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“Yes, Cate, yes,” he said out loud.
Two burly men from a rescue team picked Rudy up from the snow. “That’s some dream you’re having, Mr. Bellafini. But you need to relax now. You’re going to be fine.”
“Sure,” Rudy said. “Relax. Like it’s easy with your foot pointing in the wrong direction. Look at that. You should be on this stretcher, dude, trying to relax.”
A woman from the same team, with black satin hair and pure brown eyes, a Latin angel, told him to breathe normally through the tubes poking into his nostrils. Rudy smiled and shut up long enough to finally lose all consciousness.
1
“IT’S NOT YOU . It’s me,” Cate Falco said while sitting across from Joey Delano in the trendy dinner house on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. She watched as he tried to cut his rare steak with a blue cast wrapped around two of his fingers and halfway up his right arm.
“Come on. That’s such a line,” he said trying to get a grip on the knife.
“I know, but it’s true. It really is me.”
He put his flatware down and looked at her. “You’re breaking up with me?”
“Yes,” she answered in a cool, calm voice.
“But why? I thought we had a good thing going.”
She thought this would go easier, but he looked seriously confused. “I’m thinking that since you met me, you’ve broken two fingers, fallen down a flight of stairs, got stuck in an elevator for five hours, sprained your wrist and got hit in the balls with some kid’s baseball. I can’t date you anymore. I’m a hazard to your health.”
Cate sat back in her chair, getting a little weepy-eyed. She really liked this guy. He was funny, cute and got her weird sense of humor, but she just couldn’t let it go on any longer.
“But they were all accidents. You weren’t even there.”
“I know, but believe me, this is for your own good.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know how everybody in Chicago believes the Cubs are cursed? Well, it can happen to people, too. I’m love-cursed and you’re just experiencing the results.”
“You expect me to believe this?”
Cate looked into his sweet brown eyes and said, “Yes.”
“This is bullshit,” he said.
It was at that exact moment that the waitress tripped while walking by, nearly dropping her tray of drinks in his lap.
“No, this is real. You’re the last in a long line,” Cate said. “I’m giving it up.”
“What? You’re not going to date anymore?”
“That’s absolutely right. I’m embracing celibacy. I hear it’s quite calming.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then stood up, pulled some cash out of his pocket, slipped it under his plate and left.
Cate let out a heavy sigh.
THE NEXT MORNING Cate and her father, Ted, sat in their kitchen eating breakfast and reading the Chicago Sun Times. Ted ate soft-boiled eggs out of the shells, really-bad-for-you bacon, and vitaminless white toast, while Cate crunched on her completely-good-for-you bowl of organic Optimum power breakfast cereal with flaxseed, soy fiber, dried blueberries and 500 mg of OMEGA-3’s.
They at least agreed on the coffee—Starbucks house blend, strong and black.
“Will ya get a load of this?” Ted announced with a flourish, tossing part of the paper across the table.
“What?” Cate asked as she picked up the sports section.
“Look whose mug is on the front page,” he said while tightening the belt on his plaid robe. It was chilly in the large kitchen and her father not only wore a wool robe over flannel pajamas, but he liked to wear a white stocking cap on his balding head…to keep the heat in.
Cate took the paper, and there, spread across three columns was Rudy Bellafini, lying prone in the snow, looking absolutely awful. Aside from the fact that his body was the shape of a pretzel, his hair was way too long—shaggy and over his eyes, with a little curly flip just under his right ear—Cate wondered if the slight mustache and almost beard was due to a lack of shaving or if he had done it on purpose, for that scruffy-Hollywood effect.
She caught herself lingering over the picture a little too long. Cate purposely didn’t react. A reaction would send her father into some lecture on “the guy who jilted you,” and Cate didn’t want to get into it, especially after last night.
“He never did like to get his hair cut,” she said as she tossed the paper back to her father.
“That’s all you got to say?”
“No. I’m sorry he’s hurt.” She took a big bite of her cereal. The crunching muffled her father’s voice, but unfortunately, she could still make out what he was saying.
“He ain’t just hurt. It says there that some girl named Allison might’a pushed him off one of them ski chairs.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Because of him, you’re thirty years old with no husband.”
“I’m twenty-nine and I don’t want a husband. I’ve got a good life just the way it is.”
“You ain’t got such a good life. He’s got a good life. Winnin’ all them gold medals, and for what? Slidin’ down some bumpy hill. Who with a sane mind is gonna do that? Nobody, that’s who.”
