37 - VERSAILLES
Lacey
I had changed in the locker room before leaving. Slate-blue blouse from the back of my locker, the one I had been keeping for clinic photos and had not worn in a year and a half. Hair quickly redone.
I had stood in front of the locker-room mirror with a paper towel in one hand and my lipstick in the other and said to myself, out loud, this is a business meeting. The woman in the mirror had not believed me.
Then I got a text.
Derek. Car is outside waiting whenever you're ready.
The car was a black SUV. The driver was tall and wiry. He introduced himself as Karl with an easy smile. I got in. "You're Mr. Harrington's driver?" I asked.
He chuckled. "No, Derek doesn't have a driver. I was just the one who was free at the moment. Usually it's Aaron."
The drive to Versailles took us out of Lexington into low rolling country. A winding road showing off the old stone fences built by Scottish stonemasons maybe a hundred and fifty years ago. Beautiful pastures with million-dollar horses and impenetrable forest that Daniel Boone had made famous.
My phone rang twenty minutes in. Harrington.
"Hi?"
"Hi." There was a clatter behind him, a pan being set down hard. "Quick question."
"Go."
"Do you like fish?"
"Um. Depends."
"What's the failure mode?"
"Salmon under fluorescent lights at a hotel buffet."
"Reasonable. What I'm making is Iraqi. Spicy baked fish. If you hate it, I have a frozen pizza behind a bag of peas. I'm running a little behind because of Jessica. Have Aaron show you in."
He hung up.
The driveway was a quarter mile long. The house at the end of it was big, with stone walls, two main wings, and more chimneys than I bothered to count.
Mature oaks. To the right, a low cluster of outbuildings, each larger than my comfortable house.
Farther on, the long line of a paddock with horses moving along it, more pasture and what might have been cattle in the failing light. A working ranch, maybe?
The house had lamps lit in every front room and a pair of small purple rubber boots near the front door.
The man holding the door open was about six-foot-three, broad through the shoulders. Friendly face, scraggly blond beard. The easy grin of a man who didn't have to work very hard at being intimidating.
"Dr. Bonds. I'm Aaron. Derek is upstairs."
"Hello, Aaron. Just Lacey, please."
"Hop on Pop, Frog and Toad, Go, Dog. Go. Tonight's looking like a five-book night and Jessica's the boss."
It took me a moment to catch what he meant, and my laugh came late.
He took my coat. The hallway had dark wide-plank floors and Jessica's small pink jacket on a peg three feet off the ground and a drawing on the wall at adult eye level: a green house, a blue cloud, a yellow person who took up about a third of the page, labeled DAD in shaky uppercase letters.
It was in a frame that looked like it cost about five hundred dollars.
He left me in a sitting room at the back.
The tall windows offered a view over a stone terrace and pasture, and a fire was lit in a fieldstone fireplace.
A pile of children's books on a low table.
There was a sketch of a horse on the side table, signed Jessica. The room smelled like garlic and lemon.
Pamela had told me about this room four and a half years ago, in clinic, between scans. The back room had the pasture view, and they had put the couches there because Derek hated the formal room. This one was warmer, smaller, and more lived-in than the one I had pictured in my head.
The kitchen was lit by a row of pendant lights over a long island. A woman in her forties was standing at the open oven holding two oven mitts and a paring knife at the same time, which was not the right combination of tools for any situation.
"Hi," I said, walking to the kitchen.
"Oh. Hi. I'm Marissa. He said to watch the fish for fifteen minutes. It's been twenty. I am not going to be the person who ruined it. Are you a cook?"
"I cook a little—" I started.
"Thank God." She snatched the words she wanted to hear and started to hand me the mitts.
I looked in the oven. Whole fish butterflied open, charred at the fins and the flesh still wet at the thickest part, catching the oven light.
"Lacey," a voice said behind me.
He had not shaved. His shirt was damp in a pattern that looked like a wriggling four-year-old who had just had a bath. He was holding a paperback copy of Hop on Pop.
His sleeves were pushed up, showing ink on his forearms: a column of dates on the left, and a dagger wrapped in binary on the right, with DE OPPRESSO LIBER above it.
"Five books," he said.
"Aaron warned me."
"Derek, you're late, it's probably burning," Marissa said.
Derek took the mitts. "It'll be fine, Marissa, thank you. I've got it from here."
"I'm not a cook," she tossed to him as she went out a side door. The kitchen went quiet.
Derek came around the island. He smelled like soap and the spice he had put in the rice.
"You're actually the one cooking?" I asked.
"Yeah, shocking, I know, but I'm not bad at it." And just then he reached for a cast-iron pan handle to move it off the heat. "Shit," he said, pulling his hand back and looking at the heel of his palm.
"Every time," he laughed.
"Run it under cold water."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. Run it under water."
He looked at me with something close to amusement, then went to the sink. He ran his hand under cold water for thirty seconds and shook his hand dry.
"For the record," he said, "I have a low pain tolerance."
