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I wish it was a physical hangover that was the reason for my misery, it would be much better than the moral hangover I feel right now.After hours of leaning against the wall and seeing everything that happened, I still struggle to believe in the reality that hit me much harder than a kick in the balls.
Antonella has a daughter. A three-year-old daughter. And she’s only twenty-one.
“Holy shit!” João Pedro’s scandalous laughter is tailor-made to hurt sensitive eardrums from excessive drinking, but it does nothing for me, not when my thoughts are too far away from all this fun. “How old is Eliza, João Pedro?”
I realize I never asked that question.I know that when João Pedro convinced her to sign a contract as his personal assistant, which was actually a relationship contract, there was the registered age, but that was not a detail I cared about at the time.
“What? Are you still drunk, Marcos?” he asks, not understanding where I want to get.
“No, João Pedro!I’ve never been drunk, I’m in a hospital.”
“Damn it! What happened? What hospital? I’m on my way!” I’m going there! His voice is immediately serious and I can hear even the sound his chair makes when he rises abruptly.
I would smile if I wasn’t so fucking full of problems to deal with right now.
“Calm the fuck down!” I say, at the same time, satisfied with his mother hen care and anxious for the answer that has not yet reached the question I asked. “I’m fine!Nothing happened to me. I’m just the companion.”
“My godparents? Something happened to them?” Go to the next logical deduction, and I rub my hands on my face, impatient.
“No, João. Everyone is fine! You can relax!”
“Relax? Couldn’t you have told me that before you scared the shit out of me? Damn!” he protests, looking indignant, and I start to feel angry too.
“I didn’t scare you! You’re the one who started imagining things!”
“Marcos, what the fuck are you doing in a hospital?” I take a deep breath, preparing myself for what I know will come next, and with no way out, I release the words.
“Antonella’s daughter had a small accident at day-care.”Silence.Silence. More silence and then, a thunderous laughter, without measure, totally spontaneous.And I resign myself to hearing it, begging any fucking deity to make him forget theI told you so.
But I don’t think it didn’t like that I didn’t give it a name, because the next words I hear, amid laughter, are exactly the ones I silently begged my friend to forget.
“I fucking told you! I told you that this had the potential to turn into some deep shit! But a promotion, Marcos? Atake two for the price of one? That’s a lot better than I’ve imagined...”He goes back to laughing again and I hope, without having anything to say about it, the son of a bitch is right.I fucked things and it didn’t even feel good.
After several deep breaths, he asks:
“Is the kid alright?”
“Really, now you care?”
“Look, don’t be that person.I know you, from your tone, I know you’re not in the middle of a big problem...” he responds, and I want to contest, but spending energy on an unnecessary discussion right now is really not in my plans.
“Fine. It was just a shallow cut.She’s medicated and drowsy, she just needs a few more hours of observation and we’re going to be discharged...”
“Wait a minute, we? What the fuck! We? Didn’t you just get there?”
“No, I’ve been here since this morning, I brought Antonella and I’m waiting for discharge to take her and her daughter home...” Again, silence.
“Who are you and what have you done with my friend?Because I swore that by this time, you’d already have the tickets to the North Pole purchased!You know you can’t marry the mother without taking the daughter, right? Just to be sure...”
“Ha, ha, ha... João Pedro... Very funny!” I bring the phone close to my lips and say it quietly, so that no one but the son of a bitch will listen. “Fuck you!”
“No thanks. I wish my wife had had more time to do this in the morning, but I had a meeting, but the other party didn’t have the decency to cancel it...” he mocks!
“If a woman leaves you talking to yourself and rushes out of the breakfast table so desperately, she barely remembers how to put her finger on a fucking fingerprint sensor, believe me, canceling meetings is the last thing you fucking have in mind! And you didn’t answer! How old is Eliza?”
“Why does this matter?” he asks, without understanding the reason for my insistence.I exhale hard, feeling my patience being tested.
“Just answer the fucking question, João Pedro!”
