But I didn’t tell Raoul this. I liked the guy, asshole tendencies and all, so it was best not to reveal the true insanity of my family. So, I smiled at him like I was agreeing, and looked in front of me just in time to avoid hitting a gurney being pushed by two orderlies with someone on it. That someone ended up being someone we knew – Ren Townsend.
“Hey, man. Come here often?” he asked, trying to raise his arm in the air and groaning.
“A Townsend gets wheeled into a hospital… it’s like the beginning of a bad joke,” Raoul chuckled, putting his arm around my waist and pulling me into his side to avoid being hit by the gurney as they straightened it in the hallway.
“Yeah, imagine that,” a female snapped, walking up behind us. Turning around, I saw Ren’s wife Maya, who was covered in mud and glaring at her husband.
Ren’s face immediately went from pained to confused as he saw the state of her. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Well, let me see,” she tapped her chin with her finger. “I was on my way to meet my husband for lunch, see it’s our anniversary today, so I thought I’d surprise him.” Knowing full well this wasn’t going to go well when Ren winced, Raoul moved us closer to the wall as she continued. “He hadn’t even mentioned it this morning before he left for work, so I figured he was planning something. Anyway, on my way here, I got a phone call to tell me that the husband – we’ll refer to him as the Twooch, because he’s a twat and a chooch – in question had been in an accident at work. Apparently Twooch had been doing the limbo with the machine that lifts the car in the air,” she looked over at us, so I took a step behind Raoul, doing my best to hide. “That might be amusing, if it wasn’t for the fact he had two of his brothers operating the damn machine for him.”
“Tom and Cole were in complete control of…” Ren started and then shut his mouth with an audible snap when she glared at him.
That’s when my mom spoke up, unable to help herself. “So why are you covered in mud, honey?”
Spinning around to look at who’d spoken, Maya’s eyes widened when she saw my parents and then she looked at me, reminding me that they’d met a couple of weeks before when we’d celebrated Jose and Ellis’s engagement. “Your parents are here? I didn’t know that. Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Beauregard, how are you?”
“We’re very well. You look…” Mom stalled and then reached into her purse to pull out a tissue for Maya. One whole tissue, and from the pocket-sized pack of Kleenex, too, when Maya was covered in mud.
“Well, I got stuck in mud as I pulled out of our house, and the only person around to help me was this one’s,” she gestured over her shoulder with her thumb at Ren, “grandfather. Seeing as how he’s still recovering from major heart surgery, I got out and pushed him while he put his foot on the gas. Except – and this was after five minutes of pushing, by the way – he didn’t have it in gear. The second I called out to him to put it in gear, he did it – whilst keeping his foot on the gas.” All of us made noises of understanding, apart from Ren who groaned. “Not only did he shoot out of the mud, leaving me falling face first into it, but he also stalled the engine and still managed to hit the fence,” she growled, and then looked over her shoulder to where her husband was now lying with his eyes shut. “Playing dead won’t help, you have another vehicle to fix.”
“Noted.”
I’d made the mistake of moving out from behind Raoul while Maya told her story, and when she turned to look at me again to say something she finally saw my eye, having missed it before now. “Holy shit, what happened to your eye?”
I could see out of it now, slightly at least, but I knew for a fact it looked bad. The mirror that I’d been standing in front of when I brushed my teeth this morning had told me so, in fact. “Halloween costume. I decided to get started early.”
Apparently my attempt at humor didn’t go down well with any of them, least of all the man standing behind me who reached out and pinched my butt cheek, making me jump.
“I heard the guy was the size of a tree,” one of the orderlies, Ted, who’d been pushing Ren said.
The other one, not wanting to be left out, added his two cents worth. “I saw him, he was like a frigging bull. There’s a hole in the wall in the cubicle that’s bigger than my foot where he hit it with his fist.” Seeing as how he was standing on the same side of the bed that we were, we all looked down at the foot he held out when he said it, and I had to wonder if we all thought the same thing as we saw that he had the tiniest feet I’d ever seen on a grown man. I wore size eights and even mine looked bigger than his.