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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.”
