Page 63 of Going Home in the Dark

“Big one?” Rebecca asked.

Apparently agitated that he’d been interrupted while glowering at his meal, Butch said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, big one. What’s bigger? Nothing’s bigger than the big one.”

Realizing he had used the wrong interrogative, Bobby switched to a pronoun. “Who?”

“Who?” Butch asked, frustrated by their thick-headedness. “You want to know who?”

“Yes, please.”

“You come here with all that shit, even a balloon says ‘The lord lifteth me,’ and you don’t know who?”

To Bobby, Rebecca said, “I’ll try another one.” She smiled at Butch, favoring him with that special smile she had practiced for years, in case she ever got a chance to play a nun. “What? What is the big one?”

Butch was now red-faced. “Don’t give me that smutty smile, lady. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not talking about anyone’s pecker. What’swrongwith you people?”

Spencer stepped into the fray. “All we want to know is who bit the big one, what the big one is, and why he bit it.”

“Are you a smart-ass?” Butch demanded. “If I could get out of this bed, I’d kick the hell out of your smart ass.”

In spite of humankind’s enduring difficulty understanding one another, a confusion like this will come to an end sooner or later. In this instance, the end hove into sight when Spencer looked at the empty bed that stood beyond Butch and said, “What happened to your roomie?”

“He Bit the Big One!” Butch roared. “He doesn’t need your fancy flowers. He had terminal cancer. You know what ‘terminal’ means, you jackass? It means a lot more than where you get a bus.”

“Ahhh,” the three amigos responded, and then Bobby said, “Sorry about the confusion. We didn’t come to visit him, whoever he was. We came to visit you.”

Butch’s face accommodated a look of perplexity while still half-possessed by anger, which made him look like an enormous pouting baby. A dangerous baby. “Me? You came to visit me?”

“You,” Bobby repeated.

“I don’t even know you two. I don’t really know this jackass in the hat, either. He came in here yesterday to take my wheelchair.”

“Borrow your wheelchair,” Spencer said.

“You said ‘borrow,’ but you never brought it back.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“They had to get another wheelchair to take me to treatment this morning. They gave me the stink eye.”

“The what?”

“The stink eye. Like I must have stolen the damn wheelchair myself.”

Rebecca said, “How could you have stolen it when you need assistance to get out of bed?”

“You’d think the idiots would figure that out, wouldn’t you?” Butch complained.

Recognizing an opportunity for reconciliation, Rebecca tried the nun smile again. “That’s why we came to visit. To say we’re sorry about the wheelchair.”

“You brought me balloons, flowers, and candy because you stole the hospital’s wheelchair?”

“Borrowed,” said Spencer. “We left it in the parking lot.”

If Butch was quick to take offense, he was equally quick to forgive and forget. “Gee, that’s sweet. I mean, who does something like that these days?”

“We do,” Bobby said. “It’s just who we are.”

Butch smiled at the flower arrangement Rebecca had put on the nightstand. “They’re real pretty.”

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