I found out what went down later while driving back to the club with Nicky.
Apparently it had all started while he and Veronica had been waiting for the nose doctor, Nicky standing near the window, she sitting straight-backed on the bed.
It had not occurred to Nicky to offer to call her family to wait with her. He wasn’t that kind of thoughtful. And she had just tried to put out his best friend’s eye.
Really, he had more been wanting to talk with her about the money for the lock than actually waiting with her. And as was his habit when he could see that somebody was at their lowest point, he made a deeply unhelpful observation, “I thought Davie was crazy, but you is a straight mess, ain’t you?”
Veronica ignored him, but Nicky kept on, “Look at you. You went in to poke out her eye, and now you the one in the hospital.”
Veronica continued to ignore him. “You’re kind of like Davie,” Nicky said at this point. “She like to pretend she don’t hear shit when it’s the truth, too.”
An unfair comparison, I think, since Veronica actively ignored Nicky because she didn’t like what he was saying, while I actively ignored Nicky because letting his cutting remarks slide over me was paramount to the maintenance of our friendship.
But back to Veronica. Nicky couldn’t stop there, of course. Because he was Nicky, he had to keep on talking. “All this crazy shit over something neither of you have control over. It ain’t Davie’s fault your daddy dicked around with her mama. And it ain’t your fault, either.”
Apparently this was the moment Veronica stopped ignoring him, because when Nicky looked from the window to her, he said her face was all screwed up, like she had swallowed something nasty. At first Nicky thought her nose was hurting her, but then he realized . . .
She was trying not to cry.
He walked over to the bed and told her it straight again. “It wasn’t nobody’s fault but your old man’s. He acted on his own, you didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
Nicky said she started wheezing then. And he said, “You’d really rather hyperventilate than cry? Really?”
And she said, “I’d rather die than . . .” But she couldn’t finish the sentence, because the tears start spilling out, even though her eyes were squeezed shut against them.
She went after them with such vicious swipes of her palms that Nicky told me, “I had to hold her hands down to keep her from hurting herself. Then the doctor came in, and he was acting like he seen girls crying all the time. Just kept saying that the break wasn’t that bad, and she’d feel better after he reset it and the swelling went down.
“Then he put her nose back where it used to be, and there was this squishing, cracking sound. You ain’t never heard nothing like it, Davie. It looked like it hurt like hell. But I couldn’t tell, because she was steady weeping over that stuff with her old man. Then he stuffed her nose with gauze, and asked her if she needed anything else. Let me tell you, he was nicer than any doctor I’ve ever encountered, I guess because she’s rich or whatever. But she just said, ‘Get out.’ So he left and we sat there, and she kept on crying.”
According to Nicky, she didn’t get herself together until about ten minutes before Tammy and me came in. And somewhere in the middle of all that crying, he told her that she had to go out to dinner with him to pay him back for the lock she had broken.
I was most surprised about that last detail. Until that point, I had never known that Nicky had so much romance in him.
. . .