He told Laura he’d be home for dinner tonight, but it’s seven already, and the men at his table are listening. He can’t leave.
He’s spent most of the past two months wooing senators, either at the capitol or at Dorothy’s. He’s rarely in Boulder, more rarely home. But the session is almost over. It will all be different soon.
He motions to the waitress for another round. The chatter of the restaurant reminds him of the din of the institution, and he worries about his patients, about the whole place, languishing in its river valley without his oversight. But through the work Ed is doing here, the state will fix what’s broken, provide what’s needed. Group homes will spring up in every community, burgeoning like spring wheat and chokecherry blossoms, like tiny bunches of larch needles, greening up those empty boughs. Patients will live in homes. They’ll learn to cook for themselves and do their own laundry; they’ll sit together in living rooms and fall asleep in their own bedrooms. They’ll no longer be patients. They’ll be individuals, members of a community.
Lynn brings their drinks. Another round of beers, another round of Jameson.
He raises his shot to the legislators at his table and starts another story. “Take Belinda, for example. She was institutionalized for ten years, but she’s living independently now—in her own apartment near the capitol complex. She’s working as a janitor in the Mitchell Building.”
Stewart Thiessen, a legislator from the highline, starts talking, his mustache frothed with beer. “These are all great stories, Ed, but they’re clearly exceptions. We can’t just set all your wards free.”
“That’s the thing, Stew—we can. Not all of them, of course. But most.”
“That’s a stretch, Ed.” This from Wiley Dussault, a sleek-faced weasel of a man. Though Ed despises him, his voice is loud and his reach far. Everyone says Ed needs Dussault if he wants the bill to get any traction. “What kinds of jobs are we going to give these people? State-sponsored loiterer? Face-slapper?”
The men all laugh. Ed wants to grab Wiley Dussault’s beer and toss it in his face, or grab the back of his neck and slam that thin-lipped mouth into the table, scattering plates, blood, and ketchup. God, he should be home, eating dinner at his own table, talking to his wife.
He starts again. This time with George, the boy with the chair over his head that one day. George’s parents are the opposite of Penelope’s. They institutionalized their son because they believed the doctors would do more for him than they could. They loved him and they missed him. Their visits to Boulder saddened them, but they hadn’t known he could come home.
“It seemed so permanent when we signed those papers,” his mother told Ed the day George was discharged. “I feel so negligent.”
Ed assured her she wasn’t. He assured her of George’s growth and improvement during his time at the school, all truths. George had learned life skills that his parents hadn’t been able to teach him. He’d excelled in occupational therapy. He was an expert at bagging groceries—one of the activities used to teach order and recognition, heavy items on the bottom, tender fruits on the top—and his parents had already secured a position for him at Thriftway, the local supermarket. They brought his apron and name tag when they came to pick him up.
George donned both proudly. “Doc-tor. Ed.” He’d pointed at the tag. “Me. Jor-Ja.”
“That’s right, George. I’m going to come visit you at the grocery store, all right?”
Ed tells these men about sweet, successful George bagging groceries at Thriftway. George, who smiles enormously whenever Laura comes through his line. “You should stop in and say hello,” Laura tells Ed, relaying George’s hellos and hollers and grins. “He always asks about you.” But Ed doesn’t have time to stop by a grocery store.
Wiley Dussault interrupts. “Listen, Ed. I appreciate what you’re doing. Really, I do. But you’re asking for too much money. We all want to help the less fortunate, but we have a state to run and only so much money to run it with. I can’t speak for these fellows, but I know for damn sure my own constituents didn’t put me in office to hike up their taxes in order to build homes for retarded folks.”
Face smashed onto the table, maybe a tooth knocked loose, something permanently broken. Ed takes a breath. He conjures his calm doctor self, the one who walks families through the discharge process, the one who can get even reluctant parents on board. “I imagine your constituents put you in office to do what’s best for the state’s citizens.”
The man laughs and motions for another round of drinks. “Actually, they didn’t. Individuals don’t care about the collective, Ed. They care about themselves. As long as there are more nonretarded voting folks than retarded ones, we’re not going to be able to wrest money away from existing services. Get yourself some liberals in here and you might stand a chance. No way you’re getting my backing, though.”
Ed rubs his temples and reminds himself that he is laying roads. He might not have success this session, but his whiskey will sit in these bastards’ bellies, and his words will seep into their brains, and when the legislation comes up again, they’ll remember the great feeling of whiskey in their guts, and that whiskey will be tied to funds for the state’s developmentally disabled, and if they do what those words say, they’ll find themselves with more whiskey in their hands. Associative behaviors. Indicators and receptors. Ed is conditioning them. He knows better than anyone that conditioning takes time.
When the next round comes, he asks Lynn to bring him the check. The men at the table don’t even pretend to fight over it. This is a perk of the job—free drinks late into the night. If the rooms upstairs hadn’t been shut down recently, Ed would be buying them whores, too. The dividends from those associative behaviors would pay for years.
