The Good Doctor 18
“We can’t do this!!!!!!!”
“What? We’re not doing anything. Besides nobodies
gonna know!” He slid his hand down the back of my pants
and was playing with my butt. My libido was screaming YES but
my brain was screaming NO. I wanted him in me, I wanted that
feeling of possession of belonging. I mean, geez! Shouldn’t
this be slowing down? It’s like we’re having more
sex all the time.
“Besides, I’m a doctor and I think that you really
really need this.” Yeah right……..like a prescription!
“Pete, that bitch Jane knows that we’re in here
and there’s no fucking way that she’s giving us
time to fuck.” Charlie seems to be paying big time attention
to Jane so maybe that’ll lead to her getting banged once
in a while and she’ll get off my case. Oh god he’s
kissing my neck! “Besides, why are you so horny? We had
sex this morning!”
He smiles at me and then kisses me again. “I don’t
know, it’s crazy.” He nuzzles my neck and nibbles
for a split second on my ear. “I,” he rubs his
eyes and shakes his head slowly, “I think about you all
the time. I think about you more than I did before, before………..we
were together…….crazy, it’s crazy.” The
corners of his eyes get all crinkly and are sexy as hell in
a male outdoors kinda way. Pete is tan and that really makes
his blue eyes pop while his blond hair is dropping down over
his forehead. His voice is all rumbly and makes me vibrate
down to my toes.
Pete pulls his face away, smiles disappointedly
and says. “It’s
oooookay. I guess that I can always go and cure sick people.
I’ll go.” Go? Who the fuck said anything about
going?
“Oh! No……….I mean………..don’t
do that…………..I never got the chance
to show you the warehouse. I got a little office out there
too.” I kiss him. “No windows.”
-----------------------------
“Now listen to me!” She grabs
my arm.
“Mom, I am listening.” My
god the woman has got a grip like a vice!
“Eric, you’re not listening and I need someone
to know this. When I’m dead nobody’s gonna know
how to make this sauce! You think that your father cares?”
“Mom, you’re not gonna die.
Well, I mean, everyone dies but not for a long long long
time.”
She pointed her finger at me and wagged
it back and forth. “The
key is the stock. This is a true glaze. I didn’t just
boil some beef bones for an hour, this is an actual glaze and
it’s the thing that gives the sauce its life.” She
actually thinks that I’m gonna make this?
“Twenty quarts of stock! That’s what you start
with. Start with! That’s just to start! You boil that
down, slowly, lovingly to maybe a quart then even more slowly
to two cups.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Eric,
are you paying ANY attention at all?”
“Mom! I’m listening to every word!” A lie. “I
know that this is important to you and it’s important
to me too.” A lie. “I wanna be able to pass this
on to Jase.” A lie.
She gives me a doubtful look and then
turns back to the stove. “Okay,
the tomato is the dominant flavor but you add one ladleful
of the stock to the sauce. This big ladle not the little ones.”
She goes on………….endlessly. What DO
I want to pass on to Jase? I want him to be honest, with himself
and with others. I want him to finish what he starts, to understand
that you can’t be a quitter. God, I want so much for
him……..and he’s gotta learn it from me. Shit!
Like I’m up to that job! Well……there’s
Pete too, he oughta be great at this…….and Jase
actually listens to him.
Whack!!! She’s banging her ladle on the counter. “Eric!!
You’re not listening!”
“I heard it, Mom! Stock! You were
talking about stock!”
She leans against the counter her shoulders
slumped forward and stares at me over her glasses. “Five minutes ago
it was stock. For the last two minutes it’s been meatballs.
Will you concentrate??” She waves her hand at me and
turns disgustedly back to the counter.
“I use three kinds a meat in my meatballs, beef, veal
and pork……….and they gotta be lean.”
Now this is heresy! “Mom, since
when do you believe in lean?”
“I don’t believe in lean……………necessarily.
I do believe in healthy and there’s ways to make meatballs
moist and still healthy. And…………as
it happens they taste better this way. The trick is adding
more of our stock to the ground meat.”
Beyond mom and positioned so that she
can’t see him
in the family room is Jase. He’s sticking his tongue
out at me, and using his thumb and forefinger to make the loser
sign. Damn! I shoulda never taught him that! I growl at him
with my eyes but he knows that I’m trapped and can’t
run after him. I make like a fake lunge in his direction but
he just laughs behind his hand. I try everything, my disappointed
in him look, my angry look, my I’m gonna get you look,
it all means nothing, he just laughs more. Little brat, I wonder
if it’s too late to sell him. No! I’m kidding!
He’s my whole fucking life, well a huge part of it anyway.
“Eric!” Mom is shaking her big spoon at me again. “Quit
teasing Jason!” Me??? Fucking teasing him?? “You
know………you’re just like a little boy
yourself, don’t you take anything seriously?” Oh
God! Maybe she’ll jamb that big spoon right into my head.
-----------------------------------
I scoop Jase up on the run, he wasn’t expecting it and
he squeals. “So I’m a loser am I?” Mock severity.
He knows better than to fall for this. His body is sooooo skinny
and yet so vibrating with life. He twists and turns until he’s
right side up. His arms are around my neck and he lets me hold
him with perfect trust.
“I didn’t SAY that you were a loser, Dad.” Oh
yeah! He’s all innocence and endearing smiles now!
“Maybe you didn’t say it but that’s what
you meant. You know, it’s important to your grandmother
that we be interested in this stuff. Understand?”
