“Yeah, hey.”
“Fuck.” Iggy hung up.
Then he gaped at his phone, stunned he’d done such a juvenile thing. Especially when his shocked brain reminded him that his high school boyfriend, his secret love of two years, had been trying to call him for two days now, and Iggy had just hung up on him like a petulant sixteen-year-old.
Why was Monte calling him, though? After half a lifetime?
Before Iggy could feed or ignore his curiosity, his phone lit up again. “Hey, sorry, um, bad connection.” So lame.
“Yeah, so it’s Monte. Um, Malcolm. Montgomery. From high school.”
“No shit. Uh, hi?” Iggy gaped at the blank wall across from his bed, his brain still trying to catch up with reality. He did not have Spontaneous Call From Ex Who Broke My Heart on this year’s bingo card.
“Hey, so yeah, I know you probably never wanted to hear from me again, but I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday when it happened, and now we know what’s wrong, and he wanted me to call you.”
The dizzying run-on sentence took a moment to compute. “What happened yesterday? Who wanted me to call you? I mean, you to call me?” God, he was an idiot around Monte then, and he was still an idiot now.
“Howie. He’s in the hospital. ICU.”
“Uncle Howie?” His heart dropped to the floor. Chills shrieked up and down his spine. A thousand questions hit him all at once, but he managed to force out, “What happened?”
“I found him at his house yesterday morning, real sick, so I drove him to the hospital, and after a bunch of tests and stuff, his doctor says he’s got botulism poisoning.”
Botulism. He’d learned about that in some of the food safety courses he’d taken over the years, when he’d been attempting toget into a good culinary school. It was incredibly rare in the US nowadays, but it was also serious and potentially deadly. Iggy stopped himself from asking how Uncle Howie got it—food, duh—and focused his racing thoughts. “How bad is he?”
“He’s pretty sick. Double vision, trouble talking, general weakness. He had some trouble breathing at first, but he hasn’t had to be intubated or put on a machine. They recognized the symptoms and were able to give him the antitoxin fast.”
“Right, to neutralize the botulinum toxin. What about managing his symptoms?”
“Breathing is apparently the biggest deal with this stuff, but he’s breathing good on his own. Mostly, he’s got some paralysis, and he’s really weak, but he’s not in any mortal danger.”
Iggy released a relieved breath, and a bit of his rioting anxiety started to settle. “Okay, good.”
“I gotta say, I’m impressed you know so much about botulism,” Monte said. “I spent an hour this morning on my phone, searching everything I could online.”
“I need to know about it for work.”
“Work?”
Iggy didn’t give in to the temptation to talk about his career of the last thirteen years, because it brushed up too close to the greatest tragedy of his adult life. So far.
He needed Uncle Howie to be okay. The man had been a godsend to Iggy for most of his life, but especially when Uncle Howie took in a fourteen-year-old Iggy as a permanent foster child. Uncle Howie had never officially adopted him, but he’d had full legal custody.
His parents hadn’t wanted him anymore.
Whatever. Ancient past.
“So, wait a second,” Iggy redirected. “You said you found Uncle Howie sick? How?”
“How? He hired me to hang a new ceiling fan in his trailer, and then to replace some broken fixtures in the saloon.”
He was glad he was still sitting down, or Iggy might have fractured his tailbone a second time by falling on his ass. “You’re in Chance?”
“Yeaaaaaah. Wait, fuck, Howie never told you I moved back two years ago?”
“Not that you moved back permanently, no. He told me about Tomás, though. I’m, um, sorry for your family.”
Uncle Howie was the only person left in Chance, Colorado, that Iggy cared about, and they’d kept in frequent contact over the years. Calls on holidays and birthdays, the occasional chat to check in. Uncle Howie followed his social media. He also loved and respected Iggy enough to let Iggy leave and forget the heartache of high school, and to never look back. Uncle Howie told him when Melissa’s second husband died, leaving her a widow with four kids to raise on her own. He’d even mentioned that Malcolm Montgomery had returned to help his sister for a while.
