Last Licks

Ollie pushed the package away. “You think I’m going to worry about that, the way I feel?”

“The man said it was urgent.”

“Urgent for him maybe.” Ollie grabbed the envelope and glared at her over the big, dark, pouchy bags beneath his eyes. “He may lose a few bucks if the deal drags on, but it’s not costing me money. This can wait.”

Ollie contemptuously tossed the overstuffed envelope into his lap—then let out a stifled howl of pain as it landed on his bad leg. Sunny quickly collected the papers and deposited them on the hospital table at the foot of his bed.

“Oliver, you need something to take your mind off things.” Gardner looked at the gold watch on his wrist. “There’s some music over in the other wing right now.”

“I don’t feel—” Ollie began.

But Gardner just kept smiling. “Think you’ll feel better just lying here?” He hit a button on his souped-up remote, and a second later, a voice came out of a speaker. “Yes, Mr. Scatterwell?”

“Can we get an aide in here?” he asked. “My roomie and I want to get into our wheelchairs.”

While they waited, Gardner turned to Mike. “Go on, tell Sunny about our band.”

Mike laughed again. “We were the Cosmic Blade. I played bass, and Gardner here had a wall of drums. Remember how we used to start ‘Gimme Some Lovin’?” He began fingering chords on an air guitar. “Ba-da-da-da-dooomph, ba-da-da-da-dooomph . . .” Gardner immediately started wailing away on an imaginary drum set. Sunny couldn’t help noticing that he was seriously out of time with Mike—and that he quickly tired.

“Spencer Davis,” Gardner wheezed.

“A long time ago,” Mike said.

A young woman in a blue uniform came in, and began the process of transferring the patients from bed to wheelchair. Gardner Scatterwell was slow and awkward. “Damn stroke has really fouled me up.” His tone fell somewhere between explaining and complaining as he struggled into the chair.

Ollie was even worse. Pain not only made him clumsy, but also made him afraid to shift his weight at all. But at last both were in their chairs. Gardner looked up at Mike. “Would you mind wheeling Oliver?”

He grinned at Sunny. “At my age, and in my condition, I’ve got to grab any chance I can get to be with a lovely woman.”

Shaking her head but smiling, Sunny took the handgrips on the wheelchair. “Where to?” she asked.

He directed them around the nurses’ station and down one of the other hallways. Although it had the same floor and paint job, this corridor seemed a little narrower—older.

This must be the wing I saw coming up the walk, Sunny thought. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Mike looking around with interest as he followed along with Ollie’s wheelchair. Ollie sat in a dejected huddle, ignoring it all.

“Just keep going, right to the end, and then you make a left,” Gardner said.

Sunny followed his directions past a series of semiprivate rooms, finally coming into a combination sunroom and cafeteria, where a small collection of older folks—mainly women—clustered in wheelchairs and walkers around a younger man playing guitar. They were all singing “Pennies from Heaven.” Sunny, Mike, Gardner, and Ollie all waited in the doorway until they finished and rewarded themselves with a little applause.

“Got room for a couple of late kids, Luke?” Gardner called as the clapping died away.

“Always,” the guitarist replied with a smile. He was a guy about Sunny’s age, with a big mass of shaggy, curly brown hair that spilled down into a big, shaggy beard. A proud nose poked out of all that hair, and a pair of warm brown eyes beamed at them.

Like melted chocolate, Sunny couldn’t help thinking.

The man shifted his shoulder under the colorful strap on his acoustic guitar as he beckoned them into the circle around him. “Luke Daconto,” he identified himself. “Musical therapist. Tunes and therapy, at your service. So, Gardner, you brought me a couple of new recruits?”

“Yeah, it’s a little too quiet for us down in the rehab wing,” the older man replied, introducing Ollie, Mike, and Sunny.

“Well, let’s see if we can come up with a cheerful song.” Luke’s fingers seemed to dance along the guitar’s fretboard as if they had a mind of their own.

Ollie suddenly perked up. “That’s ‘Smoke on the Water.’”

“Guilty,” Luke admitted. “You can’t always be playing ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ How about this?”