Work Text:
Rain sounds threatening on the windows in an office on the 35th floor of a skyscraper in the Loop that has no reason to exist other than to measure dicks, fill the city with Pi Beta pricks, or sell skyline snowglobes or some shit. The raindrops are like the arrhythmic, impatient tapping of fingernails on a desk that comes just before someone tells Richie he’s in deep shit, and even though he knows it’s not actually happening, each rumble of thunder shakes the window panes like it’s god reminding everyone that humans weren’t meant to be in the sky.
It’s all glass walls in this corner office, a full 180 degrees of clouds and steel, and Richie feels like he shouldn’t even be here. Not like metaphorically or whatever, like literally, like he asked the receptionist at least seven times that they accept whatever cheap fuckin’ Obamacare bullshit he’s been on since Tiff kicked him off her plan, and though she kept saying yes and he’s yet to see the thousand dollar bill he’s been dreading even though it costs $45 a pop to park in the parking deck underneath the building, it still feels wrong. He should be talking to one of his people, the salt of the earth, or at least down on earth.
He can’t imagine these windows are even an inch thick, like if he tripped over one of the fourteen ficuses this lady has just scattered around her office in what she probably thinks is an artful manner, real feng shui, but really it’s just hazardous. If he tripped, he would shatter that thing, all six-foot-one of him would take a long dive to a short stop. He’d never work in a place like this, it’s just asking for trouble.
“What’s on your mind?” the doc says casually, like Richie has actually said more than five words since he’s sat down. She sits in a comfy chair, one leg draped over the other, a notebook in her lap, and she stays there, a statue the whole 50 minutes.
Richie moves reflexively, shifting from one ass cheek to another, the nylon of his pants making a sad swishing noise against his leather chair. “Nobody likes walls anymore.”
“What’s that?”
“On these buildings, everything’s fucking glass. There’s no walls between you and the rest of the, like, the sky. You don’t feel like you’re in a house of cards?”
“I suppose I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“How?” Richie leans forward, his elbows hitting his knees, and cocks his head at her. “It’s impossible not to. I’d think that every time I walked into this room, that I’m one bad ficus away from plunging to my death.”
She tilts her head too, the action nearly imperceptible, but Richie notices it because he’s spent as much time studying her as she has him. “Are you afraid of heights?”
Richie makes a face and says quickly, “No,” even though he’s not sure.
“Do you feel this way in airplanes?”
“I don’t do planes.”
“Why not?”
Richie leans back in his chair. “Where the fuck do I have to go?”
She marks something down on her paper, which always makes Richie feel like he’s said something wrong, like this whole thing is a test, and maybe it is because if he fails he could end up back in front of a judge.
“This is our fifth session together, Richie.”
“Yeah, happy anniversary. You want me to give you some wood?” She doesn’t respond for long enough that Richie has to rethink what he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s like. You know, five years is wood.” He doesn’t even know why he knows that, it’s not like he got to five years with Tiff.
“I wanted to know if you’d be open to telling me about what happened in the Aldi.”
Richie presses his eyes, trying to rub away the memories that flash through his mind at the mention of that afternoon. Bags of frozen chicken nuggets cascading from their shelves onto the floor, Eva screaming, Richie’s fingers tearing at his shirt to expose his chest because his mouth couldn’t make the words, the rent-a-cop trying to figure out if he should call 911 for an ambulance or a cop car.
“I had a panic attack,” Richie tells her because that’s what the paramedic told him when they finally arrived.
She nods, finally a correct answer. “You thought you were having a heart attack.”
“They said that’s a common misconception. Apparently.” His mouth twists as he offers, darkly, “Sue me.” What’s one more lawsuit when you’ve already got another?
“What was going on in your mind before it happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“I don’t fuckin’ remember,” he snaps. “Nobody ever fucking believes me but I’m sorry to report I do not have a detailed fucking account of a shit ass day preceded by a string of other shit ass days and followed by some more shit ass days. It was a fucking Thursday.”
She already has a detailed list of all the things that make him stressed from their last few conversations. The divorce and the rent and fucking Covid and shit, all the same kinds of stuff that bother everyone else. So there’s nothing special about Richie.
“I just lost my cool a little, okay, but it’s fine now. I got it locked down.”
She marks something on her paper, another wrong answer, another tick box in the column against Richie. “Do you remember what happened during or after?”
“Yes,” he answers truthfully - although, okay, it’s not like the other stuff isn’t truthful, but, he means it cooperatively. Anything to put a tick in his own column. “I thought I was fucking dying.”
“Would you be okay telling me more about that?”
Nobody’s asked him that yet. Between the store manager and the police officer and the paramedic and three lawyers and fucking Tiff, he’s been asked every question under the sun, but nobody’s actually asked him if he wants to talk about it. Not that it matters anyway, because he has to talk about it and she knows he has to talk about it, so it’s less considerate and more like when your wife of three years sits down at the kitchen table and says can we talk?, and your answer is no but your answer is really yes.
“It was a fucking Thursday and I had Eva for the weekend and Tiff says I gotta feed her more vegetables like it’s a threat, everything’s a threat with her - she’s gotta eat more vegetables or else - like she’s gonna write that in the custody papers, he won’t let her eat any vegetables. I give her vegetables, okay? I eat fucking vegetables, I’m surrounded by fucking giardiniera all day. So I don’t know, I’m probably thinking about fucking vegetables and the frozen chicken nuggets that are dinosaur shaped because she likes them better than the normal ones and the tin of hot chocolate she put in the cart when she thought I wasn’t looking and then I’m on the floor.
“I’m on the floor, and it’s like. I’m dying. In that moment, I’m dying, my heart is gonna explode, out of my chest, like fucking Alien, and I’m trying to tell someone but nobody’s listening, not really. They’re looking at me, but they’re not listening to me, their gobs all open, and they’re panicking like they’re the ones dying, but they’re not, and somebody gets this fucking… stunad rent-a-cop, this Paul Blart motherfucker, who can’t do the only thing that they’re good for, staring at his phone like the numbers have all turned to Chinese or some shit, and he can’t remember what order 911 goes, arguing with this lady over whether I’m homeless or something, like that should determine whether they let me die on the floor or not. I tell you, it’s a fucking shame, this city’s relationship with the homeless, it’s a fucking shame.
“And there’s Eva, and she’s - she doesn’t understand - you know, she’s five, and she sees her daddy lying on the floor, dying, this piece of shit is going to make my daughter watch her father die. And she shouldn’t have to. I didn’t watch my father die, you know, he had the fuckin’ respect to drop dead at the warehouse. And when I like, when I pictured it, like dying or whatever, I wanted it to be as far away from her as possible, so she didn’t have to see me like that, so that’s not how she remembered me.”
