Patricia didn’t answer immediately. Then she said, “I think it’s you who wants to go to Worm’s Place, but that’s another story.” I heard her clicking away on the keyboard, and imagined her there in our den, a cell phone cradled to her delicate neck, enough merino wool yarn surrounding her to fashion a car cover.
My wife clucked her tongue, which sounded exactly like knitting needles clacking together when she was on a roll of knit-pearl-knit-pearl maneuvers for more than a couple minutes. I said, “No, I only want to drink all day long when I’m in my hometown, Patricia,” hoping that she’d think, “Because of me, is that what you’re saying, because of me?”
She said, “There’s a veterinarian who’s still in business. Dogs get mange, and that’s more or less what your father has. Why don’t you go see the vet?” I didn’t say, “Ha ha ha.” I didn’t answer until Patricia said, “There’s one of those doc-in-the-box places, and that looks like your only choice without driving all the way to Columbia or Charleston.”
I said, “I might have to spend the night here. I brought along my gym bag, just in case.” She got on Mapquest and gave me the directions. “If you’ve gotten to some kind of golf ball driving range, then you’ve gone two hundred feet too far.”
Anyway, my father said nothing when I pulled into the parking lot, but I could tell from the look on his face that he felt betrayed. He said, “I wasn’t making a plea for help, Dust. When people make pleas for help, they take a bottle of aspirin, or cut their wrists in the wrong direction.”
I pulled right up to the front door — you’d think that an ersatz emergency room of sorts would have a handicapped parking spot or two, but this place didn’t — and turned off the ignition. I said, “I could hear it in between the lines of your voice, Dad. Plus, once we get you diagnosed for real and get proper medicine, then we can go to the bar and drink without worrying so much about the future.”
“Right-o,” my father said. “I knew there was a reason why your mother and I paid for all that education.” He reached for and extracted his wallet. “I got my Medicare card with me. You going to sit out here in the car or are you coming in?”
I said, “What do you want? Of course I’m coming in.”
“Right-o,” he said.
I looked over at a man and kid hitting golf balls at the Calloustown Practice Range next door to the emergency clinic. The sign out front of the driving range had gigantic CPR letters out front, and I wondered if people in mid-heart attack ever got confused with which parking lot to enter. I said, “Why do you keep saying ‘Right-o’? Are you watching a bunch of British sitcoms or something? Let me guess, your TV only gets British stations.”
He got out of the car and said, “To be honest, what I’d rather do to save some time is have you let me go in here — I know you have to get back home — and while I’m talking to the so-called doctor or nurse practitioner or whatever they’re calling these people nowadays, I’d appreciate it if you’d run into town and see if Tree Morse has any aloe plants for sale at his nursery. I’ve been reading up. Even if they don’t work medicinally, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have something around that needed me, water-wise.”
“That sounds like a plan,” I said. I didn’t mean it, of course. I knew my father just wanted me off the premises, that when I came back he’d be standing in front of the clinic after never checking in, and so on.
He shook my hand again for some reason and entered the building. I started my car and backed out of the parking lot, then put it in drive and returned to my spot. Then I reached beneath my seat and pulled out a squeeze tube of hand sanitizer, just in case my father’s skin supported a contagion from which I could never recover.
A snake caught and ate his cat. Back in the old days he got drunk one night, got a tattoo that read “Sin + Soretta” and it faded invisible a week later. One time he bought a recapped tire and it ended up gaining tread. I talked him into driving all the way down to Myrtle Beach to take part in a speed-dating extravaganza one time after my mom left for the retired Air Force colonel, not knowing that there was a convention of stutterers in town who’d pretty much clogged the sign-up sheet. It went on and on. Back when he actually set up appointments with Dr. Stoudemire, he was told he needed to eat more hot dogs and processed meat, seeing as his sodium levels were dangerously low.
I sat in the parking lot a good hour. I mean, I waited twenty minutes, got out of my car, opened the door to the clinic, looked inside, and saw only a receptionist behind the desk, no one else in the waiting room. I thought, “Good.” I thought, “My father’s in one of the examination rooms with a man or woman who probably half paid attention in medical school, more than likely in one of the Caribbean-nation medical schools.”
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon who went to the Medical University of South Carolina to figure out what I couldn’t: that there was a back door of sorts and my father sashayed his way straight through there without seeing a valid epidermal expert. The fucker. I waited my hour, I went inside the clinic and sat down for five or ten minutes, no one showed up with an accidental shotgun blast to their torso, and I said to the receptionist, “Are you doing a crossword puzzle, or a sudoku?” I said, “This isn’t such a bad place, out here in the middle of nowhere. Let me guess: most of the people you get in here suffer from snake bites.”
She didn’t look up. She said, “I know you. Do you remember me? Say. Say.”
I looked hard and tried to run a Rolodex of faces through my mind. I said, “Oh, Jesus, I haven’t been back to Callous-town for so long.”
She looked anywhere between forty and sixty years old. I thought, “Was she an old teacher or something?” I thought, “Have the schools gotten so incapable of offering teachers a paycheck without a furlough — what with the idiot gover-nor — that people have quit in order to be paid-by-the-hour receptionists inside virus-filled cement-blocked buildings?” I thought, “Did I take this woman to the prom, and then she had no other choice but to age mercilessly like some old dug best known to Appalachian photographs?” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m consumed with my father’s well-being.”
She tilted her head hard to the back corner of the building. “Well, your daddy seems to be consumed with not caring about his bank account.”
I looked at her hard, for I didn’t know what she meant, then looked at the door that led to the examination rooms. A woman came out of there wearing a standard white frock. She said to the receptionist, “Sometimes I wonder why we even have to show up here, Hannah.”
I looked at the doctor and said, “Hey.”
“Of course,” I thought to myself, “Hannah Hannah Hannah?” I said to the doctor, “Is it leprosy? Is it just a case of hives or shingles gone bad? Does it have something to do with fire ants, or nerves?”
Hannah said, “She ain’t seen him.” She said, “Back to what we were talking about, you asked me out one time I was in tenff grade you was in tweff and you never showed up. It wasn’t anything like the prom or nothing but it was enough to make me know I should like girls the rest of my life.”
The doctor stood there staring at me. I didn’t remember any of this at all. I said, “What?” I said, “Hannah, I’m sorry.”
The doctor said, “What are you talking about?”
I said, “My father.”