Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith

Author:Laura Lee Smith [Smith, Laura Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literary, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9781410460431
Google: BTLRvrJqFKQC
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2013-04-02T07:00:00+00:00

TEN

Beneath a heavy metal overhang in the semicircular drive of St. Johns Hospital in Jacksonville, a trio of broad-bottomed women, dressed in powder blue scrubs and plastic clogs, stood smoking. The picture of health, thought Carson Bravo, who had no patience with either body fat or cigarettes, both of which, in his opinion, were signs of weakness. He parked in the skimpy shade of a thin pine at the edge of the parking lot and got out of his car, a used late-model Acura he’d bought from a client and, he now realized, looking at it, had paid too much for. Another expensive mistake. He was getting good at them.

The smoking women were blocking his approach to the door.

“Morning,” he said tightly.

One of them exhaled and slowly moved aside.

“Thank you,” he said, fanning the air in front of his face theatrically, but the woman simply turned back to the others and resumed her conversation. A pair of automatic glass doors made a soft sucking sound as Carson entered the building and made for the reception desk. While the air outside the hospital had been hotly oppressive, inside the temperature seemed to be hovering around the twenty-degree mark. A bank of tall windows along one wall was damp with condensation. Carson shivered.

“I’m here to see a patient,” he said to a dowdy woman at the reception desk. She had hair the color of mud and seemed, like her cohorts in the smoking section, to have not missed many meals.

“Visiting hours haven’t started yet,” she said. “Not till ten.”

He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty. Fabulous. He’d driven all the way from St. Augustine to Jacksonville in thirty-seven minutes, a personal best, only to face a half-hour delay at the hands of this washed-out pudding of a woman?

“Chrissakes,” he said to her. “Does it really matter?”

She looked at him with dislike. She wore oversize glasses with gold monogrammed initials in the corners of the lenses. Nice. “We have policies,” she said. “You’re welcome to wait.” Then she turned away.

He looked around the lobby and walked toward a small and purposefully unwelcoming waiting room tucked into an alcove, where two wall-mounted TVs blared competing newscasts from opposite walls and where all the chairs were empty. He clenched his fists one time, released. He didn’t like waiting. Deep breath. Sit down. Focus. He could hear Elizabeth, telling him he was too impatient. Too wound up. Too stressed-out.

He sat down, and his left knee immediately started jiggling, as it always did. He didn’t try to stop it. He had restless leg syndrome, or so Elizabeth had reported to him after spending an evening Googling medical sites and compiling what turned out to be a comprehensive list of Carson’s psychosomatic faults: bruxism—grinding his teeth so hard and loud in the night that it sounded like a buzz saw, or so she said. Finger tapping. Chronic sighing. Excessive drinking. According to Elizabeth, he was exhibiting every stress-induced or tension-related symptom, disorder, or weakness in the book. Well, fuck it.

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