Life at 8 mph

by Peter Bowling Anderson

  We walked for a bit along the river, holding hands in the idyllic setting. I should kiss her, I thought. Now would be the perfect time. We’re by the Mississippi River, for crying out loud. It won’t get more romantic than this. Pull the trigger! Make your move!!

  But then I saw another couple ambling toward us, and my window for execution vanished. However, even if they hadn’t appeared, I probably would’ve chickened out. I was an expert at it. Plus, Leslie was modest and making out in public undoubtedly wouldn’t have appealed to her.

  At least, that helped me justify waiting.

  It was while watching a movie on her couch with her three dogs, Atticus, Bear, and Dill, surrounding us that our first kiss finally happened. Slim Dill was partly wedged between us, either jealous for attention or wanting to join in. Maybe a bit of both. Bear (who looked like one) slept near my feet by the air vent, while muscular Atti reclined on his soft bed near the TV. We were watching an intensely romantic, delicate, tear-jerking movie called Superbad, with Jonah Hill. Leslie had seen it and promised it was funny, which it was, but not really romantic date night material. More like frat house flick night. Yet it worked. Before we made it halfway through, Leslie, Dill, and I were kissing. I owed Mr. Hill one.

  My trip to Memphis couldn’t have gone better, but now the time had come for Leslie to visit me in electrifying Fort Worth. I worried she might fall asleep as soon as she hit town.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Under the Dog Pile

  Richard’s wheelchair took a pounding. It was beaten up, scratched, dented, and creaked as it rolled along with one wobbly wheel. It looked like it would collapse underneath him at any moment. He needed to wear a mini-parachute to break his fall. I kept waiting for the day either his chair or Big Blue (or both) broke down, stranding us for hours somewhere in the city.

  Under Medicaid, Richard’s wheelchair could be replaced only every five years, so he had to wait a little longer for a new one. That meant lots of trips to The Healthcare Store in Hurst about forty minutes away. It was a full-service shop providing a variety of medical equipment such as manual and power wheelchairs, scooters, lifts and ramps, and bath aids. They customized products for their customers, too, which was perfect for Richard because he usually wanted something adjusted on his chair in addition to the frequent maintenance required. John, the owner, was incredibly nice, generous, and patient, and he put up with Richard’s hot-rodding around town with little more than gentle pleas to drive a little slower over the railroad tracks and speed bumps.

  Despite the long round trip to Hurst, I enjoyed going to The Healthcare Store. All the employees and technicians were extremely friendly to Richard, which I appreciated. When he felt comfortable, I felt at ease. After Julie’s, this was one of his favorite spots to visit, even though it meant his chair was struggling. There was no haggling and no language barrier. They all understood Richard or didn’t mind listening a second time to ensure they heard him correctly. They genuinely seemed to care about helping people. It was one of those rare stores that actually lived out the maxim I found in its pamphlet that they’d treat everyone with the dignity and respect they deserved. This made it a joy to go there.

  Plus, there was a bakery close by.

  But Richard’s chair wasn’t the only thing taking a beating. Sometimes I thought Richard should wear a helmet. That orange light on top of his wheelchair wasn’t nearly enough to alert motorists he was heading their way. Richard was accustomed to driving himself around—he’d done it his whole life. Even though he now had a van, he still liked to “walk,” as he put it, whenever possible. Once, while on a scouting expedition for their new house, Richard explored a potential neighborhood and was hit by a car as he crossed an intersection. The driver never noticed him while making a U-turn. Richard was thrown twenty feet in the air, chair and all. I saw the accident from afar and sprinted to Richard sprawled on his side in the middle of the street with his chair still glued to his back. His seat belt meant business—they must’ve used them on rocket ships.

  I lay down on the street to see how badly Richard was hurt. Miraculously, he smiled at me, and said, “Hoowee. I don’t know about this house.”

  If I hadn’t been scared out of my mind, I would’ve broken down laughing hysterically. Only Richard would’ve said that then. I glanced back at Della hurrying over, and before I stood up to meet her, Richard reminded, “Don’t go too far.”

