,” he said.

Becca had felt ambivalent about the idea of getting involved in this process, but if anything Walt looked even more reluctant. Unfortunately, his digging in his heels made her want to slap the reins and mush him forward.

“It'll just be a preliminary thing,” she said. “When I was reading on the Internet, they said you shouldn't waste time. Getting on the lists is important.”

And he'd wasted enough time already.

His shoulders lifted in a fatalistic shrug. Maybe he would perk up when they sprang him from this place. Feeling optimistic in a hospital was difficult.

She was about to make her escape when a loud knock sounded at the door, followed by the entrance of a clown carrying a banjo. Clowns creeped her out even in circuses. Having one pop up out of the blue scared her out of her wits.

“Hi, folks! I'm Banjo!” His red, white, and blue painted mouth widened in a crazed grin. “Anybody in here want a song?”

Whether they wanted one or not, they were assaulted with a manic rendering of “Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” that was made even more uncomfortable for Becca because the clown was staring at her as if
she
were the peculiar one. Being viewed as an oddity by a person in tricolor pancake makeup and yarn hair took her ego down a peg. She tried to smile, although she was sure the expression was coming across as a frozen grimace.

When he reached his wow finish, the clown flapped over to Walt in his oversized shoes. “How are we today?”

“That was pretty good,” Walt said, ignoring the question altogether. “I always liked banjo. Know anything else?”

Becca barely hid her exasperation at his encouraging the man. What evil hospital administrator okayed the plan to let clowns with banjos loose in the wards? Was there a person alive who considered this Bozo-meets-
Hee-Haw
act therapeutic?

The clown turned to Becca. “Isn't your name Tina?” the clown asked Becca.

Oh dear Lord. Not now.
“Uh, no.”

Unfazed, he dropped his jaw and gave her an openmouthed, toothy smile. “Oh, I think it is! Banjo's a TV buff, and he's even eaten one of your super-scrumptious cakes! And now I'd like to sing a song especially for you!”

“That's not—”

“Does this ring any bells?”

As if to ramp up her discomfort to the umpteenth degree, the clown burst into the theme song from
Me Minus You
. Once upon a time, there had been a sweet ballad with that title, but the network had obviously decided that it wasn't cool enough, so they commissioned a new song set to a cheery pop tune, à la
Friends.
Even though the banjo couldn't capture the rock beat, nothing could disguise the earnest nineties cheesiness of the lyrics.

On the day she finally sloughed off this mortal coil, and some TV nut set a tribute video to her on YouTube, that would be the song playing. Though Becca didn't underestimate the appeal of having a tribute of any kind, she did wish she could have had a better theme song. It wasn't
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
theme. It wasn't even
That Girl
. But she supposed if she'd wanted a better song, she should have been a better actress.

The song also lacked a second chorus, so, uncomfortably, Banjo the therapy clown reprised the first verse, only with more emotion this time around. Becca shifted her gaze to Walt, hoping to transmit a visual apology for putting him through this. To her shock, his toes were tapping beneath the sheet. And when Banjo reached “my mind played on
meeeeeeee,
” Walt joined for the rest of the song.

The man had been completely absent from her life. But somewhere along the way, he'd absorbed the theme song of that stupid show. It couldn't have been anything a guy like him would want to watch. And yet, it appeared he had.

For her.

Chapter 18

He hadn't realized how much he looked forward to seeing Becca until he answered his doorbell that night and she was there.

“You wouldn't believe the day I've had,” she said as he ushered her inside. “Crazy friends, doctors, clowns.”

“Real clowns?”

“
Singing
clowns.” She handed him a bottle of wine. “This is the only antidote for singing clowns that I could think of. Sounds like we both need it.”

“No one was singing where I was, at least.” No one ever sang at the Office of Management and Budget. Which probably was a blessing.

He led her back to the kitchen, but she stopped in the living room, doing a slow 360. “I think I know why you need the wine. Your house was burglarized.”

“I just moved in six months ago,” he said, dismayed to hear his voice echoing around the bare walls.

“Six months? And you haven't bought a chair yet?”

“I have a couch. Why would I need a chair?”

She put her hands on her hips. “That sounds pathetic, even for a guy.”

“The reason I don't have extra furniture is that I spend so much time at Nicole's.”

Mentioning her name caused a subtle atmospheric disturbance. Becca broke her gaze from his and all at once seemed very interested in his television. “At least you sprang for a TV stand.”

“Of course. I'm not an animal.” He took in her smile and beckoned her with a tilt of his head. “The kitchen isn't quite so man cave–like. There are chairs.”

They were folding chairs, but Becca didn't comment on them. She was too busy checking out his cooking stuff—what very little there was. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Some people go to other people's houses and snoop through medicine cabinets or bookshelves. Me, I have to check out kitchen gadgets.”

