It took me awhile to get up my nerve and go out there in the rain. I was thinking how Dori was a pro at this and I’m chickenshit, and then a guy came over pecking on the car window and I sold him half a bottle of oxy, lickety-split. Dori told me what to charge him for it. So that was good and we called it a day, headed out to Food Lion because she’d run completely out of everything at the house, t.p. and food. Planningwise, Dori was on the par with Mom.
I asked her what happens if you actually get inside that clinic. She said you just pay the money and he writes you. Everybody gets the exact same thing, holy trinity. Oxy, Soma, Xanax. But a lot of them end up having to wait so long, they’re having their DTs in the waiting room. She always would fill Vester’s prescriptions at Walgreens, count out what was needed for the coming days, then come straight over here to sell the rest. She said she made almost two thousand bucks one time in that parking lot. You look for the ones that are seizing or puking.
Technically I wasn’t shocked, these pill millers were known about. Real doctors running their enterprises, the new philosophy of pain management as seen on Kent TV. They all would have started out as regular doctors, pediatricians or what have you. Sports medicine. That was the surprise. She said the guy running that clinic was Dr. Watts.
The hardest part of my day was leaving Dori and going back to Coach’s house. But rules were in place, with U-Haul looking for any excuse to take me down, so for most of March and April I’d been sleeping over there to keep the appearances. But after Vester died, I didn’t have the heart anymore to leave Dori. She’d never been alone in her life. Here she was this saint type person taking care of a sick man, and you’d never guess underneath it all was a child. A bedroom full of plush toys and a daddy that never said no. This was from a young age, starting after her mom died. Roller skates, Princess Di dress, horse on the roof, the occasional calm-down pill, what Dori wanted, Dori would have. It turns out, Jip started off as some old lady’s puppy that she was carrying around in her crocodile purse one time at the 4-H haunted corn maze. Dori was eight or nine at the time. She saw that fuzzy little head poking out and started crying to have them both, the dog and the purse. Would not let up her caterwauling until Daddy laid out two hundred bucks to this lady, and they went home with a pup in a crocodile purse. I was starting to get to the bottom of Dori. I’d tried explaining to her about my responsibilities as far as Coach and my grandmother and all that I stood to lose if I went AWOL from over there. My future, etc. Dori would just blink her sad, sad eyes and ask why didn’t I love her anymore.
Then my grandmother showed up. These were dark times. We’d had that late freeze that killed everything, including Vester technically, since ice took down the power lines and shut off his air. Then it warmed up a little and the rain set in. Now it was going on June, and nobody could remember a day where it wasn’t raining. The day Miss Betsy came up, we all sat around the king table with thunder rolling overhead while she went down the list of my various fails, and Coach’s face sagged, and it felt like the same black cloud had followed me all my life.
The problem was me and me alone, as far as Miss Betsy was concerned. Promises unkept. I’d flunked out of school past the point of all reason. She was stopping the monthly payments to Coach for my upkeep. As regards my staying there, playing ball or whatever, that was between Coach and me. Her interest was my education. She said you can lead the horse to water but the horse is not drinking. No need to waste more money. I was welcome to find my own way now, uneducated, and would soon find out there is more to life than kicking a ball. My grandmother never did get the mechanics of it, bless her heart. Thinking football is just the feet.
Even though I was the target, I could see Coach was taking it in the gut. In previous times she’d get on her jag about school, and Coach would wink at me behind her back. Now he was not looking me in the eye. Mr. Dick hung his head. Angus had her gray manga eyes boring into me, sending some instructions in code that I was failing to pick up on. My stomach felt like I’d been eating rusty nails. I was short on focus.
My grandmother though was loud and clear: no more support checks. “My reversed fortune,” she called it. She said I shouldn’t let it scare me, I’d just have to live it down. Some good was known to come out of bad luck, if you met it head-on. I said thanks for the advice.
Dori’s position for some while had been: Screw them. They didn’t love me like she did, so I should move in with her and be done with them all. I won’t deny I’d considered it, to live with Dori for real, as a couple. But that was with Vester still alive, just idle thoughts. I had even asked questions testing her out on the practical side. Like, what if we wanted to cook a real dinner, not just microwave or frozen. She said what do you mean cook, and I said, you know, on the stove. Like a roast or something. Grill cheese. She said if I was hungry we had Slim Jims, and some of those juice packets. I told her it was more of a theoretical. She made her little frown that ran a line between her eyebrows and said the burners on the range were hard to light and she’d never tried out the oven, so I should probably go take it up with Mattie Kate.