Roll with the Punches (34 page)

In the hall, Music Man, a bandage around his elbow, was regaling the phlebotomist with more Army jokes. "And the sergeant said to the knock-kneed recruit, 'You're hopeless. You'll never make a good soldier with the top half of your legs at attention and the bottom half standing at ease.'"

"Alzheimer's?" Dal whispered, seeing my stunned face.

I nodded, taking tight hold of Dad's arm. I reached in my pocket for a Kleenex and came up with the prescription. A-R-I-C-E-P-T. Violet, red, white, orange, green, persimmon, black. The colors of relief.

*
      
*
      
*

After a good cry and two games of hearts with Music Man, I called Monica.

"Do you want me to come home?" she asked.

I thought hard for a couple of minutes, then blew out a sigh. "I guess not. We're in this for the long haul. It's not something you can make all better in a week. I guess I have to learn to deal with it." But inside, I was screaming,
Why my father? Why now?

I decided to call Mom, not because she needed to know right away, but because I wanted to share some of the weight of this thing on my neck.

"Did you ask all the questions on the website?" she asked.

“You mean the Alzheimer’s Association website?” I asked.

“Whatever.”

So she had done some research after all. "I don't know, Mom. She did the tests you can do in an office and said if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck …"

"Exactly. The doctor's a quack, Rhonda. But your father is not a duck, and I refuse to label his behavior with this crackpot diagnosis. Mary Baker Eddy said deep enough prayer can overcome anything. He's going to get better. Your father is not sick. He's a healthy man, always has been."

"Do you at least have a power of attorney for him if we need it?" I asked.

"I do, but it was only in case he didn't make it through surgery. He did, so we won't be discussing this anymore."

"But Mom, Alz—"

"Rhonda! Don't use that word to me again. We're going to pray him out of this." The grand hostess had spoken.

I hung up and got teary again. Dal curled up behind me in his bed, encompassing me in a hug that felt like God. Bing on my other side completed a Rhonda sandwich between Indian flatbread and a giant dog biscuit. How had I ever gotten through a day without these two?

Our sandwich woke up at 7:00 p.m. for a scrambled egg dinner. Except Music Man insisted that we shouldn't have breakfast so late. I smiled sadly at the old guy as he put away the eggs and bacon and guarded the fridge door. I tried for the handle again, but he was adamant. I started to get mad, then Dal caught my eye and I thought of Dr. Madden's little lecture. Geez. It would take a lot of training to get along smoothly with the shifting sands of Music Man's new universe. My mother, in this light, was now
Saint
Vanna Mom, having put up with him for so long. I'd have to try to get her to see reality tomorrow. I blew my nose for the hundredth time that day.

That night, I couldn't face my writers' group, but I called Marian and promised to see them in Ladrona Beach on the weekend at our yearly writers' conference, a joint meeting of our local chapter of the national organization, Romance In Novels Gathering, or RING, and the darker, sexier Southern California Romance E-books Writers. You guessed it: SCREW.

Dal held my hand all through dinner and then snuggled with me on the sofa through a couple of sitcoms. Then he took my hand and led me back down the hall to his room. He stowed his crutches, sat down, and patted the bed by him. I sat, and he took my face in his. He looked deep into my eyes. The tiniest quirk of his mouth widened, blooming into a broad grin under the big bandaged nose. His black eye had spread and gone green, but this was still the handsomest man I had ever seen.

His kisses strolled and cruised and lingered over my body, and he pulled me back on the bed with him, wincing.

"Your back?"

"Yeah. Ooh." His face was in agony, his broad chest resigned.

.

"Where’s your big yellow
S
, Super Sioux? You didn’t have to rescue me. I was on my way out of that brawl on my own, you know."

He stroked my arm. "I didn't know you were so skilled in self-defense. There you were, a damsel in distress, with those guys groping your naked body. I'd brought your dad to see something Harley assured me would be entertaining, not a public rape of my best girl."

Best girl!
"Yeah, Dad loved it." My eyes rolled. "And hey, I survived topless beaches in France. Losing my bra wasn't the problem. It was all those hands." I shivered. "About to tear me apart and wreck my private fun zone."

"Oh? Don't you like hands?" He wiggled his long, well-shaped hands at me.

