by Brit Bennett
He liked that she thought of him like that—honest, shrewd, unsentimental. He found himself spending more time around her, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He wasn’t used to having friends with wives but he understood that there were boundaries you ought to respect. And even though he knew he shouldn’t visit when Finch wasn’t home, he still swung by the house sometimes before his afternoon shift. He usually made up some excuse—he wanted to return a socket wrench Finch had lent him, he lost his playbook, he thought he’d left his water bottle on the coffee table. In reality, he just wanted to talk to Cherry, who always seemed interested in his life. She told him where he should look for a better-paying job, how he should consider going back to school, how he should stop stalking Nadia’s Facebook.
“That’s your first mistake,” she said. “You never go sniffing around an ex. Why would you want to see how happy she is without you?”
Cherry was right. She was right about many things, and he liked asking her for advice. He couldn’t ask his own mother, not anymore, not since the morning he’d told her about the pregnancy and she’d returned with cash. He didn’t blame her for helping him but he knew something had shifted between them in that moment—his mother had done something he’d thought her incapable of, and the boundaries of their relationship had suddenly moved, leaving him disoriented, like stepping into a room and feeling for where the walls had once been but instead only touching air.
“What’re you two hens jabbering about?” Finch said, when he came into the kitchen and caught them in mid-conversation. Cherry always said “Nothing” and went back to being her silent self. It amazed Luke, how quickly she could shift. Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around. Who was Nadia, then, around Shadi Waleed?
“I saw your video,” Cherry said one day when Luke came by to return a book he’d borrowed called Blu’s Hanging. Here, she’d said, handing it to him. Here’s your poor Hawaiians. He’d almost told her that he didn’t have to read about it to believe her but he read the book anyway because he could tell it mattered to her. He liked it enough, even though he’d read online that the treatment of Filipino characters might be a little racist. Was that true, he’d planned to ask her. Was it true that in Hawaii, Filipinos are treated like blacks?
“What video?” he said, half listening as he tried to find the spot on the shelf where the book had been.
“What do you mean?” she said. “What other video is there?”
“Oh,” he said. “That one.”
“Finch had some of the guys over,” she said. “They kept watching it again and again and again.”
He had a sudden, clear image of the Cobras hunched around Finch’s computer, replaying the video of his injury and laughing. Jesus Christ, look at Sheppard! One more time, okay, wait for it, wait for—oh shit! The bone and everything! He’d thought he was a Cobra but he wasn’t. He was just a gruesome joke.
“Can I see it?” Cherry asked.
“You already did,” he said. He felt strangely betrayed by her, as if she, of all people, should’ve known better than to watch the video.
“No,” she said. “Your leg.”
She’d spoken so casually, it took him a moment to even realize what she’d asked. “Why?” he said.
“Just want to,” she said. “I can’t even understand how you walk on that thing half normal, let alone play.”
She was curious, but not like he’d imagined the Cobras, searching for a laugh. She looked like a person climbing out of a wrecked car, eager to inspect the damage to convince herself it wasn’t worse than what she imagined. He sat on the La-Z-Boy near the bookshelf, quietly rolling the leg of his sweatpants up to his knee. His mother had cried when she’d seen him in the hospital bed, his shattered leg propped up in front of him, and not wanting to worry her, he had smiled and said, “It’s fine, it don’t even hurt.” His father had called later that afternoon from Atlanta—he was delivering a keynote address at a pastors’ conference that night but he’d sent a prayer cloth in his stead. When his mother had placed it on his busted leg, Luke hadn’t felt the healing power of God. He’d felt nothing, and maybe, that was the same thing.
He shivered as Cherry’s hand traced down his leg to the ugly brown scar stretching down to his ankle. She bent and kissed his scar, and he closed his eyes, believing, like a child, that her kiss might stop his hurting. How easily he had believed then, how simple it had seemed, a kiss from his mother and a body that always, somehow, healed.