“You'll have a short snooping session here. I have a can opener, a corkscrew, and a blender.”

“I'll take the corkscrew.”

She opened the bottle of wine, but didn't seem too concerned about letting it rest before pouring out two glasses.

“Not too much for me,” he said, starting to get out stuff for the salad. He had already emptied a bag of greens into a bowl in a feeble effort to camouflage what a lazy chef he was. “I'm driving Olivia home later.”

She looked around, noticing Olivia's absence for the first time. “Where is she?”

“She called a while ago to say she was going out to eat with her friend and the friend's parents. Olivia loves restaurants. Plus, I think she's had it with my cooking.” He gestured to the stove, where an empty jar of pasta sauce gave a hint about the meal to come. “I have a limited repertoire, especially for things that don't involve either a grill or a microwave.”

“I love pasta.” Becca recorked the bottle. “I guess I shouldn't drink too much either. I have to go home and figure out where I'm going to put Walt. I can't spring a man from the hospital and have him sleep on a cot in my storage closet.”

“True.” He hadn't considered this before.

“And you've seen my apartment—there's no privacy. So I'm going to have to rig something up. I shouldn't have discarded all my screens. You don't happen to have any spare walls lying around, do you?”

“You don't really have a setup for two people,” he observed.

“I know, but what can I do? I'm responsible for him. I felt that way before, but now on top of everything else, he's my maybe-dad, so I really can't turn him loose in Leesburg.”

Matthew chopped a carrot. “He could stay here.”

Becca's eyes widened. “
Here?
Are you crazy?”

“No crazier than you. At least my place has a second bedroom. Or a room, period.”

“Yeah, but this is Walt we're talking about. He's my headache, not yours.”

“I don't see it as a headache. Just a favor for a friend who's down on his luck.”

“Friend?”

“Okay, an acquaintance.”

Becca looked doubtful. “Sure, he's a nice enough old guy . . . although I'm not entirely convinced he's not a con artist.”

“You still doubt he's your father?” He watched her face and saw the strain of uncertainty fighting with a strong hunch. “That's another reason it would be good for him to stay here,” he continued. “I don't have any skin in the game, so to speak. If you're worried that he's trying to play on your sympathies, that won't be so much of an issue if he's not underfoot all the time.”

“No, all my sympathy would be for you, because he'd be under
your
feet.”

He shook his head. “I'm not around that much. Although now that Nicole's back, I . . .”

As soon as he started to say the words, he didn't know how to finish. Now that Nicole was back, the future seemed more uncertain than ever. He'd spoken reflexively, because so much of his life in Leesburg had been wrapped up in Nicole and Olivia. But now that she was back and he was no longer responsible for Olivia, there didn't seem to be anything holding them together.

Becca watched him intently. “Nicole had to take off on another business trip already?”

“A short business jaunt, she said.”

She sipped her wine. “Don't take this the wrong way, but I think your head's a little screwed up right now. A few days ago you were telling me that you and Nicole were basically through.”

“We are, but it's complicated. There's been practically no time for us to talk things out.”

“Uh-huh.”

He hated how he sounded. “The relationship is on its last legs, but Nicole's seemed so stressed out lately, I haven't wanted to add to it by having
the conversation
. And Olivia's being around complicates things.”

Becca didn't say anything for a long while, and his discomfort grew.

“I'm not a cheater,” he said. “I invited you here as a friend. Which I hope you are, and will be, no matter what happens.” The more he spoke, the more he wanted to tell himself to shut up. Everything was coming out all wrong.

“I will be,” she agreed. “And I believe you're not a cheater. But I still worry that I'm blundering into something at the worst possible moment.” She tilted her head. “Did Nicole say where she was going?”

“Baltimore. She's supposed to be back tonight.”

Becca absorbed this information. “That's another reason I couldn't pawn Walt off on you right now. You've got your own problems.”

From her worried expression, he began to wonder if “going to Baltimore” was a new euphemism for unsavory activity.

“I don't really see any connection. And as for Walt being in the way, whether I'm here or not doesn't matter. During my month at Nicole's with Olivia, I got used to having someone around all the time. This place feels so empty by comparison.”

She laughed. “This place
is
empty.”

“Right—there's plenty of room. Another person around wouldn't bother me. I swear.”

“Let me think about it,” she said. “They're releasing him tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow would be fine.”

Her gaze met his. “I still don't think you know what you're letting yourself in for, but I appreciate the offer.”

“I suppose I should ask Walt if he has any preference,” he said. “We've been discussing him as if he were a minor.”

“His instinct seems to be to dig in his heels and do nothing. When I mentioned going to the transplant doctors, he immediately dismissed the idea.”

“That was your first reaction, too, as I recall. You worried Walt had come all this way to wheedle a kidney out of you. Now you're hauling him off to the transplant center.”