“You know how to make meatballs,
Dad?”
“Meatballs? Ah…………..no. With
your grandma around I’ve never had to.” I bury
my nose in the crook of Jase’s neck and inhale. Little
kids always smell so great, not sexy great or perfume great
but puppy breath great. I carry Jase into the living room and
plop down on the sofa with him still in my arms.
“You know, at some point your grandma is gonna get it
that she’s not really making any inroads with me and
at that point she’s probably gonna drop me like a hot
potato and turn her attention to you.”
“Whadya mean, Dad?” Jase twists around and straddles
my waist. His knee crushes my balls momentarily. Geez I can
understand that little girls might not understand about crushing
their father’s balls but it sure seems to me that a little
boy should understand it.
“Jaaaaaason! Son, don’t put
you knee there.”
He ignores my pain. “Whadya mean
when you say that about grandma, Dad?”
“Actually………………….I’m
not sure.” Great! All fathers should be confused! I run
my fingers through his hair and try to get it into place. Funny,
I don’t give a shit how I look but I do care how he looks. “It’s
just that at some point she might figure she’s got a
better chance of teaching you to cook and to generally be perfect
in every way.”
Jase puts his index finger into his mouth,
chews on it for a minute and glances around the room like
he’s trying
to figure something out. What’s he gonna do with that
wet finger? Oh right, his dad’s shirt! Yuck! “But,
Dad, I’m just little…………….I
don’t know how to cook.”
“That’s okay, Sweetheart, grandma will spend all
the time that she needs to spend making sure that you know
everything that there is to know about cooking…………..Italian
cooking anyway.” No…………..she
wouldn’t do that. At least I don’t think so. “Well,
there may be a way out.” I touch the tip of my finger
to his nose. “If she tries to teach you how to cook ANYTHING,
just tell her that you you’d be afraid that if you learned
to cook then you’d never get to see her anymore.” I
sighed. “That won’t stop her but it might slow
her down and make her think.”
He looked a little worried. I kissed
his forehead. “Don’t
worry. I won’t let anything bad happen.” Yeah,
right! Like I can stop all the shit in life that is gonna come
down on his head one way or another.
-----------------------------------------
“So you met his mom.” There was more to Rose’s
statement than just the statement.
“Yes, Rose and she’s very nice and noooo she doesn’t
just work with crazy people.” I know exactly what this
woman is thinking and it’s never pretty.
“Sweetheart, I didn’t say anything about crazy
people. Of course……..now that you mention it……you
are practically a member of the family and Irene has gotta
be enthused about having such an unusual specimen so handy.
Maybe you’ll even inspire a book or something. How’s
about “A Study of the Immature Male” that sounds
like something you could make a contribution to.” Damn
this woman is a bitch!
“Rose………..don’t
you have some elderly sick person that you wanna fire before
they have a
chance to use that cheapass insurance that you supply to your
people?”
“Sweetheart, speaking of old sicko’s, and please
note the plural, how are Jane and Charlie doing? Did I tell
you that I saw them splitting a happy meal when I stopped in
to Micky D’s for a cup of coffee?”
“No surprise, Rose! You can practically smell the sex
when they look at each other.” I would have called it
disgusting but I was not exactly totally in the clear on this
subject myself.
“Well,” Rose said, “I probably shouldn’t
make fun of them at least they’re getting some which
is more than I can say for myself.”
Gee, maybe being like a zillion years
old is cramping her style. “Rose, you oughta try that new truck stop out
on I94. Sit on the hood of your car with a 12 pack of Miller
Light and a big bag of chips and ya just might pick yourself
up a social life, especially if you go in the evening when
the light is low.” I can be a bitch too.
------------------------------
Pete’s wet, I’m wet but Jase, finally, is clean
and dry. Jase’s bathroom is littered with rubber animals
for bath taking. We got ducks, we got dinosaurs, we got boa
constrictors, we got dogs. I’m pulling his pajama bottoms
up and Pete is pulling his pajama top down and all the while
Jase is telling us about the little boy at his daycare that
puked in the wastebasket. Jimmy, poor little guy, he’s
probably the main topic of conversation at thirty homes all
over town. It’s weird and certainly unfair but kids can
be defined by incidents like that. The name Jimmy the Puker
could, cruelly, follow him for the rest of his life.
“Jase, I hope that you don’t
call him that.”
Jase puts his left foot on Pete’s bent knee while he
straightens the pajama feet. At the same time he’s twisting
his head around to talk to me.
“I wouldn’t do that, Dad.” He’s shaking
his head. “That wouldn’t be nice and besides I
like him.” He leans back casually against Pete while
I brush his barely dry hair.
I look up and smile at Pete and say to
Jase. “You look
very nice. You goin to bed or……I look at my watch.
You got like twenty minutes that you can still watch television.”
He screams. “TV, Dad!” He pulls us both to the
family room and gets Pete and I to sit next each other while
he climbs up and sprawls over both of us. I glance at Pete
and notice that he’s got like this weird look on his
face, like a really emotional look but I can’t for the
life of me figure out why. He sees me looking and I lift one
eyebrow in an unspoken question. He shakes his head which either
means that he doesn’t want to talk about it, it isn’t
anything to begin with, he doesn’t want to talk about
it in front of Jase or god only know what the fuck else.
Finally Jase skips off to the safety
of Alan’s big green
paws and I turn to Pete.
“ You okay?”