—
THE NEXT EVENING, he hauled the trash out to the alley behind Fat Charlie’s, still thinking about Cherry’s kiss. He had left right after—her youngest daughter had appeared in the hallway, demanding juice, and Cherry had pushed herself to her feet, not looking at Luke. She was embarrassed, and why wouldn’t she be? She was spare with her affection, even to Finch, as if the two were in a competition fighting to be the one who seemed to care the least. But Luke was grateful for her kindness. He wanted to call her when he got off work. Maybe he could ask her to get a drink. Not a drink, maybe coffee. He didn’t even like coffee, but coffee seemed like the thing you invited a girl to do to show that you weren’t just trying to fuck her. He dragged a bulging garbage bag, lugging it into the green dumpster. The sun was setting over the pier, the sky blazing orange. Sometimes Oceanside could be beautiful, even from a dirty alley.
He was heading back inside when he saw the Cobras. Finch and Ritter and Gorman and five others, all coming down the alley.
“Yo assholes,” he said, “I can’t get all of you free beer, so don’t even ask.”
He knew something was wrong when no one laughed or insulted him back.
Years ago, Luke would’ve been fast enough to duck inside the restaurant. But before he could even turn, he caught Finch’s right hook. He blacked out before the Cobras started stomping on his leg.
SEVEN
In rehab, Luke learned to walk again.
Not all at once, but slowly. He spent his first two weeks pushing a walker down the four halls of his floor. He learned the halls intimately, like a policeman memorizing his beat: the mint green checkered linoleum, the nurses’ station, the corner where old women knitted and gossiped. He dragged himself down the halls, stunned each morning by how difficult a simple action could be, the placing of one foot in front of the other. He now had a titanium rod screwed in his leg, from his knee to his ankle, which would remain there for the rest of his life. He would set off plenty of metal detectors, the surgeon had told him, but someday, he’d be able to walk again. For now, he had to work on strengthening his ankle, bending his swollen knee, developing his quad and hamstring. He slid his foot forward, straining to place the heel down, then the toe, while his rehabilitation aide Carlos followed, just in case he fell. Carlos’s father was Colombian, his mother Nicaraguan, but everyone called him a Mexican.
“Always a Mexican,” he said. “They ask me, ‘Ay Carlos, why don’t you fix us up some tacos?’ I don’t know nothing about no fucking tacos. Go fix me some tacos, you like the goddamn things so much.”
It was true. When Luke had first checked in, a nurse told him that the aide assigned to him was Carlos, the Mexican guy.
“You’ll like him,” she said, “he’s real funny. Little guy but he’s strong. Those are always the strongest ones, the little guys.”
Carlos was barely five-five, broad-shouldered and stout. He used to be a personal trainer at a gym. Luke had always thought of trainers as yoked men with muscles bulging out of their tank tops, but Carlos looked more like the type you might trust if you were a fat housewife looking to lose a few pounds. He was tough but encouraging. He lectured Luke about taking his pills, all of them, even if he didn’t feel like it, the antibiotics to prevent infection, the aspirin to stop blood-clotting, the pain medicine. He helped Luke stretch on the table, massaging his leg first with aloe vera lotion. Luke was used to trainers rubbin
g down sore muscles, easing out cramps, or taping sprained ankles, but that was in the locker room. He felt awkward, splayed on a table in an exercise room, another man rubbing lotion onto his skin. Maybe Carlos was gay. Why else would a guy take a job where he had to lotion other guys? But Luke never said anything because Carlos’s massages felt good. The tissue damage went deep.
“Christ, those guys really hated your guts,” Carlos said. “They didn’t want you to ever walk again.”
Luke had never told his parents that the Cobras had jumped him. It’d be one thing if he had slept with Cherry—he would’ve accepted his punishment then like a man—but to be jumped for seeking her friendship seemed too shameful to admit. Besides, his parents would only tell him that they had been right about the team all along. So he’d told them that some guys had tried to mug him, and no, he hadn’t seen their faces.