“Just to get facts,” she said. “I certainly don't plan on going under the knife myself. But he could get on a donor list, and it sounds as if he needs to get on one soon.”

“But the decision is Walt's,” Matthew pointed out.

“Of course.” She looked at the collection of veggies next to the cutting board. “I've been sitting here rehashing my problems while letting you do all the work.”

“It's not really work.” But he stepped aside and let her chop cucumbers and tomatoes while he finished the pasta. He told her about his day in DC, sitting in on a meeting with his crazy boss, who cracked Brazil nuts during everyone's presentations.

While they ate, Matthew asked about her visit with Walt, and she went into more detail about her conversation with Walt and the therapy clown. Matthew could just imagine her face when Banjo had started singing.

She seemed amused now, though. “And to think, I came to Leesburg with the belief that I could escape my past. Now I'm having it sung to me in public places.”

“You talk as if you were involved in some kind of nefarious activity back in Los Angeles.”

“Some of the critics certainly thought so,” she said.

He leaned forward. “Why would you want to escape your past? You lived an experience that a lot of people dream about.”

“But they dream of the good parts,” she said. “Going to awards ceremonies in limos, flying first class, and being paid a lot. They don't think about the stab of rejection when you can't find work and you realize that everyone sees you as a product with an expired shelf life. Or friends turning their backs on you because your ratings are in the toilet. I guess becoming a TV trivia question is a kind of immortality, so that's not bad, but along with that comes being confused with all the child stars who ended up suicides, druggies, or generally screwed-up people. I've had someone come up to me in the mall and tell me that she'd heard I'd OD'd. Turns out she was confusing me with the actress who played Buffy in
Family Affair.
”

“Your shows were a quarter of a century apart,” Matthew said.

“To some people it's all a blur. Everybody gets mixed up about something. I can never remember my conquistadors. Did Vasco da Gama discover the Aztec Empire or the Cape of Good Hope? Maybe that mall lady could have told me, but she definitely had her pigtailed TV kids confused.”

They were doing dishes when Olivia was dropped off. Matthew let her in and noticed she wasn't quite her ebullient self. She didn't even seem all that glad to see Becca. In fact, she barely made eye contact with her, staring around the kitchen instead, like a detective looking for clues.

“Did you have fun?” Matthew asked her.

Olivia shrugged. “It was Deirdre and her mom.” As if that explained everything.

“Oh right,” Becca said. “The fruit bar girl.”

“It's not her fault that she can't eat stuff,” Olivia said.

Conversation flagged, which surprised Matthew. Usually Olivia lit up like a sparkler when Becca was around, but not tonight.

After Becca left, Olivia flopped onto the couch and shot an accusing glare at him. “I thought you and Becca were just friends.”

“We are.”

“How come you two are hanging out without Mom?” she asked. “You were drinking wine, even. Isn't that what people do on dates?”

“On dates, or when they happen to feel like drinking a glass of wine,” he said. “Olivia, if there's something bothering you—”

“It doesn't matter,” she said, cutting him off. “I know adults are liars. I just don't understand why you can't be honest about it.”

Despite the pretzel logic, the words made sense in an emotional way, and they hit their mark. Looking at Olivia, he was ashamed. He'd known for weeks that his relationship with Nicole was fizzling. He'd just been too much of a coward to do anything about it. Plus, Olivia made breaking up with Nicole infinitely harder. They'd bonded. He didn't feel like a real parent, but he couldn't imagine just bowing out of her life. But that was what he was going to have to do, wasn't it?

It was nearly ten o'clock when Nicole called. “I'm so sorry,” she said in a flustered voice. “How are things?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Well, they're not fine here.”

“You're still working this late?”

The question was met with a frosty pause. “Yes. This late. Do you think you could take O over to my house and stay with her one more night? I'll be back in the morning.”

“Of course. It's no problem,” he lied, not relishing driving over to Nicole's.

He passed the phone to Olivia. While she was saying good night to her mom, he packed an overnight bag.
One more night,
Nicole had said.

As if she didn't intend for there to be other nights, either.

“I'm sorry you have to babysit me again,” Olivia said, sulking a little against the passenger-side window on the way back to her house.

“I'm not.”

“You don't seem happy,” she said.

“Neither do you. What's wrong?”

He glanced over and caught her biting her lip. “Nothing's been right since Mom got back,” she said. “First she was sort of frantic, and then she spent a day crying. And then she just decided to go back to work, even though she'd said she was going to take a week off and we'd have all sorts of time together. She's barely even asked about the birthday party.”

“Your mom loves her work. She's lucky that way.”

“She loves her work more than me,” Olivia grumbled.

“Not true.”

They waited through a traffic light before Olivia said in a rush, “Sometimes I wish you and Becca were my parents.”

“O, that doesn't make sense.”

“Maybe not, but I'm almost a hundred percent sure I'd be happier if you were.”