I took them in mine, palms up, and kissed each one. "I think I like these. They're good. They do good things." I traced the tan palms and long fingers with my index finger. "They make weird art and they carry stuff and … what else do they do, exactly?"

The hands in question traced my neck and shoulders and wandered down my V-neck shirt. "Oh, they work some, drive some, make pancakes, clean stuff up, rescue pretty girls, and sometimes, when the moon is full—" The fingers were hypnotic as they lazily circled my breasts through my shirt.

"What?" I was mesmerized.

"And the stars are in just the right places—" An eyebrow went up as one hand skimmed over my stomach and landed at my waist while the other pulled my head toward the brilliant grin amid the mass of black hair on the quilt.

Our lips met, sending a warm shower of sensation to my most eager parts. The wandering hands started their slow progress up under my sweatshirt again and peeled it off. I touched his face at the edge of the bruise and gasped. "Right places?"

"Uh-huh." He nibbled my neck.

"Do you forgive me?" I said, suddenly shy.

"No, never." His thumb played with my nipple through the bra and the nose praised my neck. "But I figure if I'm nice to you, you'll teach me self-defense. Have you seen James?"

"Who?" I pulled off his shirt, which brought fresh pain noises.

"Slow and steady, honey. Remember me, the hero, wounded in the line of duty, still recovering from mono?"

Somehow in the next few minutes, I lost all my underwear and my pants to the injured hero. "Oh! A naked woman! Right in this bed!" he said, delighted, stroking my bare butt.

"You’re a little behind here," I said, yanking at his belt.

He laughed. "Oh, don't worry. I feel plenty of behind here."

I got his belt undone, but then he stopped my hands. "One thing at a time," he whispered.

I ran my hands up and down the yummy torso in front of me. "What was that about the stars?" I whispered, teasing his cheek with my breast.

He groaned.

I whispered, "And the moon and your fingers?"

He nuzzled my breast and licked it. "Well, they've been known to …" One of his hands slid toward my fun zone, where it investigated the fun house appreciatively, then sent me on a wild, twisting, roller coaster ride.

My mind turned to mush and my back arched under the relentless fingers. "Aahhh. Oohhh. Oh, yeah. Up and up and left and right and up and around and …" I raised my arms like I was at that last big roller coaster drop. " …WAAAAHAAAAAA!"

He kicked his jeans off. "Sometimes, when the stars are right, I can make girls on horseback howl at the moon.”

"Horseback?" I gasped, my body still vibrating, my head on his smooth, naked chest. I nipped his ear and planted kisses along his neck, burrowing my nose into the long black hair. He tasted like the prairie—with one glorious tree sticking up off it, now wrapped in rubber. "Where's my horse, Injun Man?"

The grin glittered again. "You can ride me."

*
      
*
      
*

He woke me in the middle of the night with a miraculously recovered back. Our progress was slow but steady, and the man's miracle hands had soon built my body's expectations to a noisy, happy thrum once more. And I, in return, had a stiff handful of Indian promise to play with until it brought on our own personal fireworks. Awesome fun. Recommended for all horse lovers.

"Think we can ever learn to actually sleep together?" I said dreamily afterwards.

"Nah," he mumbled, a warm hand still on my breast.

While we were working up another sweat trying to memorize each other's bodies and bring each other to yet another rollicking, rolling boil, I heard Music Man trundle through the dark house, locking all the doors.

Wednesday was a mix of heaven and hell: Dal and Dad. Dal watched me do twenty-five pull-ups in the morning. He did two. I laughed. We showered together (ahem) and snapped towels at each other. Bliss. Dal and I decided to trade off watching Music Man, playing cards and telling bad jokes and making high-fat food with him.

But now that I knew Dad was sick, I had no way of telling what path his disease would take. The hunt for my stolen manuscript took a backseat to frenzied Alzheimer's research. I found out that patients often lived for decades after diagnosis, and confirmed that the money my parents had was a drop in the bucket when it came to paying for Alzheimer's care. And yet, Dad was big enough and already violent enough that most care facilities wouldn't take him, fearing for the safety of their other patients. In-home care was outrageously expensive, not to mention the little problem of finding the right person to do it. He didn't seem to be improving yet on his new drugs, but I prayed that he would. Otherwise, my life could end up a nightmare.

