Ernie shook my hand and told the bartender to pour whatever I was drinking. I ordered my second. Ernie held up his glass. “Cheers,” he said, then got that look of disgust. “You still wearing those dumb-ass contact lenses?”
“How many times are you going to say that?”
“Until you take them out.”
“I don’t want to scare my patients.”
“If that’s the reason, you ought to wear a mask.” He considered the overhead television. “I was listening on the radio. Sounds like the Niners are kicking some butt.”
I didn’t know the score. “How long is the hall pass?”
“I told her I’d leave at halftime.” Ernie and his wife met and married in Pittsburgh before moving back to California. They owned a house just south of Burlingame and had two young boys who called me Uncle Sam. “I didn’t push it. I’m holding out for something bigger.”
“Bigger than the Niners on Monday Night Football? Blasphemy,” I said.
Ernie reached inside his suit coat and produced two tickets. I knew immediately what they were. Every sports fan in the Bay Area knew what they were. “You’re shitting me! You scored a World Series ticket?”
“Two, my friend. So, I was going to ask . . .”
“This is unbelievable.”
“Would you mind watching the boys while Michelle and I go to the game?” Ernie laughed so hard I was surprised beer didn’t shoot from his nose the way grape juice did when we were kids. Michelle hated to watch sporting events on television or in person. How the two of them met and married was a mystery.
“You asshole,” I said.
“Be nice or I won’t take you.”
“How’d you get them?”
With the San Francisco Giants playing the Oakland Athletics in what the media had dubbed the Battle of the Bay, finding a ticket had been next to impossible. “My dad’s client can’t make it, so he offered them to me. I was going to take someone else because I thought you were going to Tahoe. What happened?” he said.
I hadn’t told Ernie about the vasectomy and didn’t intend to. He would have chastised me about it until my ears were as red as my eyes.
“Turns out Conman rented it for the weekend, so change of plans. I had a consult today,” I said. “A mother and her daughter—the daughter is losing her vision because of a head trauma.”
“Sad.” Ernie alternately glanced at me and watched the television.
“The mother’s name is Trina Crouch.”
Ernie shook his head to indicate he’d never heard of her and resumed watching the game.
“The mother and father are divorced. The daughter’s name is Daniela Bateman.”
Ernie lowered his beer.
I nodded. “No shit.”
“His daughter?”
“His daughter.”
We both drank in silence. After Bateman’s expulsion from OLM, he became more myth than real. We’d heard he went to the local public school but got expelled when he punched one of his teachers. Rumor was his parents had sent him to a military school back east and that, upon graduation, he’d enlisted in the marines.
“He’s back?”
“Apparently. The blow to his daughter’s head was supposedly the result of a bike accident.” Ernie stared at me, and I knew where his mind had gone. My “bike accident” remained firmly entrenched in both our memories. “The police report concludes a bike accident, but the emergency room doctor’s report is not consistent. The injuries—a scrape to the knee and one elbow—aren’t severe enough given the kind of accident needed to cause the vision problems.”