HI, GENIE!”The driver held the back door of the limousine open and Karn flapped her fingers in a wave—a gesture she had probably used since high school.
I was standing in front of another Marriott, this one only blocks from Turkman State. It was the second Saturday in November, a time of year when Mick would say that things were just beginning. It was raw and windy and the trees were nearly bare, a day when the warmest place in town might be an arena packed with people watching basketball.
“Hi.” I climbed into the car. There were empty seats facing our seats; the window between us and the driver was closed. “Thank you for doing this. For having me, I mean.”
“My pleasure,” said Karn, and she laughed. Was she drunk? Tran quilized? I eyed her warily. No. Karn was scared too.
“She wants you two to be obvious,” Bobby had said on the phone. “Have you heard of François Mitterrand? He was the president of France and he was married and his mistress came to the funeral along with his wife. Mom read about that somewhere and that’s all she talks about.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said to Karn now. “Mick had so many people who loved him.”
Karn was wringing her hands, looking out the window as the car left the parking lot, and abruptly her wringing seemed to crescendo, and I thought that I had said the wrong thing, that it wasn’t my right to use the words “love” and “Mick” in the same sentence. “All his old players, his fans . . .” I said. I felt Karn’s quick glance my way, although I was slow to turn to meet it.
“I used the same florist,” Karn said. “I mean, if people said they were sending flowers I suggested my florist.” She gave me a coy glance. “It’s nice when things coordinate, you know?”
We were both in black suits. Mine was trim and conservative, Karn’s shiny and flowing and done in a knit fabric, with a long jacket and a lapel trim of lavender ribbon.
“I’m trying to be very French about this,” Karn said, her hands still busy in her lap. “I break down, I get angry—I think French, French, French. I wish I’d taken French in high school. Bobby told you about Madame Mitterrand?”
I nodded.
“I know people thought, Oh, that’s just how the French do things, but she’s human. And she must be a woman of great”—I looked toward her, waiting for the word—“imagination.”
The Jesuit, I thought.
“It was brave of you to invite me.”
Karn nodded. “I know. I talked to Father DeMarco about it. He’s big on outward and visible signs. ‘I’ll bring her in the limo with me,’ I said, and he liked that. I might not be this nice without those planes. Those planes hit, it softens you.” Then, before I had a chance to respond, “Hold my hand.”
Brave of me too, I thought, reaching toward Karn. Her hand was clammy and quivering, while my own hand felt warm, calm, strong—which surprised me; I would have thought it would be the other way around. “Your hand’s cozy,” Karn said almost wistfully, and I wished I could command my own hand to cool down. “It’s okay,” Karn said, as if reading my thoughts. “You make me feel better, you really do.”
“You make me feel better too.” We smiled shyly at each other, rode in silence several minutes. What do you think about, riding in the back of a limo on your way to your lover’s funeral, holding hands with his wife? Everything and nothing. The wonderful strangeness of life.
“It was the sex,” I said. “Ninety percent of the time.” Say something simple. Even if it’s not true.
“I thought so,” Karn said. “I knew so.” My gift to her, I thought at first, my payment. But then I realized that the statement gave me protection: in saying it, I’d found a way for Mick and me to keep our secrets.
“It’s a weird thing,” said Karn, her hand still tight on mine, “but I think that between the two of us we knew Mick.”
“He couldn’t spell, could he?”
“Terrible!” Karn snorted. “I think he was dyslexic.”
We were close to the church, and we halted behind a line of cars backed up at a corner.
“We had a wonderful few months at the end,” Karn said. “He thanked and thanked me.” This hurt me—I had told myself that Mick spent his last few months with Karn as an atonement, but maybe it was something more—and Karn must have seen my surprise, because she looked away quickly and said, “He loved those tapes you sent.”
“I’m glad.”
Karn gave me a small smile. “People are going to stare at us.” Her hand was warming up, while mine seemed to be getting colder.
“I couldn’t have done it,” I said. “Cared for him in a family room for months.”
