Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series)

for hospital hygiene. “You know his daddy isn’t much better. I try not to think about that. Although,” she said as she felt around in her purse, “I have to admit, sometimes I’ve thought about killing the old lech myself.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.” She eyed me sadly. “But you know I don’t mean that. What the hell, I’ve made it this long, I can take it, right?” She gave me a confused look. “Oh yeah, the practice. I thought in that kind of situation, it was split between John Richard and me. I mean the Accounts Receivable. I don’t know what happens to the equipment and the patients. Who’d want to kill him to get his patients?”

I had been putting on my makeup; I paused to look at her.

“You mean, the good ones are all gone?”

She sighed. “Well, you always lose a few. You know babies die sometimes before they’re born. The patients blame Fritz. Now and then they sue, if they can stand all that agony.”

“Anybody sue lately? That you know of?”

“Nope.” She looked around the room. “My head hurts. S’pose they’d give me something here?”

“What are you taking for your headaches now, Vonette?”

She said, “Demerol.”

“Demerol? With your orange juice?”

“Don’t laugh, Goldy. You don’t know how bad the pain is. I have to have injections when I just can’t stand it.”

“Sorry. I know how much you’ve suffered.”

In truth I did not know the extent of her suffering. But I was determined to find out.

The hospital wouldn’t give Vonette any oral meds, as they called them, so she contented herself with something out of a prescription bottle that she fished from her voluminous purse.

We drove up 38th Avenue in silence. Patty Sue was hushed with what I hoped was contrition. Vonette wasn’t talking because she was deep in thought or pain or both. I was quiet because I was trying to figure out what Vonette was thinking.

“Gee, you guys,” Patty Sue said thinly into the silence, “my hospital breakfast was awful.”

“Mine was better than the other meal I had there,” I said truthfully.

“You girls want to stop and get a bite to eat?” asked Vonette. “My treat. I could use something myself, anyway.”

“Goldy,” Patty Sue said in a husky voice, “are you mad?”

I said, “What? With no business? No car? No money? Me, mad? Yes. Mad as in angry. Heading toward deranged.”

“Now, girls,” came Vonette’s soothing voice, “let’s not get all upset. We’ll have a little brunch. Couple plates of huevos rancheros and you’ll both be doing a lot better.”

She signaled to turn right. Her Fleetwood, which maneuvered like a road-bound yacht, glided into the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant built in the shape of a sombrero.

Vonette invited me to join her in a margarita, but I opted for a fruit smoothie. Patty Sue ordered a Coke. She asked the waitress if it was true that the Mexicans had chocolate sauce on their eggs and if so, could she? The waitress gave Vonette a questioning look.

“Oh, sweetie pie,” Vonette assured her, “don’t you worry about my girls here. Just bring the three of us your huevos and we’ll be fine. Oh yes, and make that a pitcher of margaritas. Okay?”

Fine and dandy. It was clear I would be taking the helm of the Fleetwood after lunch. Which reminded me.

I said, “Where is the station wagon you’re loaning me, Vonette?”

The pitcher of margaritas had materialized in front of us along with Patty Sue’s Coke, my smoothie, and a single salted glass.

“Now remember,” Vonette said as she poured and then took a long swig. “We haven’t used it as our family car for a long time. We bought it a few years after we moved here.”

“Moved here?” I asked. Information might come after Vonette’s first drink but before her fourth. I said, “You know, John Richard never talked to me about his life before Colorado. About how you and Fritz met, what your early life was like in Illinois.”

My ex-mother-in-law pondered the crust of orange lipstick she had left on her margarita glass.

I said, “Please tell me.”

Finally Vonette said, “Oh, well.”

She began slowly. “We used to work together,” she said. “I was Fritz’s secretary. Sometimes he’d take me out in the country to help with a delivery. We became very close, but it was all proper, I wanted it that way, being a divorcee and all.”

“What?” I said.

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I’d been married before, right out of high school in Corpus. My first husband was in the navy. Then I got pregnant, had my baby, and the navy moved us to Norfolk, where Joe was from anyway. You know, in Virginia. There Joe got involved with first one call girl, then another. Then he left for good. I was awfully young, just twenty when Joe moved out.” She sighed. “So when I met Fritz I’d been on my own for a while anyway, trying to make do for myself and my little baby girl.” She sloshed a large measure of the green stuff into her orange-and- salt-lined glass. “Just breaks my heart the way people don’t care about marriage these days. Or those days either. Anyway, there were hundreds of navy wives looking for clerical work in Norfolk, so off I went with a girlfriend and my three-year-old little daughter to Carolton, Illinois, because my friend had kin there.” She paused for a few swallows. “We had some tough times, let me tell you, living in first one and then another trailer court, men always thinking I was available, as if I was … loose.”

I said, “So how did the doctor fit in?”

“Oh, he was so nice to me when I was looking for work,” Vonette gushed. “Treated me so nicely. It was my first regular job. Then after I had worked for him for six years, well, his wife died of cancer. A few months later he asked me to marry him and it took me about two seconds to say ‘You bet.’ ”

“Colorado is a long way from Illinois,” I mused.

“Yes, well.” Vonette took out her mirror to do a little damage control on the lipstick. “Let me tell you, being a doctor’s wife is not all it’s cracked up to be.” She thought. “We got married in a little chapel and then started to try, no matter what, to be a family. After I had John Richard I thought everything would settle down but it didn’t.” She stopped to look out the restaurant window. “My daughter, she, well, she had some problems in school. Not too bad at first, but things got so much worse when she got to be a teenager. John Richard was just about ten then, and I guess I wasn’t paying as much attention to her as I should have. She had started out liking Fritz, but their relationship … sort of got bad, if you know what I mean.”

Patty Sue excused herself to go to the bathroom. Vonette let out a very long breath.

“My daughter … got involved with a fast sort of gang. She had gone through a lot, and she was only seventeen.” Another swallow. “Then one night, she drank too much. The kids dared her, is what came out afterwards. She drank a whole bottle of Southern Comfort, then keeled over dead. Seventeen years old, and everything to live for. It was just awful.”

I reached out and held Vonette’s hand.

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well,” she said, “you wanted to hear this story and now you’re hearing it. Just let me finish, maybe it’ll do me good to talk.” She gripped my hand. “Anyhow,” she went on, “that’s when I started getting my headaches real bad. Life wasn’t good for Fritz then either; he was, well, he couldn’t really practice, so we decided to make a clean break of things and move out here.”

“Couldn’t really practice?” I said. “Why? From grief?”

“Oh, no,” said Vonette. She ran her finger over the orange lipstick on her glass.

“Couldn’t practice,” I prompted.

Vonette signaled the waitress for another pitcher of margaritas. She touched her fiery hair and began to talk slowly again. “It was such a mess.” She sighed. “You keep asking why we left Illinois, Goldy. I’ll tell you, but the beginning of it goes back even farther, to when my daughter was sixteen. It’s awful, so please, don’t go around talking about it.”