  I patted him on the arm, and said, “I’ll be right here.”

  Somehow, Richard wasn’t seriously injured other than a huge hematoma on his back from where his wheelchair had scraped him. His chair, though, needed major repairs. Fortunately, insurance covered it, and it gave us the perfect excuse to spend more time at The Healthcare Store.

  As if that flight wasn’t harrowing enough, Richard sailed through the air again shortly before Leslie visited. It happened one evening after I was already home. Della and Richard were in the parking lot of Hulen Mall getting ready to leave after her shift at Chick-fil-A. She raised Richard up on Big Blue’s lift, with Richard facing away from the van. He always backed into the van off the lift because it was easier for him to position his chair to be lashed down. Just when he was about to begin backing in, his cellphone rang. Della reached up to answer it for him, but she accidentally bumped his chair’s joystick, launching Richard forward off the lift face-first onto the pavement, his chair still dutifully hugging him. I was in awe of his seat belt.

  Della immediately called the ambulance, and Richard ended up having to get stitches in his forehead. His left ankle was sore, yet he escaped major injury again. He was the true Man of Steel. I told him, “Maybe you should work at the circus as the guy who gets shot out of the canon. You could hang out with the elephants. You’d have a ball.”

  He laughed and said, “Your turn. I’ve done it.”

  Poor Della felt miserable over the accident. She’d merely tried to help Richard answer his phone so he didn’t fumble for it up on the lift and risk injury, resulting in painful irony. Richard tried to ease her guilt the best he could, assuring her he wasn’t mad and that many people had accidentally bumped his joystick through the years. It was easy to do. He said, “I’m fine, honey. The chair’s okay. All’s well that ends well.”

  Yet we weren’t quite out of the woods.

  The doctor diagnosed Richard’s sore left ankle as sprained and added that it didn’t really matter if it was sprained or broken because it was non-weight bearing. Easy for him to say. Richard insisted it was broken because the pain was killing him, yet it was logged as a sprain.

  Over the next two weeks, Richard complained louder and louder about his ankle, yet I presumed he was simply having difficulty dealing with the soreness. Whenever Della was available, he begged her to massage his swollen ankle, and when she wasn’t, he enlisted me. I didn’t mind because he was clearly in a lot of discomfort, though once when he asked me to do it in a very public place, I wished we could return to the halcyon days of desperate bathroom dashes.

  Depending on Della’s shift, we visited her every so often at Chick-fil-A. It didn’t matter when we hit the mall’s food court, Chick-fil-A was always the busiest eatery. I felt sorry for the bored employees standing behind the other counters envying the long lines stretched out before Della and her coworkers. I wanted to go order a lamb gyro or a bowl of wonton soup just to keep them company, yet I had to maintain loyalty to Della’s employer. We were a Chick-fil-A family.

  Of course, if I’d been in their shoes, I would’ve been grateful not to get mobbed all day. I’d seen Della when she stumbled home after an exhausting shift doling out waffle fries and chicken sandwiches. She could’ve used a few extended breaks.

  Richard and I arrived at the food court early that morning, not long after Della’s shift started. There was already a line of hungry shoppers salivating over chicken, egg, and cheese bagels, hash brown scramble burritos, and chicken biscuit
s smothered in Chick-fil-A Sauce (the best dipping sauce I ever tried). The other restaurants’ employees might as well have played poker in the back—they certainly weren’t needed out front.

  I liked malls. Most people I asked didn’t. Too many lines, noise, noise, noise, credit cards maxed, mental and physical exhaustion. But where I’d grown up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, we had only a strip mall, not a proper mall with two or three levels, a food court, major department stores like Macy’s and Dillard’s, Santa at Christmas, and maybe even an ice skating rink. The whole operation enclosed in one giant building like its own city separate from the one outside. It was as if I’d walked into another world, like a large resort hotel, except with soft pretzels and a movie theater. In the mornings or at lunch, people slipped on their sneakers to walk the mall like a free, air-conditioned gym. Parents arranged play dates for their kids with friends at the children’s play zones. Concerts were given, cars raffled off, book signings held. There was never enough time to try everything, like vacationing in a foreign country with only two hours to explore. I usually wasn’t ready to leave.