Richie stares at the window, trying to remember if it was raining that day too, if he sat on the wet curb, watching the paramedic talk Eva through all of the little life saving gadgets in her bag to get her to calm down as Richie iced his knuckles. He couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t hear anything but the sound of his heartbeat still pounding in his ears like it was trying to make a point - yes, you’re still alive, you piece of shit.
“I didn’t break his nose. There was a lot of blood, sure, but it wasn’t broken, I know when I break a nose. But he shouldn’t have done that to my kid.” Richie sniffs and clears his throat and looks back at the doc like a challenge. “Anyway, I didn’t exactly feel like sitting through the checkout after all that, god forgive me about the vegetables, but we went to the Arby’s. I didn’t even get my quarter back from the cart. And you can write down that the police didn’t give a shit about the rent-a-cop’s nose, and-and that his lawsuit is, you know, specious. And slanderous.”
“Thank you,” she says with a nod, not actually writing anything down like he wants her to for once.
His phone starts buzzing in his back pocket and when he looks back up after he silences it, he’s startled to find she’s moved. Her legs are crossed the other way and her notepad is on the other leg. He regards her warily.
“Do you think about dying often?” she asks.
“No more than the usual person.”
“How much do you think the usual person thinks about dying?”
“If they’re smart, four times an hour, every hour.”
“That seems like a lot to me,” she says, which catches Richie off guard. It’s not a question or a vague probing statement. It’s a response, a judgment even. As much as he doesn’t like the constant barrage of questions, this might actually be worse.
“You must not be very smart then,” he says, but he grins to take the heat off of it because the diploma from Northwestern sits right over his head with the thick wooden frame and a royal purple mat of a person who’s awfully proud of where they went to school once a hundred years ago.
She smiles too - no harm, no foul. “What is it about dying that makes you think about it so often?”
“You don’t live where I live without a healthy amount of survival instincts. You gotta keep on your toes, watch your own back because nobody’s gonna watch it for you.” Then he points at her, and heads her off, “It’s not paranoid, it’s sensible.”
“I didn’t say it was paranoid. It’s something I hear a lot, the fear of death weighs heavily on most of us, if we take the time to truly reflect on it. There’s the fear of the unknown. Of judgment. Punishment. Irrelevance. Nothingness. The existential type of thing. But I get the feeling your fear is more grounded in reality.”
He fights the instinct to tell her again that he isn’t afraid, not because he is or isn’t, but because he thinks this might be it, the little key that unlocks everything and signs his papers saying they’ve figured it out and now that he knows, he’s fine. “What’s that mean?”
“It seems to me like you’re afraid of what will happen to your responsibilities when you’re gone. What will happen to your daughter.”
“I seen what it’s like when kids grow up without their fathers. That’s not gonna be my kid.”
“And to the Beef. And your friend Michael and his mother. All the things we’ve been talking about the last month.”
“Yeah,” he says. She’s almost there, he can taste it. “That shit’ll fall apart without me.”
“I think you’re worried that it won’t.”
Richie presses at his chest, massaging at the tightness that constricts him as soon as she says that and it settles over him. “What do you mean, it won’t.”
“It won’t fall apart without you. That Michael will keep the restaurant running. That your daughter will grow up happy. That your ex-wife will marry her new boyfriend. That Mrs. Berzatto will finally start taking Natalie’s calls. That you’ll die, and they’ll be fine.”
The pounding in his ears starts again. No matter how he works it, the numbers don’t add up. She’s so full of shit. He doesn’t know what to argue first, on which front is she the most wrong. That he is fucking indispensable, or that he cares about this at all.
“Fucking bullshit,” is all he can manage to say.
She’s quiet for a moment, suddenly all out of her little hot takes, or maybe she’s just waiting for Richie to elaborate, or maybe she is saying something and he can’t tell over the sound of his own heartbeat. Eventually he does hear her say, “Are you okay?” and it snaps him out of it.
He drops his hand into his lap and works his jaw so his ears pop. “I’m fine.” He watches her watch him for another few careful moments before she unearths a surprise, secret second pad of paper, because today’s a day of impossible firsts.
“I think we should spend the rest of our time together today talking about Generalized Anxiety Disorder - ”
“What about it?”
“It’s my diagnosis. You are exhibiting the symptoms - ”
“No. I don’t - I went off the deep end once, okay, I’m sorry about it, but that doesn’t mean I have a disorder and shit, I’m not crazy. I’m fine now. It’s not gonna happen again.”
“In my twenty-three years of practice, I have never once met anyone crazy. Because we don’t stigmatize mental illness, not in my office, not ever. Do you understand?”
He nods, his hand flapping, yeah whatever.
“We have many options to explore as we continue our work together, but I’d like to talk to you about medication.” And she does, detailing for him what it’s for and why it’s for him, what his options are and what they’ll do to him, the mountain of side effects that all seem worse than anything anxiety’s ever done to him.
Sure he has anxiety, everybody fucking has anxiety unless they’re, like, a sociopath. Or a billionaire. Although, same difference with those two, really. Anxiety is just part of being alive, same as being hungry or horny or angry and you don’t take medication for those. You breathe or eat or fuck or kick something and then you move on with your life.
“This is a lot for 10.30 in the morning.”
She shrugs. “To me, it’s a fucking Thursday.”
He makes a little amused noise. “Touché.”
“Before we continue, do you have any questions for me?”
“Yeah,” Richie says, finally remembering what he should have asked in session one, the most important thing she can do for him. “Do you validate parking?”
--
By the time Richie leaves the parking garage, $45 poorer, he has 4 missed calls - Tina twice, Ebra, and Parkwood Manor. He waits until he finally makes the unnecessarily dangerous left turn onto State before tapping at his phone to start returning calls.
“Yo, T, what’s going on?” he says, tucking his phone between his chin and his shoulder so he doesn’t get another hands-free violation.
“Mikey ain’t in yet,” Tina says and then fires off another sentence or two in Spanish to someone else in the kitchen, the phone pulled away from her mouth as Richie digests that. Mike doesn’t miss open, not ever.
“We open lunch in seven minutes.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Where is he?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“Is this what Ebra called about?”
“He’s worried about him.” She leaves it at that, but he hears what’s unspoken now, verbalized in her own two missed calls. She’s worried about him too. Worrying isn’t going to get them prepped for lunch, though.
“We get the meat from Wrigley?” he asks.
“I got them to come back when I came in.”
“And you guys start the program?”
“Yeah. Running two hours late though.”
“It’s raining, it’ll be a slow start to the day.”
