Page 21 of Hello, Summer
Buddy gave a lame laugh. They were the only customers in the place. “You live around here? Or in Washington?” he asked.
“Both. We have a house in Georgetown and, of course, a place back here in my district.”
“Whereabouts?”
Symmes took a bite of grits, closing his eyes in reverence. “Hmm? Oh, uh, we have a place over at Sugar Key.”
Buddy rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and Symmes’s face flushed. “We, uh, got a good deal because the developer’s an old friend.”
“Must be nice to have friends that rich,” Buddy commented, and Symmes shifted uncomfortably on the stool.
Buddy sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the SUV, which was a new Escalade. He’d worked drive time at a station in Detroit, back in the ’80s, and he knew his cars. This one was top-of-the-line. American too. He liked that.
“Gotta say, I’m kind of surprised to see a VIP driving himself around this time of night,” he said. “Me, I got insomnia, a product of all those years working the overnight shift. But what about you?”
“Same thing,” Symmes said. “I’m not sleeping well these days.”
“Guilty conscience, huh?” Buddy gave a broad wink to say he was kidding, but Symmes looked stricken.
“Something like that,” he muttered, going back to his grits. He took two more bites, paused, then took another before pushing the plate away.
The waitress pounced. “Something wrong with your grits?”
“No, they were fine. Delicious as always,” Symmes said.
“Okay.” She cleared away his plate.
When the waitress was gone, Symmes said, “I don’t have much of an appetite these days.” He patted his abdomen.
“You sick?” Buddy was just making conversation, killing time, but Symmes seized the moment.
“Off the record?”
“Sure,” Buddy said.
“Actually, Iamsick. I don’t like to talk about it because it upsets my wife.”
“Gut problems?” Buddy made sympathetic noises. “Me too, man. Ulcers. The doctors told me I gotta stop drinking coffee, but what the hell?”
“It’s cancer,” Symmes said quietly. He leaned in. “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
“Shit, man. That’s bad, right?”
“So they tell me,” Symmes said. He used his napkin to pat his lips. “It’s not public knowledge, so I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that in strictest confidence.”
Buddy was already regretting his promise. This was news, that Silver Bay’s silver fox congressman was suffering from cancer.
“Can they operate? Give you chemo? Like that?”
Symmes looked around to make sure he couldn’t be overheard, but the waitress was nodding off in a booth by the door, and the grill cook was texting on his phone.
“No surgery. I’ve been doing chemo, but now the doctors say there’s nothing else they can do. And again, this is off the record.”
“Shit,” Buddy repeated. “I’m sorry, man. No wonder you’re not sleeping.”
Symmes stared down at his coffee. “It makes you think about things, you know? Makes you take a hard look at your past.”
When Symmes looked up, his face pale, his eyes bleak, Buddy recognized that it wasn’t just cancer eating away at the old man’s gut and keeping him awake at night. He’d seen the same expression in the mirror for years and years now.