  Except today.

  Richard led us past the lines waiting at Chick-fil-A to the counter where Della stood smiling wearily. She was taking a customer’s order, though the slender, older man didn’t request any special sauce. Big mistake, I thought. Go for the sauce. Add the dipping sauce! He left it dry. A regrettable choice.

  Richard tried to tell Della his ankle felt worse, yet her hands were full with ravenous customers who held no special sympathy for Richard’s pain. They wanted to eat. Now. If Richard required a word with his wife, he’d have to mosey to the back of the line. It was somewhere near the parking lot.

  Yet rather than hold out for his turn with Della, Richard had another idea. He pushed his joystick so that his chair reclined until he was fully horizontal. Then he looked at me while pointing at his left foot, and said, “Take my shoe off.”

  “Sorry?” I said, pretending I didn’t understand what he’d asked or where this was headed.

  “My shoe,” he said more emphatically. “Take it off. And my sock.”

  We were right next to the counter at Chick-fil-A, with two lines of customers standing six to ten feet away. This wasn’t happening. This was a terrible dream.

  I glanced at Della, who shook her head but then shrugged as if to say, No, not here…well, his mind’s made up.

  I bent over and whispered in Richard’s right ear, “Maybe we should do this outside.”

  He looked at me like he didn’t care if the Royal Family was having tea at the next table, he was in pain. “Please rub my ankle,” he asked in such a pathetic way that I would’ve had to surgically remove my heart and puree it to say no.

  I stood up and slowly slid off his shoe, hoping by the time I reached his bare foot, security would intervene. I placed his soft, brown dress shoe with the Velcro strap by the side of his wheelchair nearest the customers, praying they’d put two and two together and flee while they still could. Things were about to get weird.

  I peeled off Richard’s black dress sock as gradually as possible to give all present one last warning before showtime. It felt like I was doing a striptease. Richard typically wore socks only in the dead of winter, but it was much cooler today than yesterday. Fort Worth’s weather was a meteorological yo-yo—one day it was seventy degrees, the next thirty-five. Every day I packed extra clothes in the morning like I was traveling abroad.

  Richard’s ankle was badly swollen. Nobody wanted to see it while scarfing down a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. I didn’t want to see it. It looked lifeless, like a bloated mannequin’s leg. I fought the urge to rip off my coat and lay it over his ankle in respect for the dead.

  I looked at Della one more time for an eleventh-hour reprieve from the governor, yet she’d turned to fill a drink order. She probably couldn’t bear to watch. Who wants drinks? I’ll fill ’em. I got it. Who needs something from the back? Let me do it! I was surprised she didn’t stoop down to look for more straws under the counter never to resurface.

  So I began massaging Richard’s ankle. Each time I rubbed, he bit his right hand due to the pain. “Do you want me to stop?” I asked hopefully.

  He merely shook his head while grimacing.

  The customers in line didn’t know what to make of this. It was like a carnival freak show had just pulled up. They couldn’t take their stunned, perplexed eyes off us. Some of them were whispering to each other. Perhaps they wondered when one of us would swallow a sword.

  I kept rubbing Richard’s swollen ankle, unsure if I was helping or hurting him. Each second that passed was more embarrassing than the last. I was standing in the middle of a mall massaging Richard’s swollen ankle in front of a shocked crowd. For the love of God, do they not have security cameras in this place? Does anything go here? We might as well clean out the cash drawer before we leave.

  Finally, Richard groaned, “Okay, stop. That’s enough.” My hands popped off his ankle like I’d touched a hot oven rack. I grabbed his sock from inside his shoe and slid it on as quickly as possible without hurting him, and then wiggled on his shoe as he bit his hand some more. I wanted to apologize to the folks waiting in line, but the damage was done. These images were permanently seared into their memories. It would’ve been more appropriate to hug them and say good luck.

