Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (35 page)

“Sam told me you were going in this morning to see Sarah, and I wanted to catch you before you left. I have something to talk to you about.”

“You’ve already seen Sam this morning?”

“He was coming to see you but I knew you weren’t … 
up
yet so I met him before he got to your door and visited with him for a bit. Made him some coffee and eggs. I don’t think he eats right.”

Betty had
covered
for her?

Des looked around for the flying pigs, but the sky was perfectly clear. Betty narrowed her eyes at Des as if she was daring her to comment, but Des wasn’t a middle child for nothing. She knew when to keep her mouth shut.

“What did you want to talk about, Mrs. Lynch?”

“It’s about Paddy’s limo.”

“Oh my God. You and Rennie busted it.”

Mrs. Lynch crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t swear. Of course we didn’t bust it. We’re almost finished, actually, and it looks like it’s going to run great.”

“Oh. So what about the limo?”

Suddenly Betty looked uncertain, and she never looked uncertain. She hugged her arms around herself tighter and gave Des a little smile. “I know you had to pull the limo out of storage because you didn’t have a choice, but I admit it’s been nice to see it around. A lot of folks have said the same. I think it’s been real good, too, that you’ve given rides to people in the neighborhood that have needed them. Like Rennie and his
friends, and some of the older people. I just think all of that is … Good.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Lynch. I think so, too. I’ll try to keep that going once the limo’s done. I think I could, too. Not so much as I work at the library, but my hope is that my developer business will get enough clients that I’ll be working from home. Maybe I can arrange my schedule to offer rides.”

“No. I don’t think you should do that, Destiny.”

Des tried to stay on top of this conversation but it was impossible. “Okay. What do you think I should do?”

“I think
I
should drive folks around.” Betty tipped her chin up and dropped her arms away from her chest.

“In the limo?”

“That’s right. In the limo.”

“So you want to borrow the limo to drive Mrs. Layton to her colonoscopy?”

Mrs. Lynch shook her had and smiled at Des. “No dear. I want to buy Paddy’s limo from you. I want to start a free dispatch service for the neighborhood, probably through the church, and have a regular schedule. I’ve worked it all out, on paper, I mean. Now that the limo’s converted, my fuel costs will be almost nil. I know what that limo means to you kids, but I think Paddy would have liked this idea. It’s something like what he thought he would do when he retired.”

“You want to buy the limo?”

“Yes, dear.”

“And drive people in the neighborhood around all day?”

“That’s right. I’ve priced out similar models, and it’s a little hard to come to a perfect price because your dad had the custom Ford inline 6 diesel engine installed, which is why Rennie was able to convert it at all, and a diesel in a Town Car is rare. But with its miles and body condition, I think fifty-five hundred is fair. I’ll pay for the conversion costs that Rennie incurred, of course. Now, if you want to do a straight trade and take Marvin’s car, we can talk about that, but I think you should consider taking the money and thinking about your transportation needs. I’ll let you rent Marvin’s car in exchange for maintenance and a full detail upon return. Maintenance means a complete oil and fluid change every three thousand miles on the dot, Destiny Marie.”

Destiny just looked at Betty, her mind blank. Then her brain latched onto one thing.

You should consider taking the money and thinking about your transportation needs
.

“You think I should go to Wales.” Des blurted it out without even thinking about how strategic it was to let on to Betty that she knew what she might be thinking.

Betty’s eye contact faltered, just a little. Barely. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your young man. This is a business deal, between you and me. You don’t have to decide right away, but I think it’s a practical thing to do. I’ve been at loose ends since I retired, and I don’t mind saying that I think I might get the better end of this deal, but it’s you who has to decide.”

Oh
. Nice. She wondered if Betty learned to lay on guilt like that in some special class for old ladies at the church, like a catechism school for busybodies.

Des took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it,
Betty
.”

She raised an eyebrow. High.

“If we’re going to make a business deal,” Des
almost
teased, “then we should be on a first-name basis, don’t you think?”