"I thought you were Special Forces or something."
"The Army tested for many things. Pain tolerance was not on the list. The Army's official position was: acceptable in the field, regrettable in the kitchen.
" He laughed again. "Pamela found it deeply funny.
She made an oven mitt with my name embroidered on it.
It says HOT THING in capital letters. I still have it. "
I laughed.
He picked up a bowl of cucumbers and a knife and slid them across the island to me without asking. He started plating the fish. I sliced cucumbers. He was a foot from me. I was discovering, in real time, that a foot was an extremely small distance.
The slices were getting thicker. I made myself slow down. I've threaded catheters through beating hearts with these hands. Tonight they can't handle a cucumber.
"This is alarmingly nice," I said when he slid the plate in front of me at the kitchen table by the window.
"I told you not to drive," he said with a smile, lighting the candles on the table.
Oh my God, is Derek Harrington being charming?
There was wine. He poured for me before sitting across from me.
"I appreciate you having me here," I said.
"I should have done it years ago, Bonds. You were good to her." A pause. "Also, you have to pitch the hospital ask."
"There it is."
"I am the chair of a hospital board. I have priorities. They involve feeding people at the same time I extract presentations from them."
I bit into the fish. It was delicious.
He picked up his fork. I hadn't looked at a man's hands like this in a long time. I redirected my attention to the meal.
"Tell me about the MRI," he said.
I told him about the 3T machine, the construction footprint, and the build-out timeline if we started in spring. He listened to me completely and asked me questions. He paused before the fourth.
"Send me the proposal tomorrow. I'll seriously consider it."
"That's a lower bar than I came in here for."
"I'm a cautious man with capital. I will seriously consider it. Send it. I'll read it before I see you next."
Another man came in, got a drink from the fridge, and nodded on his way out, never saying a word.
"You have very interesting staff,” I said, because I needed a safer topic.
"They aren't really staff, not the way you're thinking. It's sort of half family, half business. Most work the ranch. Marissa runs the house. The gardeners are the only staff. Aaron, Karl, Terry, they do whatever needs doing. Josie's the horsewoman. Most have their own houses on the property."
"No nannies or maids or that kind of thing?"
"Jessica. I don't want her growing up thinking the world is a place where other people make her food and lay out her clothes and read to her at night. Pamela and I had a deal we'd do that part ourselves. I've kept the deal."
"That is more thoughtful than I expected."
"Than you expected from me specifically."
"Yes."
He laughed. "I was raised by a woman who took two buses to work because we couldn't afford a second car," he said. "I'm not in a rush to forget that."
"Where was that?"
"West Texas. Small town. My dad was Army.
Came home from his second tour with a back injury and never really worked after that.
My mother held everything together. We weren't hungry.
We just had no margin." He paused. "She passed in 2018.
I bought her the house she always wanted in Galveston about a year before she died.
She got the whole year in it. It was the best thing I have ever spent money on. "
"You went into the Army yourself."
"I did."
He took a slow sip of his wine. His face cooled. A different man was at the table.
"What did you do?"
"You probably know I can't tell you."
"Of course. Sorry."
"You can ask. I just can't tell you any details.
I wanted to be Army like Dad. My ASVAB said I should be a software guy in a basement, but I wanted action.
So I argued for a placement that let me be in the field and do the technical work, and I got it.
I spent sixteen years doing things I can't describe in places I can't name against bad people who deserved what they got.
Usually. I got to be Special Forces and a technical geek both," he concluded.
"The dates on your arm part of all that?"
He looked down at his left forearm. Then he looked back up at me with a smile.
"Bonds."
"Yes?"
"The dates on my arm aren't on the menu tonight."
"I get it, but the Latin one I can read." The wine was talking. "De oppresso liber. To liberate the oppressed."
"Roughly." He set the glass down. "You speak Latin?"
"Two years in college. Rusty. I can mostly read it on funeral programs and tattoos."
"Those are the same two contexts in which it's most useful."
I laughed. I did not look at his forearms again, by an act of professional discipline I had been running out of for some time.
"How did you meet Pamela?"
He picked up his wine and drank slowly.
"At the self-defense for women class I taught while I was finishing my degree. After the Army. At the university gym."
"You taught self-defense for women?"
"Once a week. Two semesters a year for four years. I'd been overseas, and I'd seen poorly trained female operators get hurt. I figured the average woman in Lexington could do better than what she was being taught."
"And Pamela took your class?"
He looked at the candles before he answered. "Yeah. She'd been assaulted. In some guy's basement at a—party, six months earlier."
He paused for a moment, but recovered fast.
"She wanted to learn how to defend herself."
"Was she good at it?"
"Fast learner. Got out of a bad situation in a parking garage in Cincinnati. We were already dating by then."
We sat for a while. The candles had burned down another thumb, and the fish was almost gone.
"I'm going to make us coffee," he said. "Stay if you can."
"I can."
He stood, his knuckles brushing the back of my hand as he took the plate away from me.