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10Vaughn“Something’s different about you.”
Damn. James was too observant sometimes. Since he was currently out of commission, I went to his house for lunch three days a week. I’d known going in that there was a chance he’d notice something was different. I thought I was behaving the same, but he always saw right through me.
“How so?” I asked as I poured dressing onto my salad.
After considering me for several seconds, he answered, “You look happier.”
I knew he was right, but I’d already decided to keep my new situation under wraps.
“First of all, I haven’t been unhappy since I was a kid thanks to you,” I answered, hoping to divert his attention from the present. “But right now, I’m extra happy because you’re on the mend.”
Both things were true. Although his energy level was low, his coloring hadn’t returned to normal, and he was frailer than I’d ever seen him, I could tell he was getting better.
It was also true that I hadn’t been unhappy since he became a fixture in my life. When James took me under his wing, I’d had a chip on my shoulder the size of Texas. With few prospects and nothing to hold onto, I’d fully expected the rest of my life to be as shitty as the first fifteen years were. Once he got involved and taught me to take chances and believe in myself, my whole life changed.
“It means a lot to me that you think that, but this is a different kind of happiness,” he said.
As tempted as I was to tell him about Allie, I knew it wasn’t the right time. Not because I thought she and I were going to stop seeing each other—I had no intention of letting that happen—but because I needed him to focus on his health. If he knew I’d invited a woman into my home and then asked her to stay for more than a week shortly thereafter, he’d force himself up and out of the house to come meet her.
Three days before the Golden Globes, James had gone into cardiac arrest, and he’d undergone open-heart surgery the following day. Although his wife, Marcella, was his next of kin, I had power of attorney and was the only one authorized to make medical decisions on James’s behalf and had been for the past four years. Having to sign off on the high-risk surgery had been gut-wrenching for me. The doctors had been honest that the chances of survival weren’t as good as they would have liked, but without it, he would’ve died.
The only thing worse than the anxiety about whether he would survive was being forced to sit next to Marcella for twelve goddamn hours while he was in surgery. The relief I felt when James made it through had been staggering.
Now he was a little more than six weeks post-op from open-heart surgery, but due to the severity of the cardiac arrest and then the subsequent surgery, we’d been told the recovery would be a marathon as opposed to a sprint. I needed to make sure he had the all-clear from the doctor to resume all his day-to-day activities before I brought Allie over. As it was, he was keyed up about another situation that I was trying to resolve for him. As much as I wanted to tell him about my girl, the timing wasn’t right.
Therefore, I chose to shrug my shoulders as though I had no clue what he was talking about. “I think what you’re seeing is relief. I was really happy not to have to anchor the after Oscars coverage,” I said.
I was relieved when my avoidance tactic worked.
“I’ve always told you that when the time came, you’d be able to find people to start working their way into your shoes. It’ll take more than one person—I knew that going in—but it’ll happen.”
“I’m happy with the direction things are going. God knows they did a better job than my last stand-in.”
James grimaced as he speared a piece of lettuce with his fork. “She was about as interesting as this salad.”
“It’s a good salad,” I lied.
He shot me an annoyed look. “I had heart surgery, not a lobotomy. This tastes like cardboard, and you damn well know it,” he grumbled.
I bit back a laugh and smiled across the table at him as I chewed my own god-awful plain Caesar salad. In my opinion, the absence of croutons and the bland as fuck low cal dressing made it a giant stretch to call it a Caesar. I kept that to myself because it didn’t matter that I agreed with him or that I thought the salad tasted like shit. His health mattered far more than the flavor of food did. I would choke down a shitty salad if it meant he’d be around for many years to come.