“You go on and see your sister. Sam’ll be there, I expect. We’ll talk later.” Betty moved to head into her house. “You did feed your man breakfast, didn’t you? A real one? Not just coffee and those awful sweet things that go into the toaster?”

“Um.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Do not feed Hefin breakfast, Mrs. Lynch. He’s too nice and he’ll take the time and I have no idea what it is he needs to do today.”

There went her eyebrow again.

“Okay. But nothing fancy. Just eggs, like you did for Sam. And don’t grill him, at least not too much. Remind him that I’ll call him later.”

Des climbed into Marvin’s car as Betty went back to her house to, presumably, stake out Des’s house for Hefin’s appearance.

Wait, was Betty actually going to feed Hefin his morning-after breakfast?

Des rested her forehead against the camel-colored wrapped-leather steering
wheel.

She totally was.

And she wanted to buy her dad’s limo.

And drive around neighborhood people.

Which, it
did
all make sense, that was the thing. Just like it had made sense to sell their family home to the Massersons to raise their family in.

It all made sense.

It also all kind of made her heart hurt. It made her think of engagements and weddings and graduations and baby showers and funerals. All those things that their home had been for, and her dad’s business and whole life had been for.

Her brothers and sister hadn’t really said anything, at all, when she got their dad’s limo out of storage, but they had immediately started asking for rides, eating takeout in the back, telling each other stories. It was part of their shared history,
Burnside’s Fine Limousine Service
. They’d already lost so much could she give this away, too?

It was like since her mom, then her dad, had gone, they’d all just been absorbed into the fabric of the neighborhood, and she couldn’t work out if that was a beautiful thing or if it made her sad. She thought of how DeeDee wanted to preserve the cement threshold with the names of the Burnsides, and how that had meant something to her, and meant something to her, too, to add the names of
her
family alongside.

Maybe Des was just resisting something that was supposed to happen. That would have happened anyway. Maybe if her mom had lived and nagged her dad into quitting smoking so that he had lived, they would have sold their place to get a condo in Florida.

Her family, as it was now, was the four of them and what they wanted, what would make them happy.

Which meant, of course, she needed to know what would make her happy.

I just started thinking about what would happen if I really started going after what I wanted instead of being afraid I didn’t want the right thing, or that I’d lose what it was I wanted or thought I wanted, or of messin’ up
.

He had told her that she wasn’t like he was then, that she didn’t live her life by its restrictions.

She was feeling pretty restricted.

At the same time, she
had
been looking at maps lately

And she had never seen the ocean, or flown in a plane.

She started up Marvin’s car.

What were her transportation needs?

A question for her dad, no doubt, though it was as easy as ever to hear his voice tell her that she would figure it out, that he never worried about her and the other side of a decision in the making. Her dad had planted that strong voice in her, the one that kept after it for months after she lost her job, the one that agreed with Carrie when she said
why not you?

Her mom had left her people for love, and was happy, and loved well. Her mom planted inside Des an ease in loving people.

But there was that little restriction, tight around her heart. Not so little really, the one she felt when she stood inside her dome for too long, or considered selling her dad’s limo, or thought about Hefin asking her to come with him and see the world.

She was missing something, or she was afraid, or just didn’t believe, somehow, that after she was cut out and stuck to the big blank canvas the rest of the picture would fill in.

She let the turbo in Marvin’s car open up a little on the freeway, used the fifth gear.

Someone should, it was what it was made for.

* * *

Des watched the nurse’s face as she changed the dressing where the sutures from Sarah’s chest tube had been. She had been openly pleased when she changed the hip dressings under the wound vac, the strange device sucking pus from the bad wound on Sarah’s hip, but her face did not seem openly pleased looking at the three tiny sutures between Sarah’s ribs.

“Yeowch,” complained Sarah, and she couldn’t even twist around to see what the nurse was doing.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Burnside. It will be tender removing the rest of this gauze, okay?
I don’t like the look of how this is healing.”

Shit
.

She held Sarah’s hand while the nurse painstakingly removed the gauze, then cleaned around the wound with a saline-soaked new piece of gauze. There seemed to be a lot to clean for something so small.