“Yeah,” Tina agrees. “You comin’?”
Richie huffs a breath. So much for a day off. The doc is full of shit. “I’ll be there in six.”
Mike doesn’t answer his phone in the two calls Richie shoots his way before he gets to the Beef. Richie parks in Mike’s favorite parking spot, because fuck him, and storms his way into the office in the back. It’s just as they left it last night, a couple of bottles of Miller Lites each still on the desk, cigarette butts stubbed out in each of the bottle caps, at least three mountains of paperwork, the Mother Mary, and a desk calendar still sitting on April. Richie pulls open the top right drawer and doesn’t find the bottle of pills Mike keeps stashed in there. The only thing on his desk Richie doesn’t remember seeing when he finally stumbled out to his car last night, leaving Mike to finish locking up, is a can of tomatoes.
He picks it up and inspects it - it’d be just like fucking Mikey Bear to decide 2 am spaghetti and meatballs is the thing to pre-cure his hangover before it even starts. It looks like it’s been opened, then most of the way re-seamed, poorly, because if Richie remembers, these are the kinds of cans that crumple when opened. Richie does the math on that little 15% of exposure on whether this can make it to today’s batch of spaghetti or whether he has a moral obligation to toss it because god knows what might have slipped in and festered overnight.
“Richie!” shouts Tina from the line.
“Yeah, I know,” he calls back and takes the can of tomatoes with him, setting it on the pass to remind him to deal with it later. He turns the corner out of the kitchen into the front of the house to relieve Sweeps from Richie’s throne in front of the register. Only a few regulars have shuffled in before the lunch rush, sitting along the counter, nursing cans of soda and a single basket of fries.
“You and Michael gone, we were starting to get worried,” Sweeps tells him, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey, I took the day off, I got shit to do, I’m not even here,” Richie says even as he starts his morning routine, which he knows Sweeps has probably done, but hasn’t done Richie’s way, and he’s never gonna learn to do it the right way if Richie doesn’t show him.
“Richie!” he hears Tina again.
“Tina,” he hollers back, “I’m literally here.”
“Delivery!”
Richie pounds the kitchen doors open, strolling toward the backdoor as he ties his apron around his waist. He glares at Tina where she stands by the door with her arms crossed. “You incapable of receiving a delivery?”
“No le conozco,” Tina says dismissively and walks away.
Richie turns his focus to the man stacking four cases of 28 oz cans of San Marzano tomatoes in a brand they’ve never bought before off a hand truck onto Richie’s floor without asking. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m with KBL. We got an order last night.”
“From who?”
The kid stops to squint at his order form. “Michael Buratta.”
“Berzatto,” Richie corrects him dumbly. “KBL. We don’t order tomatoes from KBL.”
“You do now.” The guy, some shithead tweaker twenty-year-old skinny enough to blow over in the wind, but somehow strong enough to haul all these cans, pulls out his phone, takes a picture of the tomatoes on the floor then a picture of Richie that he’s too slow to block.
“Don’t you fuckin’ - take these back. Return to sender.”
“Call Marlon.”
“Who the fuck’s Marlon?” Richie asks the door swinging shut in his face because the guy is already gone. “Fuck.”
He calls Manny and Angel over to stack the tomatoes over on the shelf with the rest of their supply as he pulls out his own phone. Straight to voicemail again. “Hey, cousin, we just got a shit ton of tomatoes they said you ordered from a place I ain’t ever heard of. When are you coming in today? Call me or something. Asswipe.”
Richie turns back to the door, pressing at his chest. Mikey looked fine last night, no different than normal, making it rain all $46 in petty cash he had in store for the week. They talked about the White Sox’s post-season chances now that they’re past the All Star Break (none), and the new change the CTA invented to fuck up the Red Line south of Roosevelt (idiotic), and whether a pizza joint with locations outside of Chicago (Giordano’s) can really be considered Chicago’s true pizza place (fuck no). Mikey even took his pills with him, which is good, Mike doesn’t go anywhere without them and anywhere Mike would go without his pills is probably a place Mike doesn’t want to be.
He’s fine. He’s fucking fine. Whatever, Richie tells himself and the dread that’s started tingling in his stomach, making his back feel clammy. He doesn’t have time for this.
When he turns back around, Tina’s taken a pause from slicing peppers, her hands folded against her chest, the knife still in one of them. “You staying?”
Richie checks his phone. “You got me to the end of lunch, then I gotta go.”
She grins and makes a mocking little noise at him “You got a hot date?”
“Yeah, Eva’s got a dance recital at 4.”
“Cute.”
“Sure, if you think 98 bucks a month to let a bunch of kids run around in tights on Zoom, touching their toes or some shit is cute, when they can do the same thing for free at a park. If I see more than fifteen collected minutes of actual ballet tonight, I’ll write Baryshnikov himself a fucking apology letter.” Richie rinses his hands quickly then starts spooning au jus into their little plastic cups just to put his hands and mind to work. “I forgot my fuckin’ blazer at home and I haven’t shaved in days and I just gotta. I just got shit to do, man, and I don’t have time for Mike to pull this kinda shit. Especially with the morning I’ve had.”
“With the doc,” Tina says quietly, the only person who knows, even including Michael, not that he wanted her to, but sometimes you just say things within the sanctity of the parking lot cigarette break that you don’t feel safe saying anywhere else. “How’d it go?”
He scoffs. “Fuckin’ bullshit. She says I got some kind of Generalized Anxiety Disorder.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It’s nothing. It’s not even that specific,” he jokes even though he knows it’s a bad joke. It makes him feel better about it, twisting it into a joke, a story even, another ordeal in a series of ordeals Richie’s managed to live through that other people can laugh at so it feels manageable, so it feels unreal. His voice picks up. “She’s actually insane, like. Okay, so you’re thinking it’s gonna be all the standard hits, right, anger management or daddy issues or whatever, some Good Will Hunting shit, like you choose the wrench ‘cause fuck him that’s why. But she’s like weirdly fixated on death.”
He’s got them all now - Marcus looks up from the bread he’s slicing, Manny’s glancing over his shoulder from the sink, Ebra is tossing interested glances as he’s sawing off slices of beef, even Sweeps is standing at the door between the kitchen and front of house, keeping an eye on both sides. Tina’s looking too, but she looks worried, so he ignores that.
“Who’s this?” Marcus asks.
“My psychiatrist.”
“Wait. You getting your brain shrunk?”
“Hey, be careful,” Manny cuts in, “they shrink it anymore and you’ll forget how to read.”
Marcus turns to Manny in shock. “Richie can read?”
“Fuck you and fuck you,” Richie says, pointing at them both individually.
