Chapter 13 #2
“Okay, sure,” I said, wondering why she wasn’t staying at the inn with her wife.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m not staying at the inn with my wife,” she continued.
“Well, it’s not really any of my business,” I demurred.
“Nah, whatever. You’ve met that family, you know there’s lots of dirt. I’m Lis’s dirt. You know how long she and I have been together?”
“No,” I said.
“Fifteen years.” She jabbed a finger into my arm to punctuate each syllable. “You know how many times I’ve been to her mother’s house? Zero. When she does family stuff, I’m not invited. After fifteen years! Isn’t that pathetic?”
I didn’t think I should respond, but I thought it was more sad than anything. She must have loved Lis very deeply to have put herself through that kind of disrespect for so long.
Or, a little Ricky voice in my head piped up, she must have been playing a really long game, waiting for those gazillions to make it worthwhile. I hoped the little Ricky voice was wrong, but I had to admit he might have a point.
“So she’s been trying to reconcile with her mom after that crone wouldn’t talk to her for years,” Denise went on, “and to my mind, wouldn’t a true reconciliation include her mom accepting her fully?
I’m like, if she wants to make nice, bring me along and let her make nice with your whole life, right?
Lis waffled and wavered about it for a while, but when it came down to it, she wouldn’t bring me, yet again.
So I came on my own, and have been staying in a motel down the highway, trying to convince Lis to change her mind and let me come show them how much I love her and how proud of her I am.
Anyway, turned out that was all a waste of time. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds really hard. You shouldn’t be treated like that.”
Denise looked down at her hands in her lap. “Yeah, that’s what my therapist says, too. But, like, that’s the one thing, you know? Everything else is great. It’s a really big one thing, but it’s the only one. It feels like I’d be losing too much if I let that be the sticking point.”
Losing too much, like a big payday now that the old lady’s dead? the Ricky voice in my head wondered, dripping with suspicion.
“I feel kinda guilty, though,” Denise said, still studying her hands.
“I mean, now that Cecilia’s actually dead—see, Lis was written out of her will a long time ago.
And I thought, this reconciliation might mean more if Cecilia put Lis back in the will, like, as a show of good faith, you know?
I guess I also felt like, if Cecilia still couldn’t accept Lis fully—i.e.
, accept me, too—then at least she could paper over it by leaving us some money.
Isn’t that awful? I feel like such a ghoul. ”
I considered this. “Based on what I’ve observed of Lis’s family this week, it seems like it might be very hard to have healthy relationships when there’s that much money involved.”
“You might be right,” Denise nodded. “Especially when there’s someone as stubborn and narrow-minded as Cecilia in the middle of all those relationships.
I shouldn’t speak ill of her now, I suppose, but she never acknowledged me, so what do I owe her?
It’s never been about money for Lis and me, anyway.
She’s a marriage and family counselor—that’s pretty funny, right?
—and I teach high school chemistry. We love our little life in Portland.
We don’t need all the crap that comes with that kind of money.
I mean, look at what’s happened. Richard probably killed himself, and Cecilia’s such a drama queen, she couldn’t live without her little prince.
She had to go and pull a Debbie Reynolds on us. ”
I was shocked. “You think Richard killed himself?”
“Lis does. There wasn’t any note, but he and Rachel were having a lot of problems. He was drinking a lot, he’d lost his position as department chair and probably would have gotten fired if he didn’t have tenure, we’re fairly sure he was having an affair, and he and Rachel were always on the verge of divorce.
She was putting the screws on him to collect some money he had loaned to his cousin, you know, Mary Alice, who owns the inn?
We think Rachel wanted to make sure she got her money back before she left him. ”
“Wow,” I said. This was a lot to swallow.
The Ricky voice floated back into my head. But how much of it is true? Any of it?
“Anyway, now that I think about it, I think Lis mentioned you guys to me yesterday.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, she called me while her mom was getting a massage, which—well, you know how that ended. She was telling me about this cute young couple at the inn, and how her mom seemed to really like you guys. I think she was starting to consider letting me come. So, thanks for that. You almost got me across that finish line.”