“I’m just going to rest this wound pad against this for now. I have to page on-call to take a look at this, okay?”

“Sure thing,” said Sarah. Her voice was flat, her face angry.

Des slipped her new phone out of her pocket and texted Sam. His message on her voice mail was that he was in the hospital but might not have time to drop by, but he needed to make time, now.

“What are you doing?”

Des shoved the phone back in her pocket.

“Oh. Oh hell no. Did you text Sam?”

Des closed her eyes and blew out a breath. “Yeah.”

“
Fuck
that. He is going to freak, do you know that?”

“He might freak, and I wish he wouldn’t, but he’s also almost always right about this stuff.”

“According to you.”

“According to everyone.”

“We don’t even know anything yet. I haven’t even been cleared for PT. I won’t be cleared for PT until the leech thing is done with my hip and my body weight is in the ideal range and basically, three thousand other rules.”

“But you are getting PT. Every day.”

“Raising my arms over my head. Some guy moving my legs around for me. Big deal.”

“It is a big deal.”

“Well, I’m not even going to get to do that if something else has gone bad here. If that wound is infected, I’ll have to go on IV antibiotics again. I’ve been hoping to get approval for oral blood thinners instead of IV, so I can lose the IV completely, but if they put me on antibiotics, they won’t even think about it forever.”

Des tried to stay calm, but Sarah was right. So many things in this environment worked as a setback. Every guideline was incredibly narrow. Every decision took forever and had limited results. Sarah might be young, and work hard, but she was also impatient.

Des had lost her job all those months ago, but Sarah had lost that and her mobility. Time with her friends. Her apartment. Control over what she ate or did from hour to hour. Restful sleep. Minimal comfort. All of that was just
gone
, for her.

Sam walked in wearing a white coat with a blue badge that the hospital’s urgent-care clinic used. He had Sarah’s chart.

“That has to be against ethics, or something,” Sarah said.

“It’s not. You can look at your chart anytime that you want and show it to whoever you want.” Sam was flipping to the last plastic flag in her chart. He hadn’t even looked up.

“I don’t want to show it to you. It’s my chart. If it’s my call, then hand it over.”

He looked up then. “Seriously?”

She stuck her hand out. “Seriously, give it to me.”

He didn’t. He just kept reading. Then he tossed the chart on the bedside table. “Let me see it.”

“See what?”

“Your wound.”

“No fucking way Sam. No.”

“Hey, Sarah.” Des stepped around the bed and got between Sarah and Sam. “Please, just let him see it. The more brains you have working on your situation the better, right?”

Sarah rolled her eyes.

Des looked at Sam. “I called you because I was worried and because the nurse is too, but I mean this, don’t be an asshole, Sam. Don’t make me sorry I called. Don’t put me in a position where I have to decide if I am the last of us who tells you anything or if I’m going to cut you loose, too, because you act like this.”

Sam pushed his hands through his hair. “Jesus Christ, Des.”

“I mean it. Don’t be an asshole.”

“If you’re going to look, now’s your chance, Sam.” Sarah pulled the side of her
gown forward and exposed where the nurse had rested the pad.

Des backed away, and Sam looked. His forehead wrinkled and he grabbed a glove from the box mounted on the wall above Sarah’s head, snapped it on, then ignored Sarah’s jumping and wincing as he probed it.

“I’ll make sure they culture this. And I’m going to have the thoracic guy paged. I think it should be imaged to see if you’re working on another fistula someplace even worse than your hip.”

Sarah yanked her gown back. “IV antibiotics?”

“Oh, definitely. How’s your pain?”

“That’s been good, no more than three on a scale of one to ten, or do you prefer I use the pain scale that has the little smiley and frowny faces on it? I can eat and drink just fine. They haven’t removed my catheter, so I am still peeing in a bag, but the PCA who drains and measures
my pee
does not seem alarmed. I’m shitting and passing gas. I’m turned every two hours and keep the squeezing inflatable things on my legs so another clot won’t try to kill me and yes, I am blowing into the thing every hour and coughing. Am I missing anything? Oh wait, my dignity, but you could give a fuck about that.”