Lovesick Read Online Free PDF Page A

A spice rack that needs alphabetizing,” I say.
    “Don’t be mean.”
    “No,
you
don’t be mean. I thought we had this custody battle all worked out. Gregory gets you Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and I get whatever’s left. Now you’ve got him muscling in on my Thursdays?”
    I exit the 101. Paige puts her hand on my lap and starts rubbing my thigh, slowly and seductively. She leans over and kisses my neck. We swerve slightly onto the shoulder.
    “Just don’t be mad,” she whispers.
    “And what about Scrabble?”
    “I must admit, nothing gets me hotter than a triple-word score,” she sighs. “‘Q’ me, Andy, oh ‘Q’ me,” she says, biting my earlobe.
    I’m going to crash. I take a hard right onto her street, pull over one house short of Gregory’s, and turn off the engine. I can see his pudgy silhouette reclining in his ratty olive chair. Paige and I mash faces, grabbing, groping, kissing, tugging, squeezing. We round first base and sprint toward second.
    “Don’t go in,” I huff, my eyes focused on the bay window to his living room. “Come home with me. I’m more fun than he is.”
    Gregory’s silhouette stands. I quickly disengage.
    “Sunday … I promise,” she says, catching her breath and adjusting herself.
    I pull the car forward another twenty yards and Paige is home.
    “Kiss me,” she commands. With one foot already out the door she holds out her cheek.
    I present my own cheek and she kisses it.
    “No, that’s me kissing you.” She laughs, longing for affection. “Kiss your girlfriend.”
    She holds out her cheek again and I rub my cheek up against hers Eskimo-style. Paige laughs a second time.
    “I love you, Andy,” she says, closing the car door.
    I nod, but say nothing. Fifteen paces later, I’m alone.
    Seven. Seven ILYs. Seven “I love yous,” just like Mac Daddy predicted, and yet his chart is way off: she says it, but I love her more.

C HAPTER 4
Deflected
    THE story behind Day’s Pharmacy is the story of Ringer’s Lactate. Gregory Day isn’t the type to reminisce so what I know about this place and his life I’ve largely pieced together from Paige and Sid.
    In the early 1950s, Gregory is drafted into the Korean War. Six months later, his entire platoon is airlifted into the heart of enemy combat, and his troop is given an unenviable task: stall—stall the North Korean Army until American reinforcements arrive. But the U.S. Army severely miscalculates how long and how many men it will take to fend off the enemy. Gregory and the men of C Company, Twenty-first Regiment, Twenty-fourth Infantry Division are greatly outnumbered. Gregory’s battalion is decimated, but Gregory is among the few survivors, sustaining severe shrapnel wounds to his left leg. He is losing a lot of blood. Airmen helicopter him to the nearest M.A.S.H. unit, where he receives one of the very first applications of a new miracle drug called Ringer’s Lactate, now a common electrolyte fluid used to resuscitate the wounded. Gregory receives a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Ringer’s saves his life.
    Following an honorable discharge, inspired by the power of medicine, Gregory returns to northern California to attend college. The army pays for the first three years until he drops out in 1955 to play ball for a now-defunct minor league baseball team. The San Francisco Seals are willing to overlook Gregory’s slight limp be cause he’s a true slugger. During the third day of spring training, Gregory is hit—literally—with a stroke of bad luck when a wild pitch smacks him square in the chest, cracking three ribs. He sits the season out.
    Six months later, the San Francisco Seals relocate and become the Phoenix Seals, but Gregory isn’t invited to join them. His careeris over before it begins. A medical degree seems too far off and too much work, so instead, he chooses pharmacology. In those days, you could get a pharmacy degree straight out of high school in just three years.