“Those bumpy hills are called moguls, and it’s an Olympic sport. You know that. You were glued to the TV every day during the games.”
“Yeah, well it don’t look like no sport to me. Skiing down a mountain like Alberto Tomba does is a sport. He’s a champion. But them bumpy hills, that’s no sport. It’s just dumb.”
She pushed herself up from the table. “No. This argument is dumb. I have to get to work. I’m booked all day.”
But once her father started, there was no stopping him. “And what about them restaurants of his? He’s made a million bucks on them bad Italian restaurants. What have you got? Sore hands.”
“I like what I do. I’m a great therapist. I make a good living.”
Cate leaned on the table ready to go at it with her father.
“Well, it ain’t right for a single woman to be rubbing on some guy’s hairy back all day. Only perverts and them weird sex people who like ropes and chains do that kind of stuff.”
“Here we go!” She sat back down in her chair. “We’ve locked up all our ropes and chains. They leave marks.”
“It wasn’t so bad when you was going to school and working out in California. I don’t know those people, but now that you got your own business right here in the neighborhood, I don’t like it. I gotta see these people every day.”
“Then don’t go out.”
“See what I mean? You don’t care about the shame I gotta live under. It ain’t right. You should be married to Rudy Bellafini and have a million bucks.”
Cate grabbed her bowl and cup and put them in the sink. She hadn’t really let herself think about Rudy in years, and now he was back, like lint in her dryer. “I have to go to work,” she said, and kissed her father on the cheek.
“And tell that sister of yours it’s time to get up. She does this every morning. Always late, that one.”
Cate obeyed her father and knocked on Gina’s door, but that was all she would do. She wanted to get out of there quickly and had no time to coax her sleepy sister awake. Not this morning. Not with Rudy Bellafini on the front page of the sports section.
As soon as Cate stepped out of the house, she walked straight to the newsstand on the next corner, bought her own copy of the paper and sat down on a cold, worn-out bench at the bus stop to read all about Rudy Bellafini, the man she never could shake. The man who had single-handedly cursed her entire adult love life. The putz.
The story read like it should have been inside a tabloid rather than a reputable newspaper. The focus of the piece was Allison Devine, Rudy’s latest squeeze. According to insider sources, Allison had a temper that most of Hollywood tried to avoid. They listed her many outbursts: she had thrown a chair across a movie set; trashed several dressing rooms; assaulted an unnamed costar; and backed her BMW right into her last boyfriend’s Ferrari. The article went on to say it was highly unlikely that Rudy had fallen without some assistance from the “Shrew of Hollywood.”
As if anybody cares!
Cate threw the paper into the overflowing trashcan next to her and proceeded to walk to work. Part of her thought he deserved Allison Devine. She was perfect for him. Maybe they’d get married and live miserably ever after.
She could only hope.
But the other part of her wished he’d come back to Chicago, just once, so she could somehow expunge this curse thing and be done with Rudy Bellafini once and for all.
2
FORTUNATELY FOR RUDY nothing was actually broken, but the two-hundred-pound amazon therapist who currently pulled on his very sore legs only made matters worse. He had been in therapy for almost a week. Granted, he was older now, thirty-one, and it took longer for him to heal. His knees were shot, so he didn’t expect much healing to go on there, but she really didn’t know what she was doing.
“Dude, this is crazy. Do we really have to do this now?” Rudy asked in between bouts of shooting pain. He was on the floor lying across a very thin mat.
“It’s good for the spine,” she said, smiling at his agony.
“I’ve got a great spine. A perfect spine. It’s my hip that’s hurting.”
“That’s why I’m pulling on your leg.”
“But it’s my other hip.”
“Oh,” she said, and dropped his leg, then picked up the other one. The heel of his foot hit the mat with such force that it took all that was in him not to howl in pain.
“Look,” he said trying to yank his leg away. “Could we do this some other time, like when you’re at home and somebody else with more experience is on duty? I’m too tired for all this pulling and hurting right now.”
“Nope. We have to do it now. Can’t let that hip lock up. I’ve got a whole routine planned for you. Once I finish with your leg, I move up to your neck.”
“Look,” he glanced at her name tag, “Linda. You seem like a nice enough girl, a little rough around the edges maybe, and it could be, a lot unprepared, but, hey, there’s a whole group of guys who like rough, incompetent girls. Gives them a mission in life. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. Let’s get this straight. There’s nothing wrong with my neck. It’s my shoulder.”