On the overhead television, Carlos played fútbol matches while Luke did his daily exercises; panting, leaning against the wall, Luke followed the tiny ball across the ocean of grass. He’d always found soccer boring, but he grew to like the nonstop pace, the constant movement, the flashy celebrations. Maybe he would’ve been good at soccer. Maybe he could’ve found a sport to love that wouldn’t have destroyed his body.
“You used to be a big man,” Carlos said. “You ain’t anymore. Gotta accept that. It’s okay to not be a big man. It’s enough to be a good one.”
It didn’t matter who you’d been out in the world. In rehab, you were just like everyone else, struggling to gain control of your body. Luke was the youngest person in the center. Most of the patients were elderly; in wheelchairs, they scooted down the hall with their feet, like children who’d outgrown their strollers. Between therapy sessions, Luke liked to sit in the hallway and play cards with the old men. Stroke victims, most of them. His favorite was Bill, a retired jailer from Los Angeles.
“I grew up in Ladera Heights,” Bill told him. “Back when it used to be black. You can’t even go in there now. Got taken over by all those—” He dropped his voice, pointing at Carlos walking down the hall. Mexicans.
Bill had fought in the Korean War but he’d ended up at the rehab center after tripping on the sidewalk and breaking his hip. The man had survived war and prisoner riots, only to be brought down by upraised pavement. He wasn’t married. He had been—three times before—so he was the marrying type, just not the stay-married type. He’d always been a ladies’ man—Luke spotted him flirting with the nurses, holding their hands as they wheeled him down the hall, sweet-talking them for an extra cookie after dinner. Luke used to think he might be that type of man, the kind who never settled down, but what good did that do you when you were eighty and alone at a rehab center?
“You sweet on anyone?” Bill asked him once. “Big football guy. I know the girls got to be chasing you.”
Luke shrugged, reshuffling the deck of cards. He’d thought about calling Nadia once or twice but what would he say? That the only thing he did every day was learn to walk? How simple exercises, like knee lifts or leg curls, made him groan? How he spent hours in a wheelchair, playing poker with old men to pass the time? One evening, he was in the middle of dealing out another hand when the elevator doors opened and out stepped Aubrey Evans.
“Hi,” she said. “The Mothers asked me to drop this off.”
She held up a knitted blanket, a bundle of pink and green and silver that was startlingly bright against the white walls. He led Aubrey to his room. She didn’t say anything as he pushed his walker slowly down the hall, staggering with each step. He collapsed on his bed, embarrassed by how winded he was. Aubrey folded the blanket neatly and set it on the end of his bed. He’d never been alone with her before. He knew her from church, vaguely—she seemed nice and religious in a way that had always bored him. But people seemed to like her. His mother. Nadia, according to all the pictures he’d seen of them together on Facebook.
“I didn’t know you were still in town,” he said.
“I’m taking classes,” she said. “At Palomar. And working.”
“Where?”
“Donut Touch.” She frowned when he snorted. “What?”
“Nothin’,” he said. “It’s just a dumb name.”
She smiled. “If you really wanted a donut, you wouldn’t care what it’s called.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a donut. Even before he’d existed on plastic hospital food, he had converted back to a football diet, good, clean eating, grilled chicken and vegetables at every meal. A lot of good that’d done him. He pushed himself to his feet, holding on to the walker for balance.
“Do you still talk to Nadia Turner?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said.
“Is she still in Russia?”
“What?” Aubrey laughed, her nose scrunching up. “She was never in Russia.”
“Really?”
“England. France, for a little bit.” She paused. “Wanna see pictures?”
He did but he shook his head, staring at the floor. “Nah,” he said. “I just never knew anyone who went to Russia.”
“Me either,” Aubrey said. “But she goes everywhere. Anywhere she wants to be, she goes.”
He felt stupid for the time he’d spent imagining Nadia in Russia, wearing furry hats in front of colorful buildings shaped like tops. But if anyone he knew went, it would be her. How had he ever thought she would stay in town with him and raise their baby?
