“Thanks.”
“I keep mine in the wine cellar.”
“Sure.”
Camacho finished the cup of coffee, dumped the rest of the pot down the sink and turned off the coffee maker. He wiped the area with a dishrag and threw the wet grounds into the garbage. He didn’t want his wife noticing he had been there.
It was three o’clock when he locked the front door and drove away.
At about the same instant that Luis Camacho was starting his car to return to his office. Toad Tarkington was parking at the Reno hospital. When he arrived in the room, Rita was sitting in a chair talking with Mrs. Douglas, her roommate. After the introductions Toad pulled up the other chair, a molded plastic job made for a floaller bottom than his.
“When are they going to let you go?” he asked as he tried to arrange himself comfortably.
“Probably tomorrow. The doctor will be around in an hour or so.”
“Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
“Not really.’” She smiled at Mrs. Douglas. “We had a series of little naps, didn’t we?”
“We did.” Mrs. Douglas had a delicate voice. “I don’t sleep much anymore anyway.” She bit on her lower lip.
“Perhaps we should go for a little walk,” Rita suggested. She roee and made sure her robe belt was firmly tied- “We’ll be back in a little bit, Mrs. Douglas,”
“Okay, dear.”
Out in the hall Toad said, “I see you fixed your hair.”
“Wasn’t it a fright? A hospital volunteer helped me this morn- ing. She said it would help how I felt, and she was right.” She walked slowly in her slippers, her hands in her pockets. “Poor Mrs. Douglas. Here I’ve been so concerned about my little half-acre and her two daughters came in this morning and told her she has to go to a nursing home. She’s very upset. Oh, Toad, it was terrible, for all of them. They’re afraid she’ll fall again with no one there, and the daughters work, with families of their own.”
Toad made a sympathetic noise. He had never given the prob- lems of elderly people much thought. He really didn’t want to do so now either.
Rita paused for a drink from a water fountain, then turned back toward her room. “I just wanted you to know the situation. Now we’ll go back and cheer her up.”
Toad put his hand on her arm. “Whoa, lady. Let’s run that one by again. Just how are we going to do that?”
“You cheered me up last night You make me feel good just teing around you. You can do the same with her.”
Toad looked up and down the hall for help, someone or some- thing to rescue him. No such luck. He looked again at Rita, who was absorbing every twitch of his facial muscles. “Women my own age I don’t understand. Now it’s true I’ve picked up a smattering of experience here and there with the gentle sex, but eighty-year- old ladies with busted hips are completely out of—“
“You can do it,” Rita said with simple, matter-of-fact faith, and grasping his hand, she led him back along the hallway.
In the room she nudged him toward the chair near Mrs. Doug- las. He started to give Rita a glare, but when he realized Mrs. Douglas was watching him, he changed it to a smile. It came out as a silly, nervous smile.
Women! If they didn’t screw there’d be a bounty on ‘em.
“Rita says you’re facing some very significant changes in your life.”
The elderly woman nodded. She was still chewing on her lip. At that moment Toad forgot Rita and saw before him his own mother as she would be in a few years. “Pretty damned tough,” he said, meaning it.
“My life now is my garden, the roses and bulbs and the annuals that I plant every spring. I do my housework and spend my time watching the cycle of life in my garden. I wasn’t ready to give that up.”
“I see.”
“I have most of my things planted now. The bulbs have been up for a month or so. They were so pretty this spring.”
“I don’t suppose any of us are ever ready to give up something we love.”
“I suppose not. But I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to. My husband — he died fifteen years ago with a heart attack while he was playing golf. He so loved golf. I was hoping that someday in my garden I …” She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again Toad asked about her garden. It was not large, he was told. Very small, in fact. But it was enough. That was one of life’s most important lessons, learning what was enough and what was too much. Understanding what was suffi- cient “But,” Mrs. Douglas sighed, “what is sufficient changes as you get older. It’s one thing for a child, another for an adult, another thing still when you reach my age. I think as you age life gets simpler, more basic.”
“I’m curious,” said Toad Tarkington, feeling more than a little embarrassed. He shot a hot glance at Rita. “Do you pray much?”
“Na. It’s too much like begging. The professional prayers al- ways want things they will never get, things they just can’t have. Like peace on earth and conversion of the sinners and cures for all die sick. And to prove they really want all these things that can never be, they grovel and beg.”
“At least they’re sincere,” Rita said.
“Beggars always are,” Mra. Douglas shot back. “That’s their one virtue.”
Toad grinned. Mrs. Douglas appeared to be a fellow cynic, which he found quite agreeable. Perhaps the age difference doesn’t matter that much after all. A few minutes later he asked one more question. “What will heaven be like, do you think?”
“A garden. With roses and flowers of all kinds. My heaven will be that anyway. What yours will be, I don’t know.” Mrs. Douglas waggled a finger at him without lifting her hand from the bed. “You are two very nice young people, to spend time with an old woman to cheer her up. When are you going to marry?”
Toad laughed and stood. “You tell her, Mrs. Douglas. She abso- lutely refuses to become an honest woman.” He said his goodbyes and Rita followed him into the hall.
“Thanks. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She had her arms folded across her chest
“Hang tough, Rita. If they let you take a hike tonight or tomor- row, give me a call at the BOQ. Captain Grafton or I will come get you and bring you some clothes.”
She nodded. “You come if you can.”
“Sure.” He paused. “What do you want from life, Rita? What will be sufficient?”
She shook her head. He winked and walked away.
16
An an era when the average Amer- ican male stood almost six feet tall, Secretary of Defense Royce Caplinger towered just five feet six inches in his custom-made shoes with two-inch heels. Perhaps understandably, his hero and role model was Douglas MacArthur, of whom he had written a biography ten years before. The critics had savaged it and the post- Vietnam public had ignored it. Caplinger, said one wag, would have won MacArthur sainthood had the book been even half true.
How deeply this experience hurt Caplinger only his family might have known. The world was allowed to see only the merciless effi- ciency and detached intellect that had made him a millionaire by the time he was thirty and president and CEO of one of the twenty largest industrial companies in the nation when he was forty-two. Now worth in excess of a hundred million dollars, he was a man who believed in himself with a maniacal faith; in the world of titanic egos in which he moved he saw himself as a giant and, to his credit, others saw him the same way.
Rude and abrasive, Caplinger never forgot or forgave. He had never been accused of possessing a sense of humor. He won many more battles than he lost because he was right, often terrifically right, as his many enemies
