I was glad he wasn’t watching me fumble for an answer. “I, uh, told her I wasn’t in a great place right now and I didn’t know. That’s the truth.”
Lee blew out a breath. “Yeah, I suppose it is. And Mom does okay but she’s retired, not much to do with her time now Alice is gone, and I think she’s taking a breather from all those intense years. Doesn’t get out much or like to bother people. So I appreciate you helping us.”
Six years was a longbreather, but Ellen’s situation was none of my business. “My pleasure. Brought back some good memories.” I couldn’t resist an appreciative scan of his sturdy frame, different from that young Lee I’d dated but just as appealing.
He apparently noticed because he huffed and shifted in his seat. “Hah, right. Now here it is. Let’s see how far away we have to park.”
The answer turned out to be a block and a half, but I wasn’t complaining about the walk at Lee’s side in the mellow warmth of the evening. The small hole-in-the-wall restaurant was only half full, and we were seated right away. I let Lee order since he had favorites, and once the server had headed toward the kitchen, I turned to him.
“You probably know at least something about my life in the last twenty years, but I don’t know much about yours. Just that you lost Alice, and somewhere along the way you went back tobecome a nurse practitioner, switched out of the ER care you’d planned on in nursing school…” I let my voice trail off.
Lee downed a slug of his water. “I did the ER for five years. By then, Alice needed more care and I’d been helping mom wrangle her medical team. She had a neurologist, a gastroenterologist, an endocrinologist, a cardiologist. Those guys could not the fuck talk to each other and her neurologist was a dickwad. He withheld a prescription one time until she came in for a recheck, when she’d had four days straight of migraine and couldn’t stand daylight.”
I winced. “That’s rough. Um, what was her diagnosis again?” He’d told me back when, but I’d remembered the impacts, not the name.
“A mitochondrial disorder. Usually inherited and poor Mom felt so guilty, but genetic testing showed Alice’s was a spontaneous mutation. I’m not sure Mom ever quite believed it wasn’t her fault.”
“Spontaneous means you’re not going to be affected, right?” I held my breath.
“Nope. Clean bill of health other than my doc wants me to eat better, lower my stress, and lose forty pounds.”
I chuckled with relief. “Don’t they all? So what did you do about the dickwad neurologist?”
Lee eyed me over the rim of his water glass. “What makes you think I did something?”
“You? Not try to solve a problem?” I scoffed, then paused to thank the petite server who brought us a pot of green tea and handleless cups. When she was gone, I poured us each a cup of fragrant brew.
Lee sipped his. “I like that you see me that way. And yeah, what I did was go back to school for my MSN and became a nurse practitioner. That way, I could prescribe meds myself if she was running low. I could call in a stop-gap prescription until we could get whatever specialist onboard.”
I lowered my voice. “Is that legal, prescribing for your family?”
“Yeah.” Lee didn’t seem worried. “A bit frowned on maybe, if you do it a lot, but as long as it’s not drugs of abuse, it’s okay. I wasn’t going to let Alice crash off her antidepressants when her psychiatrist refused her Medicaid and she had to find a new provider.”
“And you didn’t go back to emergency medicine?”
“Nah. Honestly, I was already burned out. That shit is intense. The money’s good, but the hours are terrible and the stress is real. We knew there was a good chance Alice would end up in a care home at some point, if she kept having stroke-like episodes. So I checked around, picked Wellhaven, and applied. The nursing homes are always desperate for good staff. I had my choice.”
“And you stayed, after she passed?” I flinched at saying the words, but Lee just nodded.
“They offered me the promotion to nursing supervisor. More money, less shit. And I felt committed to the place. Wellhaven did what we could for Alice her last two years, and there were other patients I’d come to know, and their families. Seemed like the right choice…” He stared off into space as if seeing something sad, then shook his head, and said in a different voice, “What about you? I know the big stuff, the number one hits and all. But what was it like?”
If he wanted to quit talking about his past and his lost sister, I’d go along with that. “It was a hell of a ride,” I told him. “Highs and lows like you would not believe.”
“Like what?”
“As high as getting up on stage in front of twenty thousand people screaming my name andkillingit. Walking offstage so high from the music and the crowd I tripped over a cord and sprained an ankle.”
“Ouch.”
“At least it wasn’t a wrist. I could play sitting on a stool.”
“And the lows?”
He’d opened up about his personal dark times for my questions, so I said, “Lowest was probably a hotel room outside of Phoenix, watching my band’s drummer shoot up heroin, already high on meth. Wondering if I should call the paramedics, and whether he’d be dead by morning.”
“Was he?” Lee’s voice went soft and kind.
“Not that time.” That backup band had been put together by my label and they’d been deep into the mood-altering substances, from pot and ’shrooms to LSD and the hard stuff. I wasn’t the youngest in the room, but definitely the least experienced, so I’d sat back and kept my mouth shut. I had a few regrets about that. But when Rex did OD years later, we’d long since parted ways.