Aubrey dug in her purse for her keys. She was leaving and he felt a sudden need to stop her.
“We pray for you every Sunday,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“You could bring me a donut,” he said.
—
THE NEXT DAY, Aubrey brought him a red velvet donut moist and sweet enough, he could forgive the stupid name. Other things she later brought him: a new deck of playing cards, chewing gum, a book called Why Do Christians Suffer? that he didn’t read but kept on the nightstand so she’d see it when she visited, a daily planner where he could keep track of his progress, a bundle of get well cards from Upper Room, and a tank top that said Beast Mode that he wore during his exercises. She was pretty in a quiet way he grew to like. Nadia’s beauty bulldozed him but Aubrey’s prettiness was like a tea candle, a warm flicker. When she visited him after work, she looked cute in her uniform, a black polo shirt with a pink donut on the front. She fiddled with the matching visor as she stepped off the elevator, her curly ponytail bobbing. She smelled sweet, like frosting.
“I used to have one of those joints,” he said once, pointing at her purity ring.
“Really?”
“I was like thirteen. But my hand outgrew it, so my dad had to saw it off me.”
“You’re joking.”
He held up his hand. On his right ring finger, a light brown scar.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I ended up fucking a girl later that year. I would’ve done it anyway, the ring just would’ve made me feel bad.”
“It’s not about feeling bad,” she said. “At least not for me.”
“Then what is it? Like a married-to-Jesus thing?”
“It just reminds me.”
“Of what?”
“That I can be clean,” she said.
She was a good woman. The more time he spent around her, the more he realized how rarely he thought anybody else was actually good. Nice, maybe, but niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether. He was wary, at first, disarmed by Aubrey’s kindness. What could she want from him? Everyone wanted something, but what could she possibly hope to gain from a man whose whole world had constricted to four hallways? Sometimes they played cards in his room, dipping their hands into a paper bag filled with donut holes. Other times, she wheeled him outside and they sat, watching cars come and go in the parking lot. He n
ever asked her about Nadia although he wanted to—he would feel exposed even mentioning her again. Besides, like Cherry said, why would he want to keep hearing how happy Nadia was? How big and exciting and fulfilling a life she led. He wasn’t a big man anymore. He wouldn’t be famous, like he’d dreamed as a kid, teaching himself to sign his name in all curved letters so he would be prepared to autograph a football. He would live a small life, and instead of depressing him, the thought became comforting. For the first time, he no longer felt trapped. Instead, he felt safe.
He taught Aubrey to play poker, then blackjack. She picked up both games surprisingly quickly, and he told her that they should go to Vegas someday and play in a real casino. She laughed. She’d never been before.
“Why would I go to Vegas?” she said. “I don’t party. Or gamble.”
“Because it’s fun,” he said. “There’s food. And shows. You like plays, don’t you? We could go. When I get out.”
She smiled a little, plucking a card from the middle of her hand.
“Sure,” she said. “That sounds good.”
She was just being nice, but he still clung to her words, marking them in his planner that night.
—
“WHAT YOU GONNA DO when you get out of here?” Bill asked.
Luke had just graduated to crutches and he was hobbling around the hallway, giddy and awkward. He’d progressed faster than anyone had expected, Carlos told him. He’d given Luke a tiny pedometer to wear when he walked down the hall, and within a month, he had already logged 50,000 steps. Carlos printed him a certificate that said MVP: Most Valuable Pacer. Aubrey helped him hang it on his wall.
“I don’t know,” he said. Fat Charlie’s didn’t offer sick leave—they’d replaced him weeks ago. He needed to find a job or he would have to move back home with his parents, who had already spent their own money paying for his last month at the rehab center. He hobbled down the hallway, calculating how much it must have cost, and felt overwhelmed by the thought of it. Just another thing he owed them. He would have to find work soon, maybe another restaurant on the pier. What else did he know how to do?