Karn shot me a quick appraising glance, gave my hand an almost painful squeeze. “You could have,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
He’d be proud of us, I thought. I almost said it, but we were moving, turning into the church driveway, and Karn pulled her hand away to clutch her handbag. “Let me know if you need tissues,” Karn said. The people standing on the asphalt stepped aside to let us through. Karn’s hands were starting to shake again. “French,” she murmured. “French, French, French.”
The crowd was so thick I could barely see the church entrance. “Just follow me,” Karn said, waiting for the driver to open her door.
Once I was behind Karn, it was easy. This was a funeral, this was theater, and here I was brought in for my supporting role. Karn was the gracious heroine, and simply moving up the steps she performed well. Mick knew how to pick ’em, I thought, and I wondered if he’d coached her, if he’d had her lie skin to skin on his hospital bed and said, “Genie’s a good woman,” and “Karn, you’re my number-one seed.” But maybe that was making too much of Mickey. Maybe Karn was simply a woman who’d tired of loss, who’d decided “blessed are the peacemakers” could be personal.
Marcus was holding open one of the church’s big wooden doors. When he caught sight of Karn and me he dropped his head and gave a little smile, as if the sight of us together were some kind of happy proof, as if he were saying to himself, about Mick: That devil pulled it off.
In the receiving line in the church narthex after the service, Karn pulled me between herself and Bobby, with Jessica on Karn’s other side. Karn had mascara running down her cheeks, but the service had made her calmer. “She was a special friend to Mickey,” Karn said to the first person to offer condolences, nodding toward me in an encouraging, almost instructive, way, and the elderly woman glanced between the two of us before reaching for my hand.
“Are you a coach?” the elderly woman asked me. “Are women coaching basketball now?”
I shook my head and Karn said, “She’s a doctor.” The woman looked puzzled and Karn added, “A cardiologist!” and the woman smiled as if this explained things and moved down the line. There were several more people who passed in similar confusion, and then I was faced with a woman who looked like a younger, prettier version of Karn, and Karn was saying her usual, “This is Dr. Genie Toledo, who . . .” when she stopped herself and said, “What the heck. This was Mickey’s girlfriend.”
“Mother!” Jessica said. Karn raised a hand to shush her.
The Karn look-alike’s eyes widened. “You’re incredible,” she said to Karn. “You’re Mother Teresa.”
“Not exactly,” said Karn, and she and I both started giggling. I touched Karn’s upper arm, the slippery warmth of the knit fabric.
“No,” said the blond woman to Karn, “you are. I’m spreading it around”—and it must have been spread, because in a few moments I found myself with Mick’s three sisters in a ragged spur off the main line, where most people didn’t greet me, although Tom Kennilworth and his girlfriend both gave me a hug. There were some sports celebrities at the service whom Mick’s sisters misidenti fied in loud voices, and at one point a storied coach, a coach from Monday Night, moved past us in a nimbus of hushed voices. Marcus was part of that nimbus, looking gawky and starstruck, as if he’d been transformed into a teenager. “A nice guy,” the Big Coach was saying, “a solid coach.”
I felt myself blanch. Barely a step above ho-hum. “. . . A lucky year and that guy,” the Big Coach was saying, nodding in the direction of what I found to be, swiveling my head, Frederick, and then someone was in front of me with his hand out, a slight dark-haired man in a clerical collar. “My condolences,” he said. “I’m Father DeMarco.”
“The Jesuit!” I reached for his hand.
“Thank you for coming,” the priest said, in his eyes the mildest of assessments.
“Oh,” I said without thinking, “my pleasure.”
Behind me the Big Coach had gotten to Karn, and to my relief I heard him use words like “great” and “battler” and “vision.” I half turned to better hear him and spotted Marcus, his eyes fixed and his face taut, blinking fast.
At this point Mick’s sisters broke away from me in a flurry of excitement, having spotted a man they believed to be Michael Jordan.
When Karn left in the limo for the graveside she took her children with her but forgot me, and I had to get a ride with Marcus. Karn’s apologies at the graveside, as I’d expected, were profuse. But her leaving without me, under the circumstances, was a minor slight, and I didn’t hold it against her.
