could come back too.”
Vivien felt a shudder of relief. If Jake was inviting her to come to the examination room, then it must not be desperate.
Unless it was horribly desperate, and he wanted someone to wait with him…
The nurse who led her back past rows of curtained rooms didn’t give any indication of Mr. DeRiccio’s status, and Vivien didn’t want to ask. She’d find out soon enough. The place smelled like antiseptic and medicine and other scents she figured were things she’d rather not identify, all things considered.
“Okay for her to come in, sir?” asked the nurse, stopping at one of the curtains and poking her head around the edge.
“Yes, please,” came a grumpy, gravelly voice. “I want a witness in case he tries to kill me.”
“You almost did that yourself, Pop,” said Jake as Vivien slipped in through a gap in the curtains. His eyes lit on her, and the relief and warmth in them made her feel a little wobbly inside.
“Thank God you came with him,” said Ricky DeRiccio, who was lying on the hospital bed. “Otherwise, who knows what he’d do.”
Vivien had to stifle a gasp at the sight of the old man. He looked frail and ashen, and his face was a mess of swollen red wheals over the weak pallor of his skin. What she could see of his arms—he had an IV needle stuck into the back of his hand, and the other arm had a blood-pressure cuff around the bicep—were also covered with the same angry red bumps. His thick black hair was an unruly mess, and his mustache bristled every which way as if it needed a comb.
“Pop tangled with a bee’s nest,” said Jake before she could ask. “After I told him not to—”
“You did nothing of the sort, sonny. You told me you’d take care of it, but you didn’t, and it was a week ago, and I wanted to trim the bushes under that window,” replied his father stoutly. “So I took care of it myself.”
Vivien swore she heard Jake counting under his breath before he replied very calmly, “When I told you I would take care of it, that meant for you not to do it, Pop. And it meant that I would as soon as I could. And it was only two days ago that I told you I would take care of it.”
Jake looked at her with something like pleading in his eyes. She wasn’t certain if he was asking for her to side with him against his father (as if), give him a break from his dad somehow, or simply empathize with his frustration and worry. Having a difficult parent of her own, Vivien could relate to the latter, at least.
“Well, it looks like the bees got the best of you, Mr. DeRiccio,” she said, coming closer to the bed. “I’m sorry to see that. I hope you’re not in too much pain.”
“Not anymore. They fixed me up just fine.” He pouted a little and looked even more Mario-like with those big eyes and the forward-thrust lower lip below his mustache. “I was being very careful, even though Genius here doesn’t think I know what I’m doing. I used a rake to knock it down, but when I was running away, I tripped over a damned stone and fell on my a—fell, and the blasted bees attacked.”
“Ouch,” Vivien said. “I’m very glad you aren’t allergic.”
“That makes two of us,” Jake muttered. “Pop, I have no idea what possessed you—”
“Now don’t you lecture me, Elwood,” growled his father. “I’ve had enough pain in my ass for one day. I don’t need you on there too, like a damned boil.” He turned his attention to Vivien and managed to look adorably pathetic. “Got stung so many times, I got to feeling all weak and lightheaded. Started getting a pain in my chest, too. Genius here don’t care about that, he just wants to lecture me about—”
“Pop, that’s not true,” Jake said, his eyes bulging and his jaws clamped tight. “You almost went into cardiac arrest. Your blood pressure was dropping—Christ, Vivien can tell you I was terrified all the way here that something was going to happen to you before I could get here, like—like Mom.”
That last bit plopped right down there among all of them, landing like a meteor, and Vivien winced a little inside. There was a flash of grief in Ricky DeRiccio’s eyes, but it was gone in an instant. The silence was broken