If that had been how Cecilia showed she liked you, I was glad she hadn’t disliked me. “Glad we could help, sort of,” I said. “We are usually a little more with it than we have been today—well, Ricky is, anyway. Sometimes.”
Denise laughed. “I think it helped her to see her mom interact with other gay folks, that’s all. Our circle in Portland is queer as you like, but that had never intersected with her family before.”
I smiled vaguely at her, wondering how Ricky was doing. She cut into my thoughts. “So how much longer are you guys staying at the inn?”
Oh, crud. We were supposed to have checked out by now! We were supposed to be checking into a different resort, nearly two hours away, within the next thirty minutes!
“I think I need to figure that out. Sorry. Thanks for reminding me. Excuse me,” I stammered, scrambling to my feet and fumbling in my pocket for my phone. I stepped out onto the porch, my mind doing its own scramble to figure out what we could do.
Denise was probably right; Ricky almost certainly wouldn’t be able to drive this afternoon, and maybe not tomorrow, either.
I couldn’t drive us the hundred miles to the other resort—I couldn’t, right?
No, of course not—so it looked like we were stuck in Rose Beach after all.
I wondered, as I dialed the inn, whether there were any other rooms available at Denise’s motel up the highway, in the event that Mary Alice needed us out.
She was very kind and accommodating, though, when I explained what had happened. Of course we could stay, she said.
Then I called the other resort and asked if we could shift our reservation by a couple of days, catching them on our return trip to California. That worked, too. Crisis averted. I had fumbled earlier in trying to get Ricky to the clinic, but at least now I could smooth out our logistics.
I returned to the waiting room to find Ricky sitting in his wheelchair in front of Denise, looking completely wiped out, his ankle elevated and wrapped tightly in a thick bandage. “Look who’s here,” Denise said, beaming. “You better check in with the nurse, but then I can take you back to the inn.”
The nurse met me at the check-in desk. “It’s a pretty standard sprain,” she said.
“Keep an eye on the swelling. It should go down in the next day or two. Keep it elevated, keep him off it as much as possible, keep the bandage on with good compression, ice it as long as he can stand it. Nothing to get too excited about.”
“Can he drive with it?”
The nurse shot some side-eye in Ricky’s direction.
“Certainly not today. It really should be nothing to get too excited about, but he got excited. You’ve got kind of a baby on your hands when it comes to pain, huh?
We had to give him some serious painkillers to calm him down.
The doctor gave him a prescription, but if I were you”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“I wouldn’t fill it.
He doesn’t need it. Give him ibuprofen if he needs something. ”
I glanced over my shoulder at Ricky. He caught me looking, so I flashed him a smile.
He closed his eyes in return in a show of exaggerated suffering.
Ricky having a low tolerance for pain was an interesting development.
It didn’t exactly please me, but it helped sometimes to have some reminders that this fearless, sweet, take-charge, funny, impossibly handsome devil was actually human.
“He said you’d take care of payment,” the nurse said, breaking into my thoughts.
Devil, indeed. “The cost for his visit today is five hundred dollars. It looks like his insurance has a high deductible. He said he’s on a plan from the exchange; you know, if you have an employer-provided plan, you should consider adding him to your coverage. ”
Adding Ricky to my insurance seemed like a big leap for a fake relationship, never mind the major flaw with that plan. “I’m still on my mom’s insurance,” I said.
Five hundred bucks, though. I wondered as I looked at the cards in my wallet if it would be wrong of me to give Ricky some employer-provided healthcare anyway.
I couldn’t really afford it, and I did need him healthy to be able to finish my assignment.
Maybe it was a work-related injury. If anyone questioned that, we could point to the photos he took at Ronnie’s Roastery, right across the street from where he fell.
Sure, he didn’t take them today, but who would know?
I pulled out my corporate credit card. “Will this work?”