I WALKED INTO JEREMY’S OFFICE to check about call coverage for the weekend and surprised him at the window. He was holding a film in the air, peering at one of the nuclear heart scans. I knew what he was doing: he’d gotten an unexpected report from Howard on one of his patients, and he was checking the reading himself. “Jeremy?” I said, and he put the film hurriedly down.
I looked at Jeremy’s desk and the film he’d slipped under a pile of charts. “Why don’t we fire him?”
“Howard?” Jeremy laughed awkwardly. “He’s our partner.”
“He’s a lousy doctor. We only hired him because we were desperate for weekend coverage and we couldn’t get anyone better. So why are we keeping him?”
Jeremy stared. “Look at what he does for us! Look at his business acumen!” Taking in my face, Jeremy changed his focus. “We can’t get rid of him. He’d be all over us with lawsuits. I’m not at the age for changes, Genie.” His voice gained strength, as if he’d come up with an unassailable argument. “I want to finish out my practice years in peace. I think you’d want that too.” College friends of Sukie’s had been at Mick’s funeral. I didn’t know you knew him, Jeremy had said. And I guess you knew him well.
“He’s a menace.”
Jeremy gave an equivocating shrug of his eyebrows and tried without success to hide a smile. “He got you ordering monitors, that’s for sure.”
“He’s incompetent,” I said.
“That’s a little strong.”
“It’s like we’re harboring a virus. I don’t trust his thalliums at all.”
“Talk to him! Ask him to take another course. Take the nuclear course yourself.”
“Do you trust his caths?”
Jeremy’s posture shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure I want him in there doing peripheral angios”—the new revenue stream Howard was promoting—“but his diagnostic caths are fine.” His diagnostic caths, not his angioplasties or stents: there was a lot in what Jeremy didn’t say.
“Why can’t we go back to Lenny reading our heart scans?”
“Come on.” For the first time Jeremy’s voice took on urgency. “Nuclear is a gold mine for us.”
Jeremy and I had been friends for over twenty years, partners for almost sixteen. “So that’s it,” I said. “Proficiency and experience don’t matter. Loyalty doesn’t matter. Giving the best care to our patients doesn’t matter. Only money matters.” I turned away. “I don’t have to be part of this.”
Jeremy was already protesting, following me out his door and down the hall. “Genie, Howard and I aren’t your enemies. We’re your partners.” I ignored him. I walked down my own hall and into my office and closed the door.
At Mick’s funeral, the most moving eulogy had come from Frederick Flitt, who followed the Turkman State president and the athletic director. The Turkman president had equated his own struggles with chemical imbalance to Mick’s battle with cancer, and the athletic director had envisioned Mick and Dashona Lykins meeting up to start a basketball team in heaven. Frederick’s address was much briefer, although he took, because of his leg brace, considerably more time to reach the pulpit. There was space for the congregation to ponder, with each footstep, the things he had recently lost. His quickness, his athletic career, his dreams for the future, his coach. From the pulpit, Frederick said he hated to think that Mick had put off treating his cancer so he could spend the season with his players. “I asked him about it, and he said our team was worth it,” Frederick said. “I hope it was worth it. It was worth it to me.”
I wanted to be part of something worth it. I hated the way I acted with Howard and Jeremy—snide, superior, angry. I should quit and set up my own practice, lease the empty office space upstairs. An outward and visible sign: I pictured my own name, alone, on a hall door.
I felt, again, Mick’s hands assessing my shoulders. Good, you can change a tire without me. He’d be proud of me. He’d admire my guts, my caring, he’d tell me: You get ’em, cupcake. But he was such a man of connections and accommodations—such a team player, in a way—that there was part of my motivation he might not honestly understand. I’m out of here, Mick. I’m cutting my losses. I’m gone.
I could hire a receptionist I trusted (Claudia?), bring LeeAnn with me as my nurse, contract with Lenny to read my scans. Maybe Helen, who was always saying she’d had enough of the cath lab, could join me as a nurse practitioner. M.L. could design my decor. I realized in astonishment that Mick would know exactly what I was doing: I was assembling a team.