“What do you gotta talk to a psychiatrist about?”
“I got Capital-A Anxiety. I’m Certified. She said it’s because I spend all day with you head cases, it’s starting to rub off.” He makes a jerking off motion with his hand before continuing. “Anyway, she’s like, why are you scared of death? Like I’m not scared of death, the Grim Reaper is my next door neighbor, bro, we trade cups of sugar with Walther PPK’s tucked in our waistbands, you know.”
“Yeah, we’re living in the real Chicago,” Angel adds.
“Yeah? Where you live again?”
“South Side.”
Richie laughs. “You 53rd and Cottage Grove motherfucker. If you’re six blocks from Obama and you got an express bus to the Loop, you ain’t living in the fuckin’ South Side, shut the fuck up.”
Angel laughs and flips him the bird.
“So then she’s like step-by-step taking me through all of the times in my life where I’m basically dying, right, trying to diagnose where my supposed fear of death comes from, which by the way, is probably not something you should ask someone with anxiety to do, maybe, sounds triggering, and I mean, it’s a little bad ass anyway - I ever tell you guys about the time I popped a rent-a-cop in the nose?”
“Why’d you do that?” Marcus asks.
“‘Cause he was a fucking stroke.” Richie turns to Sweeps and says, “Hey, ACAB, right?”
Sweeps just stares at him, unimpressed. Whatever.
“Anyway, you know what her response to all that is? She has the audacity to tell me that I’m scared to die because nobody will care.”
“Shiiiit,” Tina says. “She said that?”
“Yeah, basically, she was like, everyone will forget you. Nobody will miss you.”
“Well, you got at least three people in here who will, so don’t believe that shit.”
“Thank you,” Richie says, before he does the math. “Wait, which one of you fucks is not gonna miss me when I’m dead?”
They’re all laughing, so Richie can start laughing, and it does actually feel better, some real Reader’s Digest, laughter is the best medicine shit. And if he thinks about it hard enough, he thinks maybe this isn’t all the truth, that that’s not what she was trying to tell him at all, but whatever it was she was trying to tell him actually kind of hurt, like a son of a bitch, and they’ll all forget he said this in approximately two days when the next good story comes along, so it doesn’t matter anyway.
“Is that anxiety? That sounds like being alive, man,” Manny says. “Maybe I got anxiety too. You guys got anxiety?”
“Yeah. Sounds like maybe you just need to go outside, like, touch some grass about it, and you’d be fine,” Marcus says, laughing at him.
“Okay well, FYI,” Richie says, suddenly feeling defensive, because it’s the wrong kind of laughing, “31% of people got Anxiety or something and less than half of them ever do anything about it, medically speaking.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“She gave me a pamphlet. ‘Cause I can read. So excuse me for being out here trying to get self-aware, okay, excuse me for being woke up.”
“No, man, just - don’t.”
There’s a lull where the moment is breaking, where Richie’s run out of steam and their attention is dissipating, and he can’t figure out how to get it back. He could laugh it off, go touch grass, because that’s what he was feeling this morning when he was cornered in that office. Or he could double down on the diagnosis. Back when he first started sessions, he thought it might be sort of a relief, if someone told him there was something officially wrong with him, because then he could just stop worrying about all of it. But now that he knows there is, he thinks he feels worse.
Yeah, it definitely feels worse.
“Are you familiar with Terry Pratchett?” Ebra asks, having sidled up to Richie without Richie noticing.
“Is he the alderman out of Ward Five?”
“He is a writer. He has a quote - ‘a man is not dead while his name is still spoken.’”
“Huh.” Richie doesn’t even take the time to consider whatever that’s supposed to mean. “Is that some sort of Beetlejuice thing? Luke Appling, Luke Appling, Luke Appling. Wake up from the dead and take us back to the World Series. You deserve it, baby.”
“Deep cut,” Sweeps says appreciatively, finally some fucking respect.
“Yeah, I thought you’d like that.” Richie turns back to Ebra. “Did it work? Is he alive?”
Ebra shakes his head. “I think you are purposefully misunderstanding me.”
“I think you are purposefully misunderstanding my dick,” he says, grabbing a handful in Ebra’s direction. The door up front opens, Sweeps disappears to go take their order. Richie finishes stacking his little cups of au jus so he can join him, building a little wall of them at the pass, right where he left - “Where’s the tomato can?” he asks Tina.
“The what?”
“I put a can of tomatoes here.”
Tina gestures to the stove, where the tomatoes are simmering in a pan.
“It was open.”
“Yeah,” Tina says slowly, with mock patience, “that’s how you get the tomatoes out.”
Richie pauses, calculates, decides, “Whatever,” and shoves through the doors. It’s Kermit and Arnie at the counter, rain soaked but loyal as ever, waiting for him to take their order. “Hey, it’s the Muppets. It’s time to light the lights.”
“Stop calling us that,” Kermit says, as Arnie says, “Arnie isn’t a Muppet.”
“Sure he is, he’s the gay one in the stripes. Stop hanging out together if you don’t wanna be called that. What can I get you?” he asks even as he starts ringing up their usual, two Italian Beef combos, one hot, one sweet. This feels right, this is normal, he knows this.
Half an hour later, they’re really feeling their two hour delay in prep and Michael’s absence in the kitchen, but they’re churning out sandwiches nonetheless, because that’s what they always do. People either wait or they leave. Richie already knows their dailies are fucked with the rain, he’s pushing things with a quick cook time and a low food cost whenever new lunchbreakers stare at the board for longer than 30 seconds trying to summon up the courage to eat at an authentic hole in the wall instead of the Chipotle like they normally do.
During a brief break in customers, Richie checks his calls again to make sure he didn’t miss anything from Michael, when he sees at the top of the list, the red line item he forgot to call back. Shit.
“Parkwood Manor, my name is Ashley, how can I help you?”
“Hey, yeah, this is Richie Jerimovich. I got a missed call. I’m, uh, I’m on the list for Donna Berzatto.”
--
He has to turn around and go back to his car to fish a mask out of his glove box, picks the fuzz off of it before he presses it over his mouth. Never mind that sixty percent of the fucks at this assisted living facility masquerading as some Downton Abbey themed house of horrors aren’t ever gonna wear one, Richie’s going to do the song and dance anyway because they posted a sign on the door.
They always name these old folks homes shit like this, Parkwood Manor, like they’re fooling anyone into thinking it’s not a halfway house for the dead and dying, like they got servants not nurses, like they’re going to spend the rest of their miserable lives planning balls and shit to marry off their daughters to Mr. Darcy. It’s depressing, is what it is, and when he does think about death - doc be damned - he thinks he’ll die before he gets put in one of these places.
