Page 40 of Wham Line
“Uh huh.”
But that was all; the words were automatic, and Jethro’s gaze was turned inward.
“Jethro!”He blinked and seemed to remember me, and I said, “What’s going on?”
For a heartbeat, he stared at me as though he had no idea what I was talking about.Then he said, “Talmage wanted to get divorced.Mal wouldn’t let her.”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s what he said: he wouldn’t let her.”
“He can’t stop her, Jethro.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Do you know what he meant?”
The boy pushed his hair out of his eyes again.“I didn’t hear all of it.He didn’t want me to hear, but I…I listened anyway.She said she was leaving.He said something like, ‘Go ahead, but you won’t get anything.’And Talmage said she had good lawyers, and she didn’t want it to turn into a fight.And Mal said—it was really strange—he said, ‘You should have been more careful.’And Talmage didn’t say anything.And Mal said, ‘It was a little too convenient, don’t you think?He wouldn’t go, wouldn’t go, wouldn’t go.And then you stayed the night, and he was gone.’”Jethro squirmed inside his pullover again.“Her dad died, like, a week before that.They said it was respiratory failure, and he’d been sick a long time.”
For several seconds, I tried to wrap my head around Mal blackmailing his grieving wife.The money was the obvious reason; it seemed like for Mal, everything had been about money.Talmage wouldn’t have been the first wife to stay because she didn’t want to walk away from financial security.But had it been more?That had only been a few months before Mizzenmast’s opening; maybe Talmage had thought she could hold on until she was established and then make another bid for divorce.The memory of the night before swam up to me: the way Talmage had said,It’s my restaurant.What had changed?Had she learned that Mal had, once again, found a way to cheat a chef out of her stake in a restaurant?Would that have been the tipping point?
It wasn’t hard to imagine Talmage flying into a rage; I’d seen it myself earlier that day.It wasn’t all that hard to imagine her with a gun, for that matter.But she’d been in a busy kitchen, and Bobby and I had responded to the shots right away.It would have been impossible for Talmage to leave, shoot Mal, and come back into the kitchen without someone noticing.
“Okay,” I said.“That’s helpful.Was there something else—”
“There you are.”The words came from behind me.A solidly built woman with Pacific Islander features and sensible clogs marched toward me like I was a sock that had gotten lost in the dryer.“We’ve been looking all over for you.Mr.Mai’s resting now if you want to see him.”
There was a lag in my processing, a gap between the words and the rush of relief.He was okay.Bobby was okay.He was resting.My knees didn’t actually buckle, but I did get a rash of goose bumps, and there was this swelling feeling, like a wave was lifting me up.
“Right,” I said.“Okay.He’s okay?”
“He’s doing much better.”
“Okay,” I said.“Okay.”
(Cut me some slack; I was borderline in shock.)
I turned to Jethro, with the vague idea of taking him with me so that, at some future point—after lots of kisses with Bobby, presumably—I could resume my, uh, interview.But Jethro had skedaddled.I caught a glimpse of him at the end of the hallway, and then he turned the corner and was gone.
It was hard to care too much.
“Okay,” I said to the nurse.
She patted my arm.“Okay.”
Either Bobby’s status as a deputy or the rareness of his diagnosis rated him a private room; it consisted of a single hospital bed, the usual bulk of monitoring equipment, textured gray wallpaper that must have been easy to clean, and a window that gave a view of a stretch of trees.It was late afternoon, and the shadows were long and crisp, like they’d been traced with sharp-tipped pencils.
All of that in a heartbeat.And then everything was Bobby.
He had raised the bed so he could sit upright, and he wore a hospital johnnie, and he had all sorts of wires and tubes snaking around him—an IV, one of those oxygen thingies they clip to your finger, a blood pressure cuff, and an EKG.There was lots of beeping.There was lots of electrical humming.A cannula hung across his cheekbones, and his color was bad.His dark hair was plastered to his forehead with drying sweat.He looked smaller inside the johnnie, wrung out, and I thought how long it had been since he’d eaten or slept.He smiled at me, and I started to cry.
Chapter 11
“It could have been much worse,” the doctor said.
I squeezed Bobby’s hand and fought the urge to shift my chair closer to his bed—not that I could get much closer.The next step would be to climb onto his lap.Around us, the machinery continued to hum, and from the hall came a steady, high-pitched beeping that didn’t seem to alarm anyone.Sunlight fell through the window in a warm oblong across my back.Bobby’s hand was stiff in mine.
“Was it tetrodotoxin?”I asked.
