The Best Man

by Annabelle Costa

  Why did I let myself get into this situation? I knew this was going to be a tricky transfer. I should have just stayed in my chair. Rule number one of being a quad is that you don’t get out of your chair if you don’t have a way to get back in again. Otherwise, you’re fucked.

  So basically, I’m fucked.

  “Kirby!” I yell.

  Kirby comes out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her thin pajama pants. “What’s up?”

  I feel the heat rising in my cheeks. “Your cushions are too soft. I’m having trouble getting back in my chair.”

  “Oh?”

  She clearly doesn’t get it.

  “I was hoping maybe…” What do I want her to do? If I can’t get into the chair on my own, we don’t have a lot of options. “You could help me?”

  I hate that I just had to ask that. And I hate the way her blue eyes get wide and… well, horrified. I already know she’s not going to do it. Why did I even ask?

  “Um…” she mumbles. “The thing is, I’m not very strong. Like, I haven’t been to the gym in… years, probably. And you’re…” She looks me over, down the length of my legs. “I mean, I could try, but I’m just not sure if—”

  I’m really, really sorry I asked.

  “No, fuck it.” I cut her off before this can continue. “I’ll manage myself.”

  I haven’t made things better for myself, because now she’s standing there and watching me while I try to make this impossible transfer. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I guess I’ll have to call the paramedics again. A perfect ending to a lovely afternoon.

  But I guess the motivation helps me because I make one last ditch try, and manage to shift my butt into my chair, my arms shaking like crazy the whole time. I can’t believe I did it. It’s a February miracle. I feel like I’m going to faint from relief that I’m actually back in my goddamn wheelchair. I wipe sweat from my forehead.

  “Sorry,” Kirby says.

  I don’t look at her as I busy myself adjusting my tangled legs in the footrest. “Yeah, well, I was fine on my own, apparently.”

  “Anyway,” Kirby mumbles. She squeezes her hands together. “I had a really fun time watching the movie with you, John.”

  I look back up at her. I know I’ve been unfair to her. It’s not her fault that I couldn’t make the transfer and she was scared to help me. What if she tried to help me and dropped me? Then we’d really be fucked.

  “So did I, actually,” I say.

  “We’ll have to do it again,” Kirby says brightly.

  We will never, ever do this again in a million billion years.

  Chapter