The Social Climber of Davenport Heights Read Online Free PDF Page B

immediately eased. David washere. And with him came the sounds of my own life, my real life. The ordinary safe and comfortable life to which I was so accustomed.
    “My husband is here,” I told my rescuer, as if all baffling enigmas had become scrutable. “He’s come to take me home.”
    I couldn’t remember being more excited to see David. He was his usual calm, pleasant self. I introduced him to my rescuer. He gave the old man a sort of bedside high five.
    “We need to take Mr. Durbin upstairs,” one of the nurses said.
    “Of course,” David told him. “Nice to meet you, Chester, and thanks.”
    I watched them roll the bed toward the elevator. I was overwhelmed with a queasy sense of unreality. Deliberately I turned my back on the sight.
    “David, I want to go home.”
    My husband was grinning at me as if everything was fine.
    “Sure,” he said. “If it’s okay with Pete.”
    The Pete in question was emergency room physician, Pete Murfey, M.D., with whom David, apparently, had a golfing acquaintance.
    “I think we can let her go. If she promises to get plenty of rest and not blow up any more cars.”
    They both had a good laugh. I smiled along with them, but I was faking it. I just wanted to get home. To get back to the way things were before. To forget everything that happened that night.
    It wasn’t all that easy.
     
    Over the next few days I convalesced around the house. I had no lingering injuries, a few bruises and some sore muscles, but in general I was all right.
    Surprisingly, I wasn’t all that eager to get back to work. I had several things pending. I got Millie Brandt to handle aclosing for me. Everything else I just let ride. Millie and the people at work were floored. Even David seemed curious. But no one was more surprised at this than me.
    I liked being on top of things—at home, and on the job. I liked to get down to the minutiae, to personally make sure that all the i ’s were dotted and all the t ’s were crossed. Controlling was the word Brynn’s shrink used. What an ugly word. It just seemed to me that when I took care of everything, there were no unexpected complications. I had such a problem with delegating that I couldn’t even keep a cleaning lady. I hate housework, but I couldn’t stand opening the silverware drawer and finding spoons in the knife slot. Or walking into the guest bathroom and finding the liner for the shower curtain hanging on the outside of the tub. People couldn’t do things to suit me, so I simply preferred to do them myself.
    But in the days after the accident, I was different. I watered the plants on my deck, stared off into the distance and ducked phone calls from the office.
    It was almost as if I couldn’t bring myself to resume my life. I wanted things to be just as they had been, but I couldn’t pretend that nothing had happened.
    Friends were in and out. David’s mother came by to see me twice. There were flowers and cards and well wishes from associates and competitors.
    We called Brynn together. David did most of the talking. She was pretty quiet, as if she didn’t quite know what to say. She called back an hour later, after discussing it with her therapist. Then she didn’t have any trouble speaking her mind.
    “Dr. Reiser says that there are no accidents, Mother,” she told me. “We don’t know if this is an attempt at manipulation, or merely a cry for help.”
    I should have been stung by the accusation, but I was too dispassionate to even be insulted.
    I handed the phone to David.
    Tookie and her husband, Joel, came to see me. She brought over a broccoli casserole that her maid had cooked.
    “It’s a Southern thing,” she told me. “Taking food to the sick.”
    It was not hard to imagine Tookie as the great lady from the big house. Even casual and dressed down, as she was that night, she looked so perfectly put together, so unpretentiously expensive.
    “I’m not sick,” I assured her. “I’m just sort of stunned.”
    She