This one was gentle, this olive-skinned nurse who smelled like fresh pasta and attitude. What was her name? Benedetto, Benedicto? These Italian nurses were like Popes; they wore white and had hard-to-remember names. She was older and still wore the uniform, not like the younger nurses, who traipsed around in their fancy pajamas or whatever you call those low-cut scrubs decked out with palm trees and misplaced whimsy. It’s a hospital for fuck’s sake.
“Stevie’s on his way,” nurse Benedetto (icto) said, before tucking the third blanket around my shoulders like we were on the deck of the Titanic. I’ve been around for ninety-nine summers, and this woman seemed to think air conditioning was a new invention. When the door closed behind her, blotting out the image of her overstuffed skirt, I shoved the blankets to the floor.
Heat stroke was a particularly uncomfortable way to go. Give me a regular old stroke any day. The massive kind. Maybe, at a nice restaurant where I could face plant onto my empty plate, right before the check came.
I heard Stevie from all the way down the hall. His legendary voice always showed up first. They say that Stevie Rizzo, my blue-uniformed savior, could be heard shouting from his mother’s vagina an hour before he arrived in this world. Stevie was a loudmouth who would have never survived a war. His gesticulating clamor was a literal dead giveaway.
But in times of peace, it made for a spectacular entrance. Sporting his dark blue paramedic uniform, Stevie could make any woman with a pulse swoon. Sometimes, even those who temporarily lacked a pulse were said to have woken up during his chest-thumping resuscitations, only to swoon again. That’s my Stevie, punctual, polite, and perfect.
“Hellooo, Sophie,” he boomed. In my ear, I heard Pavarotti. The nurses, however, likened his voice to a Monday morning trash truck. “We all have our own proclivities,” the nurses said. But a “proclivity” sounded too much like a woman’s body part to say we all have them. Maybe half of us, then.
Stevie entered with the new driver. Always a new driver. Stevie must be hard to work with, all that booming in a closed ambulance. But to me, he was an angelo, as dependable and beautiful as the sunrise.
“Ready to go, Soph?”
I was, and I was ready to perform. Tearing my gaze from Stevie, I bobbed my head from side to side. My best Ray Charles, because the Stevie Wonder figure-eight was bad for my inner ear and made me want to throw up. “New driver today?”
“Yep. Sophie meet Jeff.”
Reaching out to where he wasn’t, I said, “Nice to meet you.”
He shuffled over to meet my hand, pretending he’d been there all along. Nobody wants to disappoint an old blind lady. Even ones who aren’t blind.
“Pneumonia’s all clear, Soph. Time to go home.”
Home? Yeah, they put it right in the name. Nursing home. Not much nursing. Definitely not home. I swallowed my sigh, so as not to disappoint Stevie. This wasn’t his fault.
When we got to the street, Jeff walked around the back of the old ‘70s Cadillac ambulance to open the door.
“Nope,” Stevie said, “On the way home, Sophie rides with us.
I stopped my head bob just long enough to look for the confusion on the rookie’s face. There it was.
Stevie helped me slide to the middle of the bench seat, clicked my buckle, and then his own. Jeff took his place behind the wheel, still looking confused. And there I was in my happy place, squeezed between two handsome young men, a paramedic sandwich. As Jeff pulled into the lane of traffic, I continued the bit. The one where Stevie plays the straight man. “Is he hot?” I asked, bobbing my head a little faster.
“Oh, Sophie,” Stevie replied on cue. “This one’s an Adonis.”
Always Adonis. Stevie needed a new god or two in his repertoire.
“Muscles?”
“Chiseled, Soph. Like Michelangelo’s David.”
The ambulance lurched toward the shoulder as I lay my bony hand on Jeff’s thigh. Giving it a squeeze, I marched a little higher. “Ooh, a cyclist!”
As Jeff righted the rig back into traffic, I pressed our luck.
“Is he packing?” I asked Stevie.
“Like he’s smuggling a salami, Soph.”
The Caddy fishtailed and spat a pound of shoulder gravel before righting itself. I moved my hand to spare us the risk of a round-trip ticket to the hospital. But for once, Stevie wasn’t lying.
“Pull in here.” Stevie pointed to the pizza stand on the side of Route 9.
“Here? But….” Poor Jeff, as befuddled as the rest.
“Pull in.” Stevie used his boom tone, the one they never questioned. The Caddy’s tires turned into the strip mall as if this stop were preordained. The Caddy knew.
Stevie was so gentle when he settled me into my wheelchair. A two-hundred-forty-pound lamb, that boy. He tucked the napkins in all the places. My lap, my collar, and even the one for the fold in my sleeve. He thinks of everything, this sweet galloot.
Delicious doesn’t come close to describing Tonio’s pizza. In fact, in my younger days, this doughy crap would never have made it past my lips. But those days were thirty years gone. Now, this cheesy abbondanza dripping cheap olive oil onto my lap tasted like heaven.
Back in the rig, we’d barely gotten a quarter mile down the road when Stevie shouted, “Donut time, Sophie?”
Poor Jeff. He had no idea. My trips back “home” with Stevie were always a sticky, greasy, sugary delight. None of the new drivers knew what they were in for. But the look on their faces, when they got to my room, was worth blowing the blind-lady schtick.
Jeff didn’t disappoint. His open-mouthed gawk, as he read the laminated sign over my bed, was priceless. “What the…?”
Sophie is diabetic and hypertensive. No Pizza! No Donuts! No ice cream! No cookies…” He went on like that for a while and got pretty far, but he never finished the list. None of them do. Practically growling, he turned to Stevie. “What the hell, I could lose my license.”
Stevie used his calm, swoon-worthy voice, the one that could wake the dead—and sometimes did.
“Your license, my license, who cares? Sophie spent her 99th birthday in the hospital. The goddamned hospital, Jeff. To celebrate, they served her a low-carb, low-sodium, high fiber pureed flax cake. If you or I ever see ten decades, it won’t be because some stick-up-the-ass dietician carried us there. Her 100th year! Sophie eats whatever the fuck Sophie wants.”
Such a good boy, my Stevie. Sure, he could stand to lose forty pounds, but on the inside, his empathy was chiseled like a David. What a ride Stevie would have been. If only I were sixty years younger.
Patting Jeff’s hand, still frozen to the handle of my wheelchair, I decided to do him a solid and take those nasty Stevie-thoughts to my grave. And maybe I could hurry the process, if only I could score another donut or two.