  Richard returned his chair to its normal upright position, and we took our leave. Our work here was done. I doubted the manager of Chick-fil-A would be inviting us back anytime soon. In fact, I hoped Della pretended she didn’t know us to protect her job.

  Not long after the massage, Della did leave Chick-fil-A to work at a daycare facility just down the street from their house. She said it had nothing to do with our little stunt, simply a more convenient job. She could come home for lunch, check on Richard, etc. I was happy she could be closer to home, though I did worry about the kids she was watching. They couldn’t handle a repeat performance of what we did in the mall. They’d have nightmares for years. Della’s boss needed to bar the front door if she saw Richard and me coming.

  After a few weeks of torture, Richard went to a chiropractor who said his ankle was broken in two places. The doctor he’d seen after the accident needed to have his license revoked. I felt guilty for presuming Richard was merely having difficulty coping with the soreness of a sprained ankle. If my ankle was broken in two places, I would’ve griped and moaned all day while crying like a baby. In hindsight, he’d handled it admirably.

  For the next few months, Richard visited the chiropractor to have electrical muscle stimulation treatments done on his ankle. They attached electrodes to his ankle that were connected to a device with a timer that beeped when he was done, like a frozen dinner in the microwave. One day as he lay on the table for treatment, he said to me, grinning, “Next time you’ll believe me, won’t you?”

  I answered, “Next time we’ll get a second opinion. And a third.” Anything to prevent more public massages.

  R

  Leslie and I talked on the phone each night, while I continued to write her as many letters as possible. I knew the more I could write instead of speak, the better off I’d be. It was harder to find time to write—and things to mention—because we were talking on the phone every day. I had to dig deep to uncover something to write about other than last night’s sudden rain shower, but it helped me learn to express what was buried in my head.

  When we talked, I remembered a piece of advice Richard had given me. He and I were joking around one day after posting an assignment, and when we finished laughing, he grew more serious and said, “Just keep this in mind: Sarcasm’s like dynamite.”

  “Huh? Where’d that come from?”

  “It’s true. Especially on the phone, long distance. Be careful with that.” He shook his head as if recalling a bad experience, before adding, “Things get misunderstood real fast when you’re not in person. They j
ump to conclusions and hang up before you can fix it. Gets worse the longer you leave it.”

  I leaned forward, taking more mental notes. This was important. I asked, “Did this happen with you and Della?”

  “Not just Della,” he said, sighing. “Lots of folks. I’m a slow learner.”

  “What if I say I was just joking? You know, make sure she understands I’m kidding around.”

  Richard responded with something I thought about for years to come. He said, “Next time you have a big argument, go back to where it started. All the way to the beginning. Bet it was a sarcastic joke. They’re like little cracks in a dam.”

  It was a great insight to remember when talking to Leslie (or anyone). A seemingly innocent bit of sarcasm could easily lead to more biting sarcasm that opened the door to hurt feelings and resentment and picking at one another and insults and before long a confrontation and finally a shouting match. All from one sarcastic jab. That was a treacherous road to travel over the phone, and often how relationships ended. I decided any joke with Leslie that carried an ounce of derision was off-limits. It wasn’t worth the risk. It probably saved us countless fights, possibly even a breakup, and for that, I owed Richard big.

  Long-distance relationships were tricky. It was a marathon, not a sprint, requiring water stations and carbohydrates along the way to avoid giving up. Leslie and I had to make progress without seeing each other for long stretches. It was easy to feel disappointed and dispirited. We couldn’t simply hang out, so we had to make up for the absence. To do this, we tried to share daily life as much as possible through texts, calls, and letters. I told her the latest with the band and how Bryan was faring. I played her new songs I was working on, even softly strumming the guitar over the phone many nights until she fell asleep. She told me about the cases she’d worked on, the new additions her dad had completed on their house in Brighton, how Dill and Bear were getting along (they had a sibling rivalry for a while).