mouths to feed than I’d planned.
The men argued and gestured with their hockey sticks. Here! they seemed to be saying. No, the ball went out over there! Two more women, apparently mindless of their own physical safety, rushed in from the sidelines to try to break up the conflict. Patricia stabbed a finger accusingly in her husband’s face, while another woman decided her husband needed to have his red face sloshed with gin-and-tonic. When Clark pushed Patricia aside, she turned and stomped back up toward the house. The conflict continued unabated.
Two men popped each other on opposite shoulders while skating sideways and trying to keep their balance. Then one of the Shirts unstrapped his helmet and snapped it upward, smacking it into the nose of his opponent in the melee. The man flailed backward, then did a belly flop forward on the blacktop. The battle ceased briefly while the injured man lay flapping his arms and legs. His squeals for help were muted-probably he had landed on his diaphragm.
Patricia McCracken, her face red and her voice shrill, rushed back into the kitchen. “Beer! Dammit, Goldy! What are you standing there for? Beer! Don’t wait for halftime! Take them some beer now!”
I mumbled something about a medic being a better idea than a bartender but scrambled obediently around the kitchen, where I quickly filled a Styrofoam cooler with three six-packs and a shower of ice. Beer didn’t seem a very good idea to me, especially on top of all those gin-and-tonics. Still, my contract did not include ground cleanup, if it came to that. I marched carefully down the walk to Clark McCracken, who gestured grandly toward his cement-hockey game.
“Take it down to them! Take it down!” he hollered, his face scarlet with exhaustion and what I suspected was pain. “Throw the cans at them if you have to!”
Without Clark, the players had resumed their game, which I found incredible. The Shirts and the Chests were skating around one another with even more alacrity and daring than before. One helmeted player thwacked the ball toward the goal and barely missed the net. Instead, the ball bounced off the retaining wall and smacked one of the female spectators in the knee. Her shrill squawk of pain went utterly unheeded as the skaters bent and swerved around one another to pass a newly produced ball.
“Beer break!” I called as the cans chinked against one another with what I hoped was an inviting sound. But the players could not hear me or the cans as they pushed, grunted, and jostled for position. Clark, somehow revived, whooshed past and waved me down to the sideline. I sighed, heaved the Styrofoam chest above my rib cage, and clink-clomped closer to the players, keeping a wary eye on the game.
Clark bellowed enthusiastically to his fellow skaters: “Hey, guys! A beer break would ? “
But I never heard him finish. From the chalked line where I stood, I was suddenly aware of a shift in the game. Like a tornado that had changed direction without warning, a gaggle of sweating skaters loomed. Charging out of the crowd came Ralph Shelton, hell-bent in my direction. I dropped the beers. The Styrofoam chest landed on my feet. Spilling ice filled the air as Ralph Shelton slammed into my stationary, unhelmeted, unpadded body. As he hit me, the look on his bandaged face was a determined, angry grimace, as if he had every intention of killing me.
12
There was, apparently, a shortage of doctors. In any event, no one stepped up to offer me help. I lay on the pavement one second, two seconds, three. My eyes felt permanently crossed. As far as I could determine, everyone seemed to be clustered around Ralph Shelton.
I gasped but couldn’t bring any air in; the wind was gone from my body. Blood dripped from my forehead. Finally some people moved toward me. Their mouths chattered incomprehensibly. Move, I told myself. Get up. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I groaned and lifted one shoulder. Pain pierced my stomach and shot up my legs. My calves had been gashed by Ralph’s in-line skates. Even more agonizing was my head, which throbbed unremittingly.
As I speechlessly eyed the gaggle now gawking down at me, I was convinced that the cement had cracked my skull. Perhaps I had a concussion. Perhaps my brains were leaking out. Well, I had agreed to cater to a group of hockey fans. I probably didn’t have any brains left to leak.
