The man got ready to take my dad’s temperature and turned to me. “You should have seen this place last night. Jerry’s friend brought in a bunch of alien heads for the staff to wear. Sure did cheer up the kids when we walked into their wing. Imagine that, a hospital staff in papier-maché alien heads. Those kids—some of them are terminal. They needed that laugh.” He chuckled to himself and thrust a thermometer in my dad’s mouth. He—the nurse, not my dad—waited until it beeped and recorded the result on a chart that hung from the foot of the bed.
I went out to the parking lot and sent Ebony in. “About time,” she said. “Thought I was going to have to pack these two up in my handbag and smuggle them in.”
We took turns in the hospital room until well beyond visiting hours. Between my skill with the partially operating vending machine and the compliments Ebony drew on her outfit and accessories, the staff quickly warmed to us. They even relented and let Dad come outside to visit with the animals. Soot started purring the second he hit my dad’s lap. (He was in a wheelchair—my dad, not the cat.) Ivory stood on his back legs and put his paws on the side of the chair, whimpering for attention of his own.
By the end of the day, my dad’s spirits were high, but the doctors said he wasn’t out of the woods yet. Often a second heart attack would follow on the heels of the first. I told them that this was already the second. They told me that was part of the reason for their concern. Jerry Tamblyn wasn’t heading back to Proper City just yet.
I found Don in the cafeteria. “Ebony and I have to leave,” I said. “I kept the store closed today, but I should open it tomorrow.”
Don agreed. “Margo, Jerry’s been talking about selling the store when you go back to Las Vegas,” he said. “I get the feeling it’s an extra source of stress, and he doesn’t need any stress on him right now.”
“He shouldn’t worry about that.” Don’s eyes narrowed and he tipped his head to the side. I looked away so he couldn’t read my thoughts. “How about Ebony and I take the trailer back to Proper City now so you won’t have to worry about the extra weight on the car when you hit the road?”
“That would be a big help. Are you sure Ebony’s car can handle it?”
We walked to the exit and looked at the trailer and then at Ebony’s Cadillac. The Caddy was twice as long as the trailer. “She probably won’t even notice,” I said.
“Notice what?” she said, surprising me. I jumped.
“We’re taking the trailer. Can you help Don hitch it to your car while I say good-bye?”
“There’s nothing crazy in that trailer, is there?”
Don and I looked at each other. “Nothing too far out of the ordinary,” he said.
I went back inside. My dad’s head was turned to the side and his breathing was even. I approached the bed and put my hand on top of his. “I’m going to make everything okay,” I said.
He looked up at me, and for a flash, it felt as if I were the parent and he was the child. I swatted at the fresh set of tears that ran down my cheeks, kissed him on his forehead, and left.
*
IT took Ebony five miles to get the feel for the additional weight hitched to her car. Every once in a while the trailer swayed. Each time she muttered under her breath about the idiocy of carting interplanetary species along behind us.
Ebony was more superstitious than most people. Not only did she avoid ladders and black cats, she had her tarot cards read weekly, took feng shui to a new level, and knocked on wood a lot. She even maintained that her medallion had special powers of protection. I wasn’t up on the superstition handbook, but I had a feeling towing a trailer filled with relics that had heretofore been stored in the highly secret Area 51 made her nervous.
The Caddy and trailer combination evened itself out around mile twelve, not that I was counting. That’s when Ebony relaxed enough to talk. “It’s nothing bad,” she said.
She could have been talking about anything from my dad’s health to the slightly aggressive noise her engine made every time she accelerated past sixty miles an hour, but I knew instinctively that she was talking about her history with Blitz. I suspected she knew I knew it.
“I didn’t think it was,” I said, confirming what I thought she thought I thought.
“People will talk. They always do. But it’s nothing I should be ashamed of,” she added. “The truth is, there is a history there. One that not many people know about.”
“A history with Blitz?”
“A history with his family. What most people don’t know is that I had a relationship with Blitz Manners’s dad long before Blitz was ever born.”
Chapter 17
I SAT VERY still. Ivory squirmed in my lap and I ran my open hand over his fur to calm him down. He turned around and hung his head out the window. Soot slept by my feet.