She put her hands on her hips and glared right through him. “Uh huh. I’m a nurse, Bob. I know when someone’s in pain.”
“Then the direction this conversation is headed should be setting off all sorts of additional signals,” he said dryly. “Besides… I’m on antibiotics, I’ve got painkillers. I’m okay.”
“Sure.”
“You have wheels? I have some stuff to pick up.”
She nodded and smiled. “A rental. Are you going to let me in on just what the heck happened down here, or…”
“Come on. I take it you have a hotel room somewhere?”
“I do.”
“I’ll explain on the way.”
They’d stopped for a burger for lunch and a chance to discuss the week before heading to pick up her stuff. There was a flight that evening directly back to Chicago.
Dawn was enjoying being behind the wheel; she hadn’t owned a car in more than a decade, which made driving herself a treat.
But even more, she was subtly enjoying the relaxed, almost placid expression Bob had on his face, despite her ongoing sense he’d left out major details.
He noticed her staring. “What? Do I have something…” He felt around his mouth for stray food.
“It’s not that. You just look—I mean, you look like a meatloaf who got beat up by a brick, really—but a happy meatloaf.”
“I was thinking about my mom,” Bob said. “I don’t do that enough.”
“You’ve never really talked about her,” Dawn said. “Your father, I know, was difficult.”
“Yeah, he was at that. Hard, suspicious, difficult. She wasn’t like that at all, though. If anything, I always sort of thought she was with him because he was someone who needed fixing. She just wanted people to get along and care about each other. She spent a lot of time she could have spent on herself on us instead, either trying to make him happy or keep me from being unhappy. He’d be trying to drill something home—he was drill instructor in the Marines—and she’d try to undo any damage by telling me to do what I love. The trouble was, by then, I didn’t know what that was. I just knew what my old man had taught me.”
“But now you know what you love: helping people,” Dawn suggested.
“Eh…” Bob didn’t sound so sure. “I wish that was it. But I kind of think it’s a little more selfish than that.”
“How do you figure?”
“Sorting this all out… it took a lot of hard work, days of graft and personality management, keeping my temper under wraps, dealing with bad boys. And throughout—and I guess I should be more ashamed of this, but it is what it is—throughout, I didn’t really think much about Marcus at all.” He looked over his shoulder to the backseat. “No offence, kid.”
“Then… why?”
He shrugged. “I like punishing bad guys. I like what I do, I guess. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of years bitching and crying about my time in Team Seven, but when push came to shove, I just went right out and started doing the same kind of things, just on a smaller scale and on my own targets. I have to be more empathetic, more understanding of people trying to maintain normalcy. I get that. But what it’s all been about, really, has been making life difficult for difficult people. I’m nobody’s savior. I just fix problematic people.”
“Ah,” Dawn smiled and nodded.
“What?”
“And you’ve just figured out you shouldn’t feel guilty about that. That as long as it’s helping good people and hurting bad ones, it’s not wrong to do right it for its own sake, not because of how other people see it or judge you.”
“Exactly.”
“And that’s what your mom wanted: for you to pursue what you love, and not feel bad about it.”
He nodded, then leaned on his hand and stared out the side window. “She’d say, ‘Do right, but do right by you also’. I don’t think, until very recently, that I understood that. Then a friend I’d made in Arizona died suddenly.”
“Oh… I’m sorry, sweetie.”
“It’s okay. The last thing she’d told me before dying was that she felt blessed, to have that second chance at not just doing the right thing, but being the person she was supposed to be, the person she felt like on the inside.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was. She was a nun. And before that, a former corporate raider who laid off thousands of people.”
“That’s…” Dawn cocked her head a little, weighing the dichotomy. “That’s quite the role reversal.”
“You would’ve liked her. She kept telling me that I needed to stop worrying about who I am and accept myself. She also got pissed at me every time I swore.”
From the backseat, Marcus chimed in, “It’s like you have a type or something.”
Bob closed his eyes tight, then pincered them with his right thumb and forefinger. “Yah… I don’t want to even try to unpack that right now.”
Business was brusque in the hotel lobby, guests checking in for the weekend. There were a few more Stetsons on display than was typical for the town, Bob figured, and a sure sign some of the visitors were there for the town’s country music legacy, the Bakersfield Sound.
They took the elevator to the third floor and followed the fading faux-Persian runner carpet to Room 312. Dawn reached out with the keycard and put one hand on the handle.
Then she stopped. “Hmm.”
“What?” Bob’s hackles rose a little.