She stopped pulling and looked at the clipboard she had carried in. “That’s not what it says on my chart.”
“Well, your chart’s wrong.”
She flushed, then looked from left to right. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bellafini, but I’m not really a therapist. I work in the front lobby, but when I heard you were recovering here, I thought I could get the real story on how you fell off that lift. I mean, like, I don’t want to be a receptionist forever. I’m studying to be a journalist. I go to night school. You’re this week’s assignment. So, tell me, Mr. Bellafini, did your girlfriend really push you off that lift?”
“No. It was an accident.” But he wasn’t so sure about that himself. Rudy tried to remain calm, tried to move away from her and ring for a nurse, but the red emergency alarm was in the middle of the wall, well out of his reach. “All I want is some rest. Can’t a guy get some rest?”
“Sure, if you’ll just answer a few of my questions. I’m your biggest fan. I was rooting for you when you won your first gold medal. By the way, when you hang all three medals around your neck, are they heavy?”
“Where’s the nurse? Who let you in here?”
“Mr. Bellafini, please don’t get upset. Just one little question.” The woman straightened up, cleared her throat and said, “Is it true that you were caught messing around with some other Hollywood actress and that’s why your girlfriend, Allison Devine, pushed you off the lift?”
She smiled at him and waited for her answer, as if he would actually give her one. Rudy stared at her, trying to imagine what kind of insanity ran through this woman’s mind. When she opened her mouth to begin her next question, Rudy lost it. “Nurse,” he yelled. “Help! Nurse!”
The journalist-in-training got scared and stood up, turned on her heels and quickly walked out of the rehabilitation room, carrying the chart but leaving Rudy sprawled across the mat, entirely unable to move.
IT HAD BEEN a little over a week since Cate had seen Rudy’s picture in the paper, and so far she’d been unable to think of anything else. She blamed it on her new vow of celibacy. She was positive once she fell into the rhythm of this self-imposed, sex-depravation thing, all men would completely vanish from her thoughts, and she’d become as saintly as her aunt Flo, her mother’s fifty-eight-year-old, silver-haired sister.
“I heard Joey’s left nut blew up to the size of a melon,” Aunt Flo said while she lay on her stomach on a table at Cate’s Wellness Center.
Cate stopped the massage. “I’m not going to treat you if you keep this up.”
Cate had been working on Aunt Flo’s neck and shoulder every other day for the past month, but she still wasn’t getting any better. Cate didn’t know if the kink was real, or if Aunt Flo just wanted the attention. Cate was hoping for a little of both. She didn’t want to believe that all her hard work wasn’t helping.
“What?”
“Can we talk about something other than my love life?”
“Sure, doll. Anything you want.”
Cate continued with the massage. “How about the weather? That’s a neutral subject.”
“What’s to talk about? It’s winter. There’s not much conversation about ice and snow. And speaking of ice, at least you still got Henry O’Toole. He took care of Rocky pretty good. And come to think of it, you probably never would have met him if poor Rocky hadn’t croaked on your wedding day.”
“Rocky passed on, Aunt Flo. He didn’t croak.”
Cate speeded up her treatment. She wanted to get Aunt Flo out of there.
“You’re right, but them undertakers sure do make good money, and he’s Irish. The curse won’t take him. And even if Henry is old enough to be your father, sometimes that’s what a girl needs…another father.”
“Henry’s just a friend.”
“They were all your friends, but you didn’t love any of ’em but Rudy, that’s your problem.”
“My only problem is everybody telling me about Rudy Bellafini. He’s gone and out of my life, and that’s the way it is. Forever.”
“So, we won’t talk about him. Who is he, anyway? Just some boy who hurt my beautiful niece, that’s all. Just the boy who stood her up at the altar, like that devil Pinky did to me thirty years ago. And now you and me both gotta carry the curse.”
Cate refused to admit to anyone in her family that she actually believed in the curse. It just gave them more fuel.
“Rudy and I never made it to the altar. We set a date, that’s all. He never even gave me a ring.”
“I guess you’re right.” She paused for a moment, sighed and went on. “I mean, it don’t matter that your first fiancé was in a hospital for three weeks when he got run over by the flower truck on your wedding day. Or that your second fiancé, may he rest in peace, Rocky Dilantano, the prizefighter, collapsed right there in church while you was walking up the aisle on your dear father’s arm. It’s a good thing your sweet mother isn’t here to see all this, may she rest in peace, or she’d be worried sick, like me.”
