One Last Call Before Goodbye novel · Chapter 2 of 16

Chapter 2: Check Number 4471

Colleen finally tells Louise the truth about the diner and the torn check, and then Cynthia calls to say she bought Louise's building.

Louise read the text over my shoulder.

Her mouth went flat.

"What you took from her," she said. "What did you take from that woman?"

"Nothing."

"Coll."

"Nothing, Lou. I swear on Mom."

She sat down on the floor next to me, right there on the hospital tile, in her black salon smock.

"Then why does his girlfriend think you did?"

I held the ticket in my lap.

I had kept this for five years.

I had kept it from Clifford, from Dad, from Louise, from every nurse who asked who I wanted to call.

I didn't have five more years to keep it.

"Do you remember the winter he couldn't find a job?" I said.

"He slept on our couch half that winter."

"His mother called me that January. She asked me to meet her at the diner on Ditmars."

Louise stared at me.

"You never told me that."

"I never told anybody."

I could still see the booth.

Red vinyl, a crack in the seat, a coffee I never drank.

Cynthia Wexley wore a cream coat and didn't take it off.

She didn't touch the menu.

She slid an envelope across the table with two fingers.

"Open it," she said.

Inside was a check from the Wexley Foundation.

Two hundred thousand dollars, made out to Colleen Duffy.

"What is this?" I asked her.

"It's more money than your family has ever seen," she said. "Take it and end things with my son."

I laughed.

I actually laughed at her.

She didn't blink.

"Every hospital in this city returns my calls," she said. "Clifford knows it. That's why nobody will hire him."

"He'll find something."

"He won't. Not in New York. Not in Boston. Not anywhere I can reach, and I can reach everywhere."

She folded her hands on the table.

"There's a residency at Whitford Memorial in Washington. My foundation paid for its cancer wing. The day you leave him, his name goes on that list."

"And if I don't?"

"Then he sells insurance," she said. "And every year he'll look at you and know what you cost him."

"And if he keeps playing the fool over you, then as far as I'm concerned, I have no son."

I picked up the check.

I tore it in half, right down the middle of her signature.

I set the two pieces on the table.

"I don't want your money."

Cynthia looked at the halves for a long moment.

Then she pushed them back across the table to me.

"Keep them," she said. "Take them out whenever you start to feel noble. The offer on his residency stands either way."

She stood up and left a twenty for a coffee she hadn't ordered.

Louise had gone very still beside me.

"So you left him."

"Three weeks later."

"At Penn Station," Louise said slowly. "You came home soaked. You said it was over and you wouldn't say why."

I remembered that too.

Clifford with his duffel bag, on his way to an interview in Philadelphia that he didn't get.

The departures board flipping over our heads.

"I met someone," I told him. "Someone with money. I'm tired of waiting for you to be somebody."

He looked at me.

"You don't mean that."

"I do."

"Coll, look at me."

I didn't.

I walked away and went down the stairs to the subway, and I didn't turn around once.

Two months later, his name was on the list at Whitford.

"You idiot," Louise said.

Her voice cracked on it.

"You absolute idiot. He'd have picked you. He'd have sold insurance for you."

"I know."

"Then why?"

"Because he wanted to be a doctor since he was nine," I said. "Because I wanted him to have it."

Louise pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

"And his mother told everyone you took the money."

"I guess she did."

"Where are the pieces? Tell me you still have them."

"In my diary. In the closet at home. Taped to the back cover."

She gave a short, quiet laugh.

"Good."

"It doesn't matter anymore, Lou."

"It matters to me."

My phone rang in my hand.

We both jumped.

It wasn't Clifford's number.

It was a Washington area code.

Louise reached for it, but I answered first.

"Hello?"

"Colleen."

I knew the voice before she said another word.

Five years hadn't changed it at all.

It was still cool and even, still sitting across a diner table from me.

"Mrs. Wexley."

"My goddaughter tells me you called my son an hour ago."

"I just wanted to talk to him."

"We had an agreement."

"You had an agreement," I said. "I never took anything from you."

"And yet here you are, reaching for him again the minute his life is finally going well."

I closed my eyes.

"I won't bother him."

"No," Cynthia said. "You won't."

I heard ice move in a glass on her end.

"Your sister still cuts hair on Thirty-First Street, doesn't she? Louise's. Two chairs and a leaky sink."

Louise could hear every word.

I watched the color leave her face.

"Leave her out of this," I said.

"I made an offer on that building twenty minutes ago," Cynthia said. "Her lease comes up in January. Call my son again, and there won't be a renewal."

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