He’s googling KBL when they make him sit and wait in the lobby, even though they’re the ones who fucking called him over. It’s not enlightening him to much other than yeah, they sell tomatoes and other kitchen supplies. Whatever, he decides, and pockets his phone.
An orderly comes to him and says, “Dr. Esin will see you now.”
“Nah, I’m here to see Donna Berzatto.”
“I understand. The doctor would like to see you first.”
He’s had enough doctors for the day, and wonders if he can get away with sliding out the door, punting this until Michael can come take care of it tomorrow, whenever he decides to drag his ass out of bed. But it’s been five months of this shit already with no sign of back up, not with her Cold War with Sugar and Carmy out sucking dicks at Eleven Madison Park or wherever. Richie’s the only family she’s got left.
“I’m Dr. Esin,” says the doc, shaking Richie’s hand when he enters her office. She’s Black and she has an accent, which is two strikes against her where Mrs. Berzatto is concerned, and if this is the third home she’s about to get kicked out of for being a racist psycho, Richie might just leave her on a street corner.
“Look, sweetheart, I’m sorry for whatever she’s said,” Richie starts, might as well get out ahead of it, “but we need her to stay here. I hope we can work something out.”
“She hasn’t said anything,” she replies, her eyebrows furrowing.
“Oh. Well, that’s good. We call that personal growth.”
The doc shakes her head. “Mr. Jerimovich, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Mrs. Berzatto has begun to refuse treatment.”
Richie stares at her, trying to process, but it’s not sinking in. “What does that - what’s that mean?”
“As you know, we’ve had her on a cocktail to help stem the growth and improve quality of life, and with that, we were looking at about a year. Now we’re looking at about a month.”
“What the fuck.” Richie takes a deep breath in, holds it, lets it out slowly. Doesn’t do shit. “You can’t just, like, slip it to her in her mashed potatoes or something?”
“According to the State of Illinois law, we can’t medicate someone against their will.”
“Wanna bet,” Richie snorts quietly, thinking about his own prescription coming down the pipe some time today. She either doesn’t hear him or doesn’t care enough to argue back.
“There are some things we need signed,” she says instead, unearthing a stack of paper. “We have the paperwork on file for you as her power of attorney.”
That startles Richie. “What - why?”
“I’m - well, I’m not sure why, Mr. Jerimovich. Is there a problem?”
“I don’t - I didn’t.” Richie shakes his head, he doesn’t know what Michael’s fucking playing at, maybe forging his signature or some shit to make this officially Richie’s problem. Yeah, no fucking way. “Let me talk to her son. Michael. I’ll talk to Mike and I’ll get this all figured out.”
“We need to sort this out as soon as possible.”
“Cool, we can get it sorted out tomorrow with Mike, ‘cause I ain’t signing shit. It can wait ‘til tomorrow, right, it’s not like she’s gonna drop dead tonight?”
The doc doesn’t answer, which seems answer enough.
“Let me see her. I’ll see what I can do to, I dunno, talk her out of it.”
Mrs. Berzatto is in her bed, sheet pulled up to her chin, watching Murder, She Wrote with a disgruntled look on her face even though she loves that shit. She only has seven VHS tapes’ worth of episodes, but that doesn’t stop her from watching them all day every day - he assumes, she’s always watching them whenever he comes by - probably screaming until some orderly is kind and rewinds before popping in the next tape into the player they brought from her old house.
She doesn’t look up when Richie knocks on the door frame and says, “Hey, Mama Bear.”
Richie eyes the screen, trying to figure out where in the episode she is. If it’s toward the big reveal, he’ll have to sit down and shut up while the lady’s talking, but it seems to be early, still chasing the first misdirect, so he grabs a chair and sits next to her bed. He pulls off his mask to ask, “You doing okay?”
She mumbles something, some of it Italian, all of it unintelligible.
“Listen, ma, they told me you’re not taking your medicine anymore.”
“No,” she says.
“No? Why not?”
“Dead either way.”
Richie’s mouth snaps shut and wipes his hands over his face. This is so fucked up. He looks at her wrinkled, scrunched little frog face, too naturally sour to be the kind of face you’d want for your nonna. Thank god she isn’t one, and he’s not counting Eva here because Eva doesn’t and won’t know her, he won’t do that to her.
But the fact of the matter is she was there, especially when Richie’s mom wasn’t because he had the good fortune to get two deadbeats for parents. He grew up on the floor of the Beef with Mike and Sugar and Carmy instead of out on the street. Even if she didn’t exactly want him around, she never sent him home. And for that, he owes her a debt.
“You want me to get the kids together?” Richie asks.
She takes a deep breath in and then spits, “Fuck no.”
“C’mon, like the old days?”
“No,” she snaps, so he snaps right back, “Fine.”
He pulls his pack of Sapphires out of his back pocket, lights one for himself, and then one for her when she pulls an arm from under her blanket to reach over to him. Dead either way. He tries to open the window, but it’s nailed shut, so they’ll just have to see what happens first - a nurse finds them and tells them off or that smoke detector on the ceiling proves that it actually has batteries in them. His money’s on neither.
Hospice care sounds expensive, more attentive than what she’s getting now, but for no good reason. He wishes she hadn’t snitched on herself, found some way to bury the pills instead so that when she goes, they’ll be caught off guard by it. But that’s not her style. High maintenance, loudly enumerating all of the injustices perpetrated against her to the last.
He keeps his eyes trained to the television, where Angela Lansbury is demonstrating something clever with a pencil that doesn’t make a lot of sense out of context. And he asks her, “You’re not scared?”
“Of what?” she says, exhaling a plume of smoke to fill the space between them.
The unknown. Judgment. Punishment. Irrelevance. Nothingness. Take your pick.
When she dies, it’ll be a relief. Not just to her, but all the rest of them. No more sending every other dollar from the Beef to this hellhole, no more long, traffic ridden drives over to the west side. No more suffering, maybe, although if there is suffering in the afterlife, she’ll choose it, if there’s a way to suffer when you’re decaying in the ground, she’ll find it.
He doesn’t know what’s more fucked up, that he should be treating this like it’s good news or that he somehow isn’t able to. When she dies, things will get better, and it’s making his stomach sick. That’s irrelevance.
“How’s the shithole?” she asks.
“It’s good, ma.”
“The mortadell - ”
“We haven’t fuckin’ touched the mortadella,” he says firmly, defensively, “it’s the same as it’s been for thirty years. Same shit, different day, okay, I got this.”
She makes a noise that sounds dissatisfied, but he doesn’t take it to heart because that’s her personal default. He can’t sit here and talk about the mortadella. He can’t pretend this is just another normal house call and not a save-the-date to her death day.
