Page 20 of A Much Younger Man
“I’m afraid it can’t be helped.” I eyed Cooper. “Are you sure it can’t be helped?”
“Yes.” He shot me a stern look.
“All right then. Lena, would you be good enough to hold down the fort?” She nodded. “Beck’s in the back with some kittens. Cooper, would you make sure he gets dinner?”
“Course.” Cooper nodded. “Shawn will be by to pick him up later. I’ve only got my bike.”
“Right.” For some reason I’d yet to discover, Cooper didn’t ride in cars unless the heavens opened up and lightning cracked the sky, and sometimes not even then.
I grabbed my wallet, phone, and keys and let myself out the back.
There are people who might say what I was about to do was unnecessary at best and crazy at worst. Those people would be absolutely, completely right.
What was it about Beck that got under my skin?
There was the talent, of course, which was not to be denied. And the dog. I can never resist rescuing a dog.
But I think for me it was that Beck ran to me when he was alone and scared. He’d been robbed, and instead of going to the police, instead of any one of a number of people who’d befriended him—Cooper, and Jim, and probably an SIPD uniform or two—he’d run to my clinic and banged on my door.
In a way, I figured that made him mine.
The drive up the coast was pretty, but the two-lane road between the 101 and Salinas was boring as hell. Because I don’t pay for satellite radio, on that stretch of road, I had trouble getting anything besides banda; country; or endless, infuriating, Christian talk radio.
I barely made it to Secondhand Salinas in time, and Cooper was right about the owner holding out for a brain-boggling price. In the end, I got Beck’s guitar. The dude threw in some sheet music he had like a party favor. I stowed everything in the back of my SUV, got a box of Popeye’s fried chicken tenders, and started back the way I’d come.
Cooper rang me when I was about halfway home.
“Hey, Coop. What’s up?”
“Beck’s at our place. He looks like a zombie. I don’t think he slept much last night.”
“I wouldn’t have.” I couldn’t begin to imagine how vulnerable he must have felt. “The boyfriend was a shit, but I get the feeling he looked out for Beck.”
Boyfriend.I scoffed. Just more evidence that relationships were a sucker bet.
“Should I come by? I’m still about forty-five minutes out.”
“You could wait until morning.”
“I could.” But I’d seen Beck’s face that morning. He’d looked lost and hopeless and utterly betrayed. I didn’t want him to have to spend a whole night feeling that way when it was in my power to help.
“You’re really scaring me, Doc.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“I’ve like, literally never seen you act like this. This kid is way under your skin.”
“Says the man who invited him into his home.”
“All right. Fuck you.”
Cooper was not a man to mince words.
“I’ll be by before I go home. See you then.”
Off to the right, the sun was falling into the ocean, leaving a long, glittering red path across the water. The beauty of the coast is something you can take for granted if you’ve lived alongside it most of your life, but I don’t. To my left, a cargo train chugged along the railroad tracks going north.
For me, that’s what it was like to meet new people—I’m going along one way, and they’re speeding the other. Sometimes we slide by each other, but there’s never a break in the momentum of our lives to really connect.
Yet somehow I’d connected with Beck.
Whatever that might mean in the future, right now, I was content to give him what he’d lost and make him smile again if possible.