“Goldy?” A strange woman’s voice accused me from faraway. “Why did you drop the beer?”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was sitting in a gleaming blue-and-white bathroom. I had a vague recollection of someone lifting me and then placing me into this space. I studied my surroundings. Thinly striped blue porcelain tiles covered the floor, ran up the walls, surrounded the tub. Someone had wiped off my legs, arms, and face. The room swam. This was a nightmare, and I was dinner on a Staffordshire plate.
“I won’t be much longer,” came a comforting voice from the vicinity of the sink. Water was running. I risked eyeing the sink area.
The plump woman who stood beside me was of medium height. Her strawberry-blond hair shone. In the mirror I could see she had a kindly face. Actually, two kindly faces. I groaned and closed my eyes.
An impatient, distressed voice spoke from the doorway. “Lucky you’re coming around, Goldy.” My heart sank: Patricia. This was a bad dream. “We’re starting on that vegetable basket you put out. Are you all right now? My husband can’t put the fish on the grill until you’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” I muttered as the kindly red-haired lady smeared a gold-colored jelly on my forehead. The jelly looked like Vaseline and smelled like something you’d get in a Navajo gift shop. “What are you doing?” I asked uneasily, even as the comforting warmth of the salve magically removed the throbbing in my head. “Do I know you?”
“Shh, shh.” The woman smoothed more salve on my right arm. “Now smear some of this on your other arm.” I obeyed. More water spurted from the faucet. The red-haired Florence Nightingale handed me a glassful. “Can you drink some of this and then put this under your tongue?” When I nodded mutely, she shook out a speckled beige tablet from a wide brown bottle that hadn’t come from any pharmacy.
“I’m not taking any drugs,” I said firmly. Or at least I think I did.
Her laugh rippled off the porcelain walls. “This is about as far from drugs as you can get,” she assured me.
“Goldy, did you hear me?” pleaded Patricia, my former friend, my former pleasant client. “We’re going to start on your appetizers. Clark’s putting on a video of one of the Cup games and I want dinner to be served in forty minutes. If you’re still going to cater this party, you’d better pull yourself together.”
I clasped the tablet. It was still difficult to bring Patricia into focus. “Ah, do all the skates have their guests off?” I managed. Dyslexic sentence. Still couldn’t think right. No wonder press conferences after hockey games were so uninformative. “Ah …” I tried again. “Guests have their skates off?”
“Of course they do,” Patricia retorted. “You’ve been in here for almost a quarter of an hour. I’m worried that the grill’s going to run out of propane. When that last buzzer sounds, I want these guests to have grilled fish on their plates. Please hurry!” Then she turned on her heel and stomped away. I hoped Clark had put on a video of the last game of the 1996 Stanley Cup. Then we would have dinner in five hours, and I would have the last laugh.
“Don’t mind her,” said the red-haired woman. “And by the way, I’m a nurse. Put that pill under your tongue. It’s a homeopathic treatment for shock and pain.”
“What… ?”
But I was in too much pain to argue. I obediently slipped the pill under my tongue and got a smile as a reward from my new guardian angel. Doggone if this woman didn’t have an aura. On the other hand, maybe my head injury was even worse than I feared.
She said softly, “It’s called arnica, from a flower of the same name.”
“Who’re you?” I managed.
“Ralph Shelton called me,” she replied in that mellifluous voice that reminded me of stirred custard. “I live close by.” She concentrated her warm brown eyes on mine. “Ralph and I used to work together. He was so worried about you. He told me l you were an old friend of his.” She added gently, “My name’s Amy Bartholomew.”
I gagged on the second tablet as Amy patted more of the salve on my right shin. “I thought you…” What did I think she was going to look like, Kenny Rogers fresh from singing “The Gambler”? “What’s that you’re putting on me?” There was a taste of grass clippings in my mouth from the pills. “This stuff in my mouth tastes funny.”
“The salve contains goldenseal, olive oil, comfrey, yarrow, white oak bark, and all kinds of other healing herbs. Beginning to feel any better?”
I nodded, then waited for the pain in my head to pulse in punishment for my unwise move. To my