“In fact, I should get back. Sandwiches aren’t selling themselves.”
He rises, stubbing his cigarette out on the bedside table and tossing in the trash. He does the same for her, snatching it quickly because she won’t want to give it up. Ash has collected on her blanket, which he picks up the edge of and gently shakes. Some of it makes it onto the floor, the rest of it scatters down the length of the blanket, but at least it’s not up by her face anymore, so good enough.
“You need me to bring you anything?”
“La Madonna. The fuckin’ nurse keeps stealing it from me.”
“Nobody’s stealing shit from you,” he says, which is not true, because he knows where her statue has gone. It’s sitting on the office desk at the Beef, courtesy of Mike’s sticky fingers, a move he never explained but Richie remembers finding hilarious at the time. “I’ll bring you one tomorrow.”
He pauses at the door. “Listen, ma. You need to take your medicine.”
“Why?”
He can’t come up with any good reasons other than that’s what you’re supposed to do, but Richie doesn’t live his life by those kinds of rules, so he doesn’t see why she should either. “I don’t fuckin’ know,” he admits.
Once he’s sitting inside his car in the parking lot, he presses the button to dial Mike’s number again, waiting for the inevitable voicemail.
“Hey, you reached Mike,” Mike’s voice says with a laugh. “Good fuckin’ luck with your message.”
“Hey, Mike, I just been to see your mom. I know they called you. Call me. This shit’s getting real old.”
His phone has two other pieces of bad news for him, besides no contact from Mike. The first is the clock, which says it’s 2.36 pm, which means he’s both missed family at the Beef and he’s running out of time before the show to get all the shit done that he planned to get done today. The other is an automated text message from the pharmacy four blocks from his place.
JERIMOV. R. 1 prescription(s) ready to pick up.
Richie is tempted to abandon them there, for all the good they’ll do him. But the thing about the pharmacy is, it’s also four blocks from Michael’s place.
--
The line at the pharmacy is longer than it should be for mid-afternoon on a weekday, and Richie almost bails four times before it's his turn to tell the pharmacist his name and date of birth to pick up the prescription his psychiatrist called in.
“Do you have any questions about this medication?” the pharmacist asks.
“Nah, thanks, sweetheart, but I don’t need it.” He pulls his wallet from one of his zipper pockets and fishes out his debit card and Obamacare card. “I only have anxiety because she’s making me fucking anxious.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My doctor. She’s put all this shit in my head.” He slaps his cards down on the counter. “So I had one fucking panic attack, okay, and now she’s got me worrying that I’m gonna have another one, which I wasn’t thinking about before, okay, I wasn’t thinking about anything, but she makes me think about them. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’ve been thinking about my kid, I miss my fucking kid. And my best friend is miss - I mean, he doesn’t show up for work, all day he’s gone, and he’s had a rough time of it lately, and I don’t know where the fuck he is. And I wouldn’t be thinking about all this shit if it weren’t for her. I could just be fucking normal.”
The pharmacist looks between him and the cards on the counter for a long moment. He doesn’t expect her to respond, he doesn’t want her to respond, and he’s about to tell her so when she finally says, neutrally, “Sir, if your doctor prescribed you this medication, you should take it.”
“Why?” he asks.
“To get better.”
It’s laughable, the idea that he’s allowed to get better. People don’t get better. Shit happens to you and then you just move on. Easy solutions don’t just come in sets of thirty little square white pills. They’re not going to medically invent a way for him to be less of a fuck up.
“Hang on. Do you guys sell flowers?”
“This is a pharmacy,” she says blandly.
“It’s a CVS,” he answers, with just as much condescension. He cranes his head to try and get a glimpse of the other registers at the front of the store. “Okay, gimme a sec.”
“Sir - ”
She probably keeps talking, but he’s walked away toward the front of the store, stalking the aisles until he finds a little refrigerated case with one plastic wrapped bouquet of an assortment of flowers. They’re wilting and a few of the stems have snapped, but it’s all he’s got. He made the mistake last time of not getting Eva anything when she had that little toddler Christmas caroling performance, all the other parents bringing their kids flowers like that’s something a kid really cares about or wants, when really it’s just so the parents can post a bougie picture on Facebook. Never again.
“Excuse me,” Richie says, butting in front of the woman currently at the window, who was just in the process of pulling out a sheet of paper from her purse, and no one who brings a sheet of paper to the pharmacy is going to do anything with any sense of haste. “Here, ring these up too,” he says, shoving the flowers into the small hole in the plastic barrier between the two of them so she can scan the barcode.
On the way out of the store, he rips the bottle of pills out of the stapled paper bag and tosses the bag and instructions. The pills get pocketed and the flowers get thrown into the passenger seat as he checks the time again. He can either go to his or go to Mike’s, but he doesn’t have time for both.
“Cousin, I’m gonna kick your ass if you’re still in bed,” Richie announces as soon as he opens Mike’s door. He kicks the door shut behind him when he doesn’t hear a response.
Mike’s got a one bedroom, so there’s not much to search to confirm he’s not there. It’s hard to tell if he has been there recently or not, because the place is a mess. It’s been a while since he’s been over - they’ve been watching games over at Richie’s since Richie took the plasma with him in the divorce - but he’s never seen it this bad. Dishes piled in the sink, easily three weeks’ of unopened mail on the table, a couple of stinky old trash bags sitting tied by the door. Richie’s a bachelor so he’s not exactly in a hurry to make his shitty little studio sparkling clean, but at least he manages taking the trash out.
He calls the Beef, Sweeps answers. “Hey, Mikey in yet?”
“No, sir.”
Richie drags a hand over his face. It was too much to hope for. “All right. You guys doing okay?”
“The ice machine is making a grinding noise. Hasn’t had any ice for about an hour.”
Fuck. “Send Manny and Angel to get a couple of bags from the corner store. I’ll be by to look at it later.”
“Already on it.”
“Good. Okay. You guys call me or text me if he shows, okay?” He ends the call and resists throwing the phone across the room like he wants to, because otherwise how are they going to call or text them, but it is a near thing.
He clears a couple of paper plates off the sofa and sits down, his head resting in his hands. He needs Michael. Not just for the security of knowing where he is, but because he’d knock some sense into Richie. Literally. He’d smack him over the head and tell him to stop being such a fucking stroke, and give him permission for everything to be fine, tell him there’s nothing to worry about.
He spins his phone between his hands. It’d be snitching to call Sugar and it’s not like she’d know where he is anyway, he never tells her anything. Richie’d get a lecture before he gets an answer. So he tries the last place he can think of.