“Training is part of the process, gentlemen. There are innumerable jobs that would be perfect for the developmentally disabled and retarded—fabrication, janitorial work, stocking, bagging—anything that’s simple and repetitive.”
Lynn comes for the money. “Need change?”
“The rest is for you.”
Wiley Dussault slaps her ass as she walks away, and she slaps his hand in return. “No touching,” she says, scolding him like a child in a store, reaching for everything delicious. “Thanks, Ed,” she says, looking his way, and then adds, her eyes back on Dussault, “Dick.”
Everyone at the table laughs but Wiley Dussault. “I’ll touch what I damn well want to.”
“Calm down,” Ed says. “She’s feisty, has a kid at home she’s raising on her own.” He knocks back his new shot.
Tiny Dan Hutter from out east breaks in, a peacekeeper, quiet until needed. Ed likes him, not only for his ability to pacify Wiley Dussault and the other arrogant bastards like him, but for his thoughtfulness. He’s always paying attention, watching, listening, his questions finely polished and astute when he asks them. “If we’re giving our disabled population all these jobs, aren’t we going to be driving able-bodied people out of work?”
Ed expects Dussault to jump in with an addition, callow and stupid, but his eyes are trailing after Lynn. Ed will have to wait until Lynn’s done with her shift and walk her to her car. Or he can tell Jason, the bartender, protective of all his waitresses.
“Great question, Dan, but it really won’t have that much of an effect. We’re not talking about that many people—just the able ones. And what’s more, we’ll be creating new jobs. The group homes and community service organizations will need unskilled staff, too.”
Dussault’s attention is back. “So we take a retard out of the institution, put him to work in the community, and then make the poor bastard whose job he stole work at the retard’s group home?”
“Enough, Wiley.” Stewart Thiessen tips back the last of his beer. “Come on. I’ll drive you back to your hotel.”
Dussault looks ready to argue, a grumpy child whose dessert has been withheld.
“Time for me to hit the road, too.” Tiny Dan Hutter is standing, reaching a hand out to Ed. “Thanks for the drinks, buddy. I think you’re doing great work.”
Stewart Thiessen shakes Ed’s hand, too, then heaves Dussault to standing. The man sways once he’s on his feet, drunker than Ed realized, sloppy enough not to be dangerous.
“Don’t have my vote,” he mumbles, his speech gone slurry.
Thiessen shrugs apologetically. “Come on, Wiley. Out we go.” Dussault stumbles along next to him, eyes hanging on Lynn at the bar, then back ahead of him, too drunk to walk without oversight, more disabled than many of Ed’s patients. He’ll probably piss himself on the way to his room and sleep in his clothes and wake bleary-eyed and heavy in the morning. Ed has no tolerance for men who can’t hold their liquor.
He walks to the bar and asks for one more shot. Lynn slides down next to him, off shift, a beer in front of her. “You know, some people judge a man by the company he keeps.”
Ed laughs. “Sorry about that, kid. My work requires it.”
She scoots closer, close enough for him to smell her—perfume and shampoo and food, maybe some sweat under it all. Though she’s not really his type, he can appreciate her looks. Tall and blond, rounded in the right places, big bright eyes. As classic an American beauty as they come, knocked up in high school and now waiting tables and fending off letches like Wiley Dussault. This close, he can see the lines working at the corners of her eyes, threads of age and exhaustion. She can’t be older than twenty-five.
“Just don’t let him rub off on you,” she says. “You’re too good a guy.” Her leg nudges his.
She’s flirting with him, but the idea of Lynn taking him somewhere offers no allure. He doesn’t need this lovely young thing, though he’s sure sex with Lynn would be nice—more than nice. Still, he doesn’t have time, not even for a quick fuck in the bathroom.
“You don’t have to worry about me becoming anything like that sonofabitch.” He shoots his drink, leaves a couple bills on the bar, kisses Lynn on the cheek, and stands. “Have Jason walk you to your car, all right? Just in case that asshole didn’t head straight to his hotel.”
“See what I’m saying? Too good a guy.”
His gentle rejection is probably a relief to her, or at least a validation in some way. Not all men are dogs.
Ed waves to Jason and pushes himself outside. He’s parked in the back lot, level with the second story of the building, and he takes the stairs along the side, treacherous with ice. The sky is clear, which will make for a colder night, but the stars are thick and gleaming, so brilliant he stands next to his car for a moment, head back, staring. He’s been so busy that he quit noticing the place around him, just like Dean said he would. He’ll take tomorrow off, he tells himself, let someone else buy those guys their drinks. He’ll tell Laura to dress warm and wear thick socks and hiking boots, and they’ll take to the south hills behind their home, climbing and climbing until they reach the top of Mount Ascension, and they’ll stand there and look out over the white-dusted fields of the Helena valley, the tall mountains ringing it, the creeks burbling past the ice shelves along their banks.