Page 5 of We Could Be So Good
July1958
Nick is pretty sure that if he hadn’t first known his nephew—a fourteen-year-old who goes through life with untied shoes and perpetually skinned knees, surrounded by a chaotic cloud of comic books and pencils and baseball cards—he wouldn’t know what to think about Andy.
In May, Andy gets stuck in the elevator at the criminal courts building for three hours, then turns up at theChroniclelooking mildly traumatized but bearing a box of doughnuts to apologize for cutting it so close to the filing deadline. In June, he’s nearly run down by a cab on Canal Street, only stopped by Nick’s hand darting out to grab his coat. In a single week in July, Andy bangs his head into the ladder of a fire truck while he and Nick are covering a warehouse fire, gets food poisoning from a chicken salad sandwich that Nicktellshim looks bad, and is almost bitten by a guard dog at the scene of a robbery in the Bronx.
When, one Monday morning, Andy emerges from the elevator leaning on a cane, Nick takes one look at him and shakes his head. “Christ. You need someone to follow you around. An ambulance or at least a medic. Maybe a Saint Bernard.”
“Nice,” Andy says, looking like he’s trying not to smile. “This is how you treat the wounded?”
“What was it this time? You already have elevators, fire trucks, and taxicabs. A helicopter? A hot-air balloon?”
Andy looks like he’d rather do anything than answer. “A boat, actually.”
Nick bursts out laughing.
“This is a place of business, gentlemen,” shouts Jorgensen, the deputy city desk editor.
“A boat,” Nick says, when he gets himself under control.
“The decks are quite slippery, I’ll have you know,” Andy sniffs. “Even slipperier when you accidentally step on a fish.”
Nick falls off his chair, which sets Andy off laughing, and Nick is so unprepared for the baritone rumble of laughter that he doesn’t even notice when he hits his head on the corner of a desk.
“You’re bleeding,” Andy says, stricken. Nick brings his fingers to his temple and they come away red.
Jorgensen rolls across the room on his chair, tosses the first aid kit onto the floor where it lands beside Nick with a metallic clank, and rolls back, muttering something about how it’s a dark day when reporters start acting like giddy schoolgirls. Nick is dimly aware of a grumble coming from the direction of the copyboys’ bench, and he realizes he’s probably smiled enough in the past two minutes to make a mess of their betting pool for the entire month of July.
Andy hobbles over and with some difficulty lowers himself to the floor. “May I?” he asks, his hand an inch from Nick’s forehead.
“I’ll be fine,” Nick says, from reflex as much as from anything else. He’s been patching himself up for a long time now.
Andy rolls his eyes. “We both know that if you bleed on that shirt, you’re going to gripe about it for the rest of the day. Let me stick a Band-Aid on your forehead so we can move on with our lives.”
Nick sighs. “Fine. Have it your way.”
Andy brushes the hair away from Nick’s temple and peers at the cut. Nick finds himself looking up into a pair of caramel-brown eyes. “It’s not deep. You won’t need stitches and it won’t ruin your pretty face.”
Nick can hardly breathe. “What are you, a nurse?”
“As you’ve noticed, I’ve had a lot of experience on the receiving end of first aid. Now sit still while I put iodine on it.”
Nick does as he’s told, only wincing a little as the iodine stingshis cut, distracted by the way Andy bites his lip as he focuses. A few wisps of hair fall onto his forehead as he works, and Nick resists the urge to put them back where they belong.
It’s no good, looking at a colleague that way. There are plenty of places where he can look his fill and plenty of people who won’t mind looking back. TheChronicleisn’t one of those places, and the owner’s son isn’t one of those people.
“There now,” Andy says, smoothing a Band-Aid across Nick’s temple, the pads of his fingers gentle. “Good as new.”
“Thanks,” Nick says, his voice a little rough. “Jorgensen would have let me bleed out.”
“Who gave you the first aid kit, you pair of ingrates?” the editor shouts.
“Back in his day they didn’t have Band-Aids,” Nick continues. “They just slapped mud on their wounds and went back to drawing the news on the walls of their caves.”
“I can still hear you,” Jorgensen says.
“It’s nice when the elderly keep their hearing,” Andy observes.
“I’ll have you both writing obituaries if you don’t get your acts together,” Jorgensen says.