“Hey, Nico.”
“Hey, Richie,” Nico drawls, “how much you need?”
“No, it’s not - I just wanted to know if you heard from Michael today.”
“Today? Nah.”
“Okay.” He goes to hang up, but catches the inflection on replay. “Not today?”
“He came by last night. Or I guess it was this morning. Shit, so maybe it was today. You know how it’s like late at night but it’s still the morning so you think it’s yesterday but it’s actually still today.”
“Yeah, man, that’s real deep,” Richie says, hoping he’s onto something. “What’d he see you for last night?”
“Just a couple of grams. Nothing special.”
Richie should have known better. There are useful dealers, then there are Nico. “How’d he seem? Did he tell you where he was going?”
“He seemed to want a couple of grams, I dunno what else to say.”
“No, I mean - you know what. Don’t worry about it. If he calls you again, will you call me?”
“You guys fighting? Lovers spat?”
“Fuck off.”
He throws his phone onto one of the cement blocks masquerading as a coffee table and wonders when Mike is gonna be done with this shit. Covid’s basically over, it’s time to wake the fuck up and get back to reality, out of whatever coked up la la land Mike’s found himself in. They didn’t have a deal, necessarily, but an understanding - no matter what he was taking, Mike was going to get shit done.
So maybe he didn’t make it home, and he’s sleeping on one of the only non-anti-homeless park benches left in the whole city or under a bridge. Maybe he got mugged and is laying in an emergency room as a John Doe that no one can figure out the emergency contact for. Mike would have had to go far for that kind of thing, though, which he rarely ever does. The truth about their neighborhood is it’s as safe as it’s ever been since they opened a goddamn Whole Foods a few blocks away. The only one shooting a gun on his street is Richie, once, when he got fed up with his deadbeat, literal rat of a roommate before it scurried back into its little hole to fuck up his insulation more.
His phone buzzes and he picks it up, his face falling when he sees it’s a text from Tiff.
Where are you?
He’s got thirteen minutes to get over to the auditorium. Nothing Michael owns is going to fit him, but he unearths a blazer anyway and slides it on over his Beef raglan. It’s somehow too big and too short for him and it’s an idiotic look coupled together with the windbreaker pants but he knows for sure none of Mike’s jeans are gonna fit. He grabs the two bags of trash and hauls it out the door with him.
--
Rush hour gets earlier and earlier every day, it seems, and even though Richie breaks about seven different laws on his way to the auditorium, he’s still seventeen minutes late. He runs up to the doors, a mask strapped around his chin, the flowers flopping in the rain and the wind. The ticket is buried somewhere in his wallet, folded up small and tight three weeks ago because it was the only way he could imagine not losing it.
The usher scans it, but doesn’t move away from the door. “I’ll let you in at a break in the performances.”
Richie stares at him. “She could be performing right now. I’d miss it.”
“It’s rude to disturb everyone who was here on time with a late arrival.”
“Fuck you, man. It’s a bunch of fucking five year olds running around to Shirley Temple, not Swan Lake, I think they’ll forgive me.”
“It’s company policy. There will be a break soon.”
Richie bites down on his counterpoint. He can’t cause a scene with Tiff and Eva on the other side of the door, not with a potential custody battle waiting in the wings. His hands clench into fists before he points at the usher silently, letting him know in just that move exactly how lucky he is to be spared Richie’s wrath. Pointedly, he doesn’t move away from the door.
His stomach starts to rumble and he realizes he hasn’t eaten anything all day, he’s just run off of the large cup of coffee he picked up before his appointment this morning, which feels so long ago it might as well have been yesterday.
This fucking day. That goddamn doctor filling his head with shit, Mrs. Berzatto’s latest ploy for attention, Michael’s disappearing act, this usher with a god complex. From the second he woke up, it’s like everything conspired against him to make sure he missed the single most important part of his fucking existence. And he let it.
I fucked up, he thinks and it hits him like a bolt of fucking lightning, tearing his breath away, making his heart start to pound. I fucked this up, I am fucking it up, I fucked up. The more he fucks up, the more of a relief it’ll be when he’s gone. Then his kid won’t have to strain her neck looking through the crowd to see if he’s made it or not. She’ll just have to see her mom and her new dad waiting in the front row, since they seem to have all the time in the world to do fucking everything under the sun. There’ll be no reason to say his name. Fuck. Fuck.
He can’t do this again, he can’t slip away in a lobby, a hundred feet away from his kid. He pops open the pill bottle after he unearths it from his pocket and crunches on a pill before dry swallowing the pieces down. He wishes he hadn’t thrown away the paperwork because he doesn’t know how long he’s supposed to wait before it starts to work. He swallows another one anyway just for good measure, because at least focusing on the medication is stopping the endless chanting in his brain.
At the next burst of applause, Richie rips open the door himself without an invitation, snatching a program off the podium by the door. He tries to read it by the dim light in the auditorium. The Good Ship Lollipop was second. Even if the usher had let him in, it wouldn’t have mattered. “Fuck,” Richie mutters.
He leans against a round column behind the seating, his arms crossed against his tight chest, and slides down to sit on the floor. Slowly, eventually, his body loosens, his stomach untwists, and he feels evened out.
Well, shit. Maybe the fucking medication works. Maybe he’s a fucking idiot, maybe even if he’s not psychotic, he could stand to take a break every once in a while and get a medicated high. He sends a little thank you out into the universe for the doc as he thumps his head back against the column.
The longer the performance goes, the older the performers get, and he does actually see some real ballet whenever he leans over into the aisle. After the last curtain call, he scrambles up off the floor and heads back out to the lobby, picking fuzz off the borrowed blazer and trying to cultivate the air of someone who’s been here the whole time.
He sees Tiff before she sees him. She looks good, frustratingly good, her hair all done up, wearing a dress he’s never seen her in before. She’s followed closely by that pod person, Henry, who, Richie is irritated to see, has also brought a bouquet of flowers. When they walk up to him, Henry nods at him, which Richie doesn’t have the emotional capacity to entertain.
“I thought you didn’t show,” Tiff says instead of saying something fucking normal, like hello.
“I was here. I was sitting in the back.” It’s not technically a lie.
“We saved you a seat.”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to sit with you. I wonder fucking why.”
She takes a step toward him and away from Henry. “Can we talk?”
“We already are talking. That’s what happens when your mouth moves in my direction and words come out, it’s called a conversation.”
Tiff glances back at Henry, who smiles at her and makes his excuses about going to find the bathroom, which is interesting, because Richie didn’t think Ken dolls came with dicks.
“Listen. I wanted to tell you before Eva comes out. My lease is up in January.”
