The Duration Read Free Page A

recognize him, but of course I would. By the end of high school, he’d developed this slouchy, limpy walk that looked like a strut. The sidewalk was sloped steeply down to the west, and KMC was just one distracted orderly away from sending a gurney rolling into the Housatonic. Up across Council, in the blocks off the rotary, sat St. Eustace, another hive of high school rivals, whose queen bee I’d dated briefly in 2000. She was a cute girl from the east side of the Knots, daughter of a judge, Shaunda Schorenstein or something like that. Shaunda Schoenstein. She’d taken me to her senior formal that year. I was just a junior from Gable, and we got a lot of dirty looks, which I think was what she was hoping for but sort of scared the shit out of me at the time because even though you’d think Catholic schools were full of sweethearts it’s just the opposite, but I manned up and held her close and nodded at the dudes I knew from the courts, and later, in the downstairs girls bathroom, she pulled me into a stall and let me get to third with her, which I tried to do in a nice way, and, as I recall, she tried to help me do in a way that would make the experience meaningful for her too, until I think I came in my tuxedo pants. And that was that. High school. What do you want?
    Chickie was already a half-hour late. I called the number I had in my cell, but it went straight to voicemail and that was full anyway. I walked to the entrance to KMC and approached the information desk, where the nurse receptionist looked at me suspiciously. Light brown skin, a robust waistline, a tattoo peeking out from the collar of her shirt. Big hoops hanging from her ears, wrong side of 28 and 215. Which made two of us, except for the hoops. She had long lacquered nails that looked unlikely to pass muster in an operating room. Her name tag said “Lemon.”
    “Hello, Lemon,” I said. “I’m supposed to be meeting someone. I think he was a patient here.”
    She sort of rolled her face, as though skeptical of the very notion of meeting someone, and looked at her computer screen.
    “What’s the patient’s name?”
    “Chickie Benecik,” I said. “Philip Benecik.”
    Nobody’d called him Philip in, like, the entirety of my existence. Even his mom called him Chickie.
    Lemon kept looking at the screen.
    “Your name?”
    “Peter Johansson.” I gave her a smoldering look, the one I’d used to reel in Kelly, the one I used to put on at the foul line when there were cute girls in the stands.
    “Sorry,” she said. “But you’re not on our list. I can’t give you any information about a patient. It’s the law.”
    “So he was a patient?”
    Lemon looked annoyed.
    “What I mean is if he was a patient, and he’s not a patient anymore, then you can tell me that, right? That’s legal. Trust me. I’m actually a lawyer myself.”
    Feckless. But maybe charming in its fecklessness? I’d gotten by with it before.
    Lemon seemed briefly willing to engage, the blinds of bureaucracy open an inch. Another nurse ambled by and gave me the evil eye, sort of impressively for someone wearing flower-print scrubs. Lemon glanced at her and harrumphed. Some history there.
    “Come on, Lemon,” I said. “Don’t let her come between us.”
    Lemon rolled her eyes.
    I laughed.
    “I’m just messing,” I said, chuckling, looking at my watch. Not a threat until it’s too late. I could do this all day. It’s where I excelled. “When life gives me a lemon, you know what I do? I say thanks. I’m not trying to squash it, either. It’s perfect just the way it is.”
    Lemon returned to her computer screen, but she was smiling.
    “This says he checked out two hours ago,” she said, and then, “What did you say your name was?”
    “Pete Johansson.”
    She reached down below her desk and came back with a manila envelope. Chickie’s writing. Block letters.
Pete So Handsome
.
    Her hoops swayed.
    “This you?” she asked, raising her eyebrows sort of