Part 37 (1/2)

Call us!”

They looked at the phone with renewed hilarity and laughed some more. But by the time the sun was setting over Potrero Hill and Suzanne's jet-lag was beating her up again, they'd both descended into their own personal funks. Suzanne went up to the guest room and put herself to bed, not bothering to brush her teeth or even change into her nightie.

Perry touched down in Miami in a near-coma, his eyes gummed shut by several days' worth of hangovers chased by drink. Sleep deprivation made him uncoordinated, so he tripped twice deplaning, and his voice was a barely audible rasp, his throat sore with a cold he'd picked up in Texas or maybe it was Oklahoma.

Lester was waiting beyond the luggage carousels, grinning like a holy fool, tall and broad-shouldered and tanned, dressed in fatkins pimped-out finery, all tight stretch-fabrics and glitter.

”Oh man, you look like s.h.i.+t,” he said, breaking off from the fatkins girl he'd been chatting up. Perry noticed that he was holding his phone, a sure sign that he'd gotten her number.

”Ten,” Perry said, grinning through the snotty rheum of his cold. ”Ten rides.”

”Ten rides?” Lester said.

”Ten. San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Madison, Bellingham, Chapel Hill and --” He faltered. ”And -- s.h.i.+t. I forget. It's all written down.”

Lester took his bag from him and set it down, then crushed him in an enormous, muscular hug that whiffed slightly of the ketosis fumes that all the fatkins exuded.

”You did good, cowboy,” he said. ”Let's mosey back to the ranch, feed you and put you to bed, s'awright?”

”Can I sleep in?”

”Of course.”

”Until April?”

Lester laughed and slipped one of Perry's arms over his shoulders and picked up his suitcase and walked them back through the parking lot to his latest hotrod.

Perry breathed in the hot, wet air as they went, feeling it open his chest and nasal pa.s.sages. His eyes were at half mast, but the sight of the sickly roadside palms, the wandering vendors on the traffic islands with their net bags full of ipods and vpods -- he was home, and his body knew it.

Lester cooked him a huge plate of scrambled eggs with corned beef, pastrami, salami and cheese, with a mountain of sauerkraut on top. ”There you go, fatten you up. You're all skinny and haggard, buddy.” Lester was an expert at throwing together high-calorie meals on short order.

Perry stuffed away as much as he could, then collapsed on his old bed with his old sheets and his old pillows, and in seconds he was sleeping the best sleep he'd had in months.

When he woke the next day, his cold had turned into a horrible, wet, crusty thing that practically had his face glued to his pillow. Lester came in, took a good look at him, and came back with a quart of fresh orange juice, a pot of tea, and a stack of dry toast, along with a pack of cold pills.

”Take *all* of this and then come down to the ride when you're ready. I'll hold down the fort for another couple days if that's what it takes.”

Perry spent the day in his bathrobe, shuttling between the living room and the sun-chairs on the patio, letting the heat bake some of the snot out of his head. Lester's kindness and his cold made him nostalgic for his youth, when his father doted on his illnesses.

Perry's father was a little man. Perry -- no giant himself -- was taller than the old man by the time he turned 13. His father had always reminded him of some clever furry animal, a racc.o.o.n or badger. He had tiny hands and his movements were small and precise and careful.

They were mostly cordial and friendly, but distant. His father worked as a CAD/CAM manager in a machine shop, though he'd started out his career as a plain old machinist. Of all the machinists he'd started with at the shop, only he had weathered the transition to the new computerized devices. The others had all lost their jobs or taken early retirement or just quit, but his father had taken to CAD/CAM with total abandon, losing himself in the screens and staggering home bleary after ten or fifteen hours in front of the screen.

But that all changed when Perry took ill. Perry's father loved to play nurse. He'd book off from work and stay home, ferrying up gallons of tea and beef broth, flat ginger-ale and dry toast, cold tablets and cough syrup. He'd open the windows when it was warm and then run around the house shutting them at the first sign of a cool breeze.

Best of all was what his father would do when Perry got restless: he and Perry would go down to the living-room, where the upright piano stood. It had been Perry's grandfather's, and the old man -- who'd died before Perry was born -- had been a jazz pianist who'd played sessions with everyone from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington.

”You ready, P?” his father would ask.

Perry always nodded, watching his father sit down at the bench and try a few notes.