When Dal went off to school, Dad and I went to the park. I skated and mulled things over. Music Man told the little kids lame jokes. Then, while I wasn't looking, he took off walking, and I had to comb the area on my wheels before catching up with him three blocks away. Back at home, I called James and Yvette. No response. I called Shiny Zone, but they hadn't rehired Maria Elena. I called a lot of other cleaning services and finally located one that had recently hired a Maria Elena. She had an opening the next day, so I made an appointment for her to come and clean Mom's house.

Music Man and I visited Mom. She stoically would not admit he was ill in any way. I asked her about how they were going to deal with his care on their limited income, and she chanted a God-will-provide mantra at me with her Vanna Mom smile.

In mid-afternoon, I started writing a short, hot romance. Not my favorite genre to write since it embarrassed the hell out of me just to read one. I preferred action and humor mixed in with my love scenes, but I figured a steamy book would be a quick way to get a quick sale. Under a pen name, of course. Rhonda Rhapsody, or maybe Boudicca Jones. It would take a month or two to write it and another month to revise. Then, God willing and the stars aligned perfectly into dollar signs, I'd sell it at the next big conference, the Hawaiian Yearly Meeting of Erotic Novelists, (HYMEN) in February. I really needed to clear my publishing name before then. But until Mom got home and relieved me of Dad, this seemed about as likely as finding world peace.

I missed my trusty laptop. At 4:20, Mom's aged computer shuddered to life just long enough to let me check my email and blog. The venom in the vast majority of comments and flaming email was staggering. I was skewered everywhere as a horrid plagiarist, Salem's latest witch. Just when tears threatened, the computer went all white screen.

So when Dal came in, I was huddled on the plaid couch amid a sea of crumpled yellow paper balls and shredded erasers, mindlessly doodling the words
vampire
and
mermaid
and
sex appeal
in many crayon colors on the legal pad in front of me.

"Tough day at the salt mines? Coloring like a six-year-old?" Warm hands rubbed my shoulders.

I rolled my head forward in surrender to the marvelous hands. "Mom's computer crapped out. I'm reduced to paper.”

"Poor baby. And crayons.”

On the second sheet of the pad, I'd drawn
Reynard Jackson
all in the correct colors with spiky black and red flames underneath, and daggers, pikes and snakes sticking out of it. And drips of blue, green, and gold blood. Synaesthesia voodoo.

I closed my eyes and felt the tension go as Dal kneaded my shoulders. "My problem is getting the poor governess with the heaving bosom, Jane Luvyll, together with the good guy with the bulging manhood, John Sandwych, Viscount of Onionham, Marquis of Chezwhyz. See, the bad guy, the nasty Earl of Rainwynde, turns out to be a sexy vampire, and I think she likes him better."

Dal leaned in and nibbled my neck, a promising start to the evening. "Vampire, huh? In a romance?"

"Well, not usually in a Regency novel. But while I was trying to come up with something really trashy, this character just popped up and took over. I'm so used to writing Gothic horror books that paranormal characters creep into every story before I know it. Next, I may find out that Jane is really a very rare bastard daughter of a werewolf and a mermaid. Hey, maybe that'll work." I started scribbling furiously in green ink.

Magic hands massaged my neck. "She can't tame the vampire? Or marry him off to her nemesis?"

"No way. He's hot. I'm half in love with him myself. Gotta love those slick bat types."

"Like me?" He slid a hand down my shirt.

I turned to him, assessing batliness.

"What?" He checked his fly.

"Sorry. I just don't see you as a bat. You're definitely an animal, but more of a—"

"When's dinner?" Music Man wandered out.

"Later, Dad. It's only 4:45."

Dal said to me, "Am I a shark?"

Music Man said, "We could play poker. Sharks like that." He wandered toward the kitchen.

I shook my head.

"Okay, we're not talking a banana slug or something disgusting, are we?" Dal said.

Big Ears Dad said from the kitchen, "We got garden slugs again?"

"Only when I first met you." I folded a newspaper. On top was a big article by Paul Reynolds, the first in a series, titled
The Underside of California Indian Gaming
about serious threats to California Native American tribes' casinos from big Nevada casinos. The big casinos wanted to horn in on the smaller casinos to retrieve what Las Vegas considered its lost profits when many California gamblers started gambling closer to home. Why did this topic suddenly jump out at me?