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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I wonder if my old friend Maria is in her office. I call her. And, I’m in luck.

Maria Amato has done well. She has a good sized office with some nice bookshelves and dark wood furnishings. Unusual in the hospital. It seems that she’s every bit as senior as she led me to believe. Which, if I’m honest, surprises me.

But, never mind that.

When I step into the office, I close the door behind me. A little wrinkle passes across her brow.

Maria is as neat and conventionally lovely as ever. She has on a pale skirt suit and an open blue blouse with a closed collar. A couple more years of worry under her eyes, probably courtesy of her spoiled idiot daughter Laurel, but Maria made her own bed.

Standing to greet me with a thin, watery smile, she leans across her tidy desk to offer me a light, fingertip handshake. She greets me by my name. I still don’t recognize it, but at least this time I hear it.

Smoothing the underside of her skirt with both hands as she sits back down in her nice big chair, she tells me how nice it is to see me and she’s so sorry that she doesn’t have long to chat.

When I ask her how Laurel is, I could do without her telling me all the worries and trials of a modern working mother, but I’m hoping it brings up a recollection and takes her mind to a receptive point.

As I tell her what I need, I can see that she will need a little more reminding.

“Oh, I do understand,” she starts out, and then she begins to list and describe some very dull details of hospital policy.

I tell her that Mikey is very important to me. That his recovery and his welfare are a high priority.

“It’s a serious issue, though, Lucia. We really can allow that only in the most serious cases.”

“He’s on high-dependency care, Maria. I was sure that I mentioned that.”

She gives me the so-sorry smile and spreads her fingers as her face tilts. “I could lose my job.”

“Seriously?”

She nods, “I’d lose my medical insurance. Laurel depends on that insurance, too, you know? Hell,” she smiles, with a so-you-see nod, “it could be a breach of ethics. If it were to go bad, I might not be able to work in the field again. All my experience and all of my qualifications would be up in smoke.” She gives me a little nod with a flick of her neat eyebrows for emphasis.

I say, “No, Really?” and I leave a pause.

Her chin shakes and her eyebrows wrinkle as she says, “Sorry.”

She starts to stand.

I say, “I thought we were friends, Maria.”

“Lucia–”

“Wasn’t that what you said when you came to me with a problem you wanted solved for Laurel?”

She freezes.

Maria and I were friends in high school together. We liked the same music, the same bars that we weren’t supposed to hang out in, the same boys that our parents would never approve of in a million years. We covered for each other a couple of times.

After we left school we stayed in touch. Not close, but now and then we’d meet for coffee. I treasured the friends I had who weren’t in the Life. People I could just hang out with and talk to. Talk about ordinary stuff.

She knew my background. Most people did. But she never made anything out of it. At least, I didn’t think she did. Not until many years later.

Our lives went separate ways as they do, she got married, had a daughter. Got unmarried again. Pretty young, in fact. But we still met for coffee. As we got older, we were like a tiny little occasional club of two. Like a mini book group. Something like that.

So this one time, she called me up, wanting to meet for coffee. Nothing unusual about that. Only, these days it would usually be next week or even next month. This was today. “Can you come right away?”

We met in our usual little diner. She was early. I had a latte. She was jumpy.

She said,

“Somebody is harassing my daughter. A man.”

“That’s terrible, Maria.” My voice slowed. I really hoped that this wasn’t going the way that I thought it was.

“I need help. Can you help me?” My heart sank. After all these years.

I said, “You’re asking me to do you a favor.”

Her eyes moistened. “Yes. Please. If you can.”

I never forget a favor. Because a favor equals a debt. It’s the Life. Someone does a favor for me, or I do one for them, either way, there’s a debt. And there may be a time it can be called in.

I asked her if she was sure, hoping she would change her mind.

She said she was.

I told her, “I’ll fix it.”

“Can you?”

A slow sigh drifted from me. It’s a big step. I felt like asking her if she was sure about this a second time, but I couldn’t. That’s not how it works. I regretted it, too. Maybe we could still be some kind of friends, but it wouldn’t ever be the same again.

Even if she changed her mind at that point, there’s no way she could have un-asked. From that moment, I knew that she saw me as something else. Maybe she always had.

Certainly I saw her differently. A moment ago, we were old friends. Friends since school with long histories, shared moments and memories.

She made the switch. She spoke to me as someone who can do things, get things done. Things nice people don’t want to talk about or even think about too much. Things they would rather hand off.

That’s a moment we couldn’t ever step back from.

In the Life, it’s not easy to have friends who are civilians. And you can only stay friends until they ask a favor. Once they cross that line, everything changes.

They may say, “I didn’t know.” But that’s a lie.

If they didn’t know, they wouldn’t have come to you to ask the favor in the first place.

I blinked. “It’s done, Maria.”

She smiled and let out a long sigh.

I said, “That person will never trouble your daughter Laurel again. And people around her will know that she’s taken care of. That she’s not somebody to mess with.”

A little shaky, she said, “Thank you, Lucia. You don’t know what this means to me.”

I told her, “Oh, Maria, believe me, I know.”

Her breath caught. She paused. Watching me. Studying my face as it sank in.

We haven’t spoken since.

Slowly sitting back down now, she pulls her lips in between her teeth.

There’s a knock on the frosted glass of her office door.

Her eyes stay on me and her voice cracks as she calls out, “Just a minute.” Then, “Could you come back in five, please.”

She says to me, “Maybe…”

“It’s done, Maria.”

She frowns. “When I came to you for help, I had no-one else to turn to. I was desperate. Now you want to turn that against me, to make me do this thing for you. After all the time we’ve been friends, how can you do that?”

I reach across the desk and put a hand on hers. “Maria. You came to me because you knew that I could do what you needed, and you wouldn’t have to worry anymore. I know that. But it’s not true that you had no-one else you could turn to. You made a choice.”

I fix her eye, steadily. “You could have dealt with that man yourself. It might have been hard. It could even have been dangerous, but you could have done it. He wasn’t all that, you know.”

She bites her lip and looks down. I tell her, “You could have talked to your daughter. What he was doing was wrong and she’s not to blame in any way. But she did have a choice. She could have removed herself from that situation.”

Maria’s brow pinches. I say, “It may have been hard, but there were a number of ways you could have dealt with it. You could have asked the police for help. Or another friend. But you came to me. You wanted to have it handled. You wanted it done. Neat and with your hands left clean. You had options and you made a choice.”

“I needed to be sure that my daughter was safe. That’s all. What’s wrong with that?”

“Of course you did. And nothing’s wrong with it. Only, you didn’t want to have to do it yourself. You could have been sure by making sure.” I tilt my head. “Did you just come to me straightaway, or did you think about it for a while first?”

She looks up, pleading. “No. I thought about it, Lucia. I did. I thought about it long and hard.”

“That’s what I thought. You knew what you were doing. What you were getting yourself into.”

“Lucia. I thought that because we were old friends…”

“You changed our relationship, Maria, not me. It was you who flipped us from being two old school friends into somebody who wanted something done, and the person who could do it for them. That was your choice, not mine. I never would have taken things that way. And, when you decided to ask, did you think about something you could do for me first, did you stop to consider what might be an appropriate way to repay me? No. Did you come to me with a proposal? No. You simply came and asked for a favor.”

I feel the warmth fall out of my voice now, as we finally come to finish the conversation that she started in the little diner where we met for coffee.

“You switched us from being friends into a client and a service provider, okay? That was your choice. Now, here’s the bill.”

As I stand, I tell her, “This is for someone I care very much about, too, Maria.”

In the Life, you do favors. All the time. And you never forget a favor.

Now I’m really starting to remember who I am.