I could make two hundred bucks out of it. My folks’ savings are gone. They sold their car and bought a clunker. Dad took a second mortgage on the house when he should have been thinking about retiring and selling it and living on the proceeds.”
“Have you thought about coming back into teaching?”
Johnny glanced up. “Is that an offer?”
“It ain’t chopped liver.”
“I’m grateful,” Johnny said. “But I’m just not going to be ready in September, Dave.”
“I wasn’t thinking about September. You must remember Sarah’s friend, Anne Strafford?” Johnny nodded. “Well, she’s Anne Beatty now, and she’s going to have a baby in December. So we need an English teacher second semester. Light schedule. Four classes, one senior study hall, two free periods.”
“Are you making a firm offer, Dave?”
“Firm.”
“That’s pretty damn good of you,” Johnny said hoarsely.
“Hell with that,” Dave said easily. “You were a pretty damn good teacher.”
“Can I have a couple of weeks to think it over?”
“Until the first of October, if you want,” Dave said. “You’d still be able to work on your book, I think. If it looks like there might be a possibility there.”
Johnny nodded.
“And you might not want to stay down there in Pownal too long,” Dave said. “You might find it ... uncomfortable.”
Words rose to Johnny’s lips and he had to choke them off.
Not for long, Dave. You see, my mother’s in the process of blowing her brains out right now. She’s just not using a gun. She’s going to have a stroke. She’ll be dead before Christmas unless my father and I can persuade her to start taking her medicine again, and I don’t think we can. And I’m a part of it—how much of a part I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know.
Instead he replied, “News travels, huh?”
Dave shrugged. “I understand through Sarah that your mother has had problems adjusting. She’ll come around, Johnny. In the meantime, think about it.”
“I will. In fact, I’ll give you a tentative yes right now. It would be good to teach again. To get back to normal.”
“You’re my man,” Dave said.
After he left, Johnny lay down on his bed and looked out the window. He was very tired. Get back to normal. Somehow he didn’t think that was ever really going to happen.
He felt one of his headaches coming on.
4
The fact that Johnny Smith had come out of his coma with something extra finally did get into the paper, and it made page one under David Bright’s by-line. It happened less than a week before Johnny left the hospital.
He was in physical therapy, lying on his back on a floor-pad. Resting on his belly was a twelve-pound medicine ball. His physical therapist, Eileen Magown, was standing above him and counting off situps. He was supposed to do ten of them, and he was currently struggling over number eight. Sweat was streaming down his face, and the healing scars on his neck stood out bright red.
Eileen was a small, homely woman with a whipcord body, a nimbus of gorgeous, frizzy red hair, and deep green eyes flecked with hazel. Johnny sometimes called her—with a mixture of irritation and amusement—the world’s smallest Marine D.I. She had ordered and cajoled and demanded him back from a bed-fast patient who could barely hold a glass of water to a man who could walk without a cane, do three chinups at a time, and do a complete turn around the hospital pool in fifty-three seconds—not Olympic time, but not bad. She was unmarried and lived in a big house on Center Street in Oldtown with her four cats. She was slate-hard and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Johnny collapsed backward. “Nope,” he panted. “Oh, I don’t think so, Eileen.”
“Up, boy!” she cried in high and sadistic good humor. “Up! Up! Just three more and you can have a Coke!”
“Give me my ten-pound ball and I’ll give you two more.”
“That ten-pound ball is going into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s biggest suppository if you don’t give me three more. Up!”
“Urrrrrrgrah!” Johnny cried, jerking through number eight. He flopped back down, then jerked up again.
“Great!” Eileen cried. “One more, one more!”
“OOOOARRRRRRRRUNCH!” Johnny screamed, and sat up for the tenth time. He collapsed to the mat, letting the medicine ball roll away. “I ruptured myself, are you happy, all my guts just came loose, they’re floating around inside me, I’ll sue you, you goddam harpy.”
“Jeez, what a baby,” Eileen said, offering him her hand. “This is nothing