Chapters (19)
He opened one puffy eye to look at me, then closed it again. “Doesn’t matter now. I’ve had my last spin at the roulette wheel of life.”
“Oh listen to you, don’t be such a baby. You should eat something. Are your eggs cold? Do you need them heated up?”
He took his coat from the seat beside him and put it over his head like a bag, and that’s when I got up and left.
Tony had Gil working with him at the office, so I presided over the bagels and coffee by myself. The bagel woman ate her fill and left. Bettina Cruz was reading that night and she asked if she could play some slides during it illustrating the Puerto Rican diaspora. Somebody else needed a Benadryl, another somebody wanted to know where to find an ATM. I didn’t mind; I was kept too busy to worry about Aaron or anything else.
Sacha came looking for me after breakfast. “I don’t think Viridian’s taking her medicine. She keeps it in our bathroom and I counted the pills.”
“She has to take it. Did you tell her?”
“What am I supposed to say? I did ask once, like, did she remember to take it, and she said yes, of course she did. But she hasn’t. I checked again.”
We looked at each other, stricken. I don’t know what I might have suggested, in the way of good ideas, since I had none.
I didn’t get the chance anyway. Oscar’s workshop students came in then, back from their adventure and looking for coffee and bagels. They didn’t seem to have suffered any harm. If anything, they had a swagger to them, having had an authentically wild time, having gotten their money’s worth, so to speak. A couple of them seemed to have started in drinking again this morning.
I told Sacha we should talk when I got done slinging bagels.
Oscar’s morning workshop session apparently turned out all right. I doubt if any of his students were in fit shape to complain anyway. I saw them all later, sitting together at lunch. Oscar still wasn’t talking much or eating. He was attempting to be a wan good sport as the others told their stories. I didn’t see Sacha or Viridian.
I looked up to see Gil walking through the dining room distributing a packet of mail. It hadn’t occurred to me to give out my address. Who would write to me anyway? Who got mail in a place like this?
Oscar did. Gil handed him a small white envelope. He stared at it, stood up so suddenly that his chair wobbled backward. Then he raised his hands over his head, prize fighter style, and hurried from the hall.
“Poets,” Gil said to me, the same way that somebody else might say “kids.”