The second time she did it I said angrily, “If you want to talk to Pat, I can get in touch with him in half a second!”
“What? Why, Tom!”
“Oh, I know you would rather I was Pat! If you think I enjoy being second choice, think again.”
She got tears in her eyes and I got ashamed and more difficult. So we had a bitter argument and then I was telling her how I had been swindled.
Her reaction wasn’t what I expected. Instead of sympathy she said, “Oh, Tom, Tom! Can’t you see that Pat didn’t do this to you? You did it to yourself.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not his fault; it’s your own. I used to get so tired of the way you let him push you around. You liked having him push you around. You’ve got a ‘will to fail.’“
I was so angry I had trouble answering. “What are you talking about? That sounds like a lot of cheap, chimney-corner psychiatry to me. Next thing you know you’ll be telling me I have a ‘death wish.’“
She blinked back tears. “No. Maybe Pat has that. He was always kidding about it but, just the same, I know how dangerous it is. I know we won’t see him again.”
I chewed that over. “Are you trying to say,” I said slowly, “that I let Pat do me out of it because I was afraid to go?”
“What? Why, Tom dear, I never said anything of the sort.”
“It sounded like it.” Then I knew why it sounded like it. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I had struggled just hard enough to let Pat win… because I knew what was going to happen to the one who went.
Maybe I was a coward.
We made it up and the date seemed about to end satisfactorily. When I took her home I was thinking of trying to kiss her good night-I never had, what with the way Pat and I were always in each other’s hair. I think she expected me to, too.., when Pat suddenly whistled at me.
“Hey! You awake, mate?”
(“Certainly,”) I answered shortly. (“But I’m busy.”)
“How busy? Are you out with my girl?”
(“What makes you think that?”)
“You are, aren’t you? I figured you were. How are you making out?”
(“Mind your own business!”)
“Sure, sure! Just say hello to her for me. Hi, Maudie!”
Maudie said, “Tom, what are you so preoccupied about?”
I answered, “Oh, it’s just Pat. He says to say hello to you.”
“Oh… well, hello to him from me.”
So I did. Pat chuckled. “Kiss her good night for me.”
So I didn’t, not for either of us.
But I called her again the next day and we went out together regularly after that. Things began to be awfully pleasant where Maudie was concerned … so pleasant that I even thought about the fact that college students sometimes got married and now I would be able to afford it, if it happened to work out that way. Oh, I wasn’t dead sure I wanted to tie myself down so young, but it is mighty lonely to be alone when you’ve always had somebody with you.
Then they brought Pat home on a shutter.
It was actually an ambulance craft, specially chartered. The idiot had sneaked off and tried skiing, which he knew as much about as I know about pearl diving. He did not have much of a tumble; he practically fell over his own feet. But there he was, being carried into our flat on a stretcher, numb from the waist down and his legs useless. He should have been taken to a hospital, but he wanted to come home and Mum wanted him to come home, so Dad insisted on it. He wound up in the room Faith had vacated and I went back to sleeping on the couch.
The household was all upset, worse than it had been when Pat went away. Dad almost threw Frank Dubois out of the house when Frank said that now that this space travel nonsense was disposed of, he was still prepared to give Pat a job if he would study bookkeeping, since a bookkeeper could work from a wheelchair. I don’t know; maybe Frank had good intentions, but I sometimes think “good intentions” should be declared a capital crime.