“I know,” he says, because it’s actually his lease, but whatever the fuck.
“So we’re going to move in with Henry.”
Of all the things he expects her to say, it’s not that. He can’t even do the math to argue that it hasn’t been long enough that they’ve been together, because he doesn’t remember when they got together, because he has no incentive to take up any amount of space in his brain with the life and times of his ex-wife. If he wasn’t medicated right now, he’d probably start screaming.
“You’re moving to Wrigleyville?”
“Yes.”
“What about - she just started kindergarten, what about school?”
“She’s going to move to a school up by Henry’s.”
“Fuck, Tiff.” She’s really doing this now, in the lobby of some random high school auditorium, surrounded by hundreds of families all waiting for their sweet Hallmark card reunions with their little ballerinas, and if Tiff thinks he’s not going to cause a scene now, after he’s been so fucking good the last month -
“It’s a good school, Richie, it’s a good neighborhood.”
Richie shakes his head. None of that matters. “You are gonna take her away from me. It doesn’t matter how many of your bullshit hoops I jump through, you’re taking her away.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Don’t make me into this shrill bitch in your mind to justify whatever fucked up sexist bullshit you think about me that helps you sleep at night. We’re moving neighborhoods, not states.” She holds her hand up just as he’s about to respond to cut him off. “Lower your voice.”
Richie ducks his head, lowering his voice even though he doesn’t want to, because kids have started to come out. His defense feels like a lie, even to him. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“You scared the shit out of her, Richie. You left her alone in the store - ”
“It was for two seconds,” Richie argues. He remembers it so clearly now, he remembers combing through the aisles, he remembers thinking it’s impossible an Aldi is that fucking large. “She was trying to find Oreos, I was doing the vegetables, the fucking vegetables that you told me to get, FYI - ”
“You lost her. She could have been taken, she could have run away, because you weren’t watching her. She is five years old. You’re lucky that security guard found her. And you know you did the wrong thing because you - you know.” She gestures, some vague hand motion that he guesses means panic attack. “I’m not doing this for fun. This isn’t fun for me.”
“Well, it ain’t exactly a walk in the park for me either.”
“I can’t let you see her unless I can trust you.”
“You can trust me.”
“Richie,” she says and he can tell she doesn’t believe him, and it makes him feel desperate.
“I’ve been seeing the doctor, okay. Dr. Kothrappali. I’ve been going to all the appointments, just like you asked me too, and we’re working on it. Okay? You can’t - you gotta let me see her.”
She straightens, wiping at her eyes discretely before throwing a huge smile on her face, which means Eva’s coming, which means it’s the end of the conversation.
“Tiff,” he says weakly before turning around himself to see his kid.
She’s holding Henry’s hand, dragging him along, her ballet shoes slipping against the linoleum as she’s trying to walk faster toward them. She’s wearing this little sailor outfit, striped white and blue, with a stiff white tutu and a bedazzled sailor hat, all of which breaks Richie’s heart into four neat pieces. Henry finally lets go of her hand once he sees them, and she comes barrelling straight for Richie. He kneels down to catch her in the strongest hug he can give her.
“Hey, heyyy kiddo. Look at you! You did so good. Oh my god, so good. I swear I got seasick just watching you, you really transported me.” When she finally unwraps herself from around him, he hands her the bouquet of flowers, which she immediately squishes to her chest in delight, destroying whatever remaining integrity the stems had. “Bravo. Bellissimo. Do you think you could do me an encore?”
“Encore?” she repeats.
“Yeah, do it again. When someone is so good, the audience goes encore, encore! Because they want to see it again and again. Do you think you could show me? Some of your little squats?”
“They’re called pliés,” Tiff corrects.
Richie raises his hand up behind Eva’s head and flips Tiff off where Eva can’t see. Eva walks him through what she says is the hardest part of her routine, narrating endlessly as she goes, stopping every few seconds to make sure he’s watching, but he can’t take his eyes off her anyway.
“Look at that,” he says when she’s done. “World’s best plié.”
Eva’s mom takes her then, giving her the second big armful of flowers and showering her with compliments. Richie watches this little family, feeling like the training wheels they’re going to grow out of soon.
He could move closer to Wrigleyville, but that’d take him further from the Beef, and there’s no guarantee that would even mean Tiff would let him see her more anyway, and besides he can’t afford shit in Wrigleyville, not without three roommates and he’s too old to star in whatever new gay CBS sitcom that would end up becoming.
“We’re going to dinner,” Tiff tells him, which is a goodbye, not an invitation.
He ignores her, only has eyes for Eva. “All right. Have fun. I love you. Okay? I love you.”
She wraps her arms around whatever she can reach from all the way down there and he rests a hand on her head, messing up some of her hair, which feels so hairsprayed, she might as well have combed superglue through it.
He watches them go, growing roots at his feet into the lobby floor just to keep himself from chasing after them screaming, from scooping Eva into his arms and driving away forever. The rest of his day pales in comparison to this, he can barely remember what else has happened, solely fixated on his impending doom - his daughter is another step closer to leaving him.
What was the point of going through all this if she was just going to leave anyway? What fucking nerve did she have thinking he was going to get better? He wouldn’t even know how to walk right without a chip on his shoulder.
Once the lobby clears out, he is able to convince himself to leave too. It’s a summer night so the sun hasn’t set yet, but he wishes it would, just for closure’s sake. He peels off the blazer and tosses it into the backseat before sliding into the driver’s seat. The key goes into the ignition and he turns the car on out of habit, but there’s nowhere Richie wants it to take him because there’s nowhere left to go.
The AC is on full blast and the CD in the stereo whirs back to the first track, and he doesn’t switch it out even though he’s heard it all the way through eight or so times the past couple of weeks. He runs the windshield wipers once to clear it, the rain having stopped at some point while he was inside.
He could just go for a drive. Hit I-90 and take it all the way up to Wisconsin and back before his shift tomorrow and it’ll do him exactly as much good as both staying put right where he is or going home and sitting on his couch.
Just as he puts his hand on the gear shift, his phone rings, like divine fucking intervention.
It’s Tina. “Hey, Richie.”
“This better be good news, I swear to god.”
“Michael just showed up.”
Richie laughs in spite of himself. “Motherfucker,” he says. He has a hundred questions - is he alive, is he sober, is he sorry, whatever the fuck else. But he isn’t really looking for answers. If he had to name it - he’s looking for relief. “Give him the phone.”
He sniffs, wipes his eyes and nose, and waits for Mike to say something first, just to confirm he’s real, before he says, “Mikey Bear, where the fuck have you been? I’m gonna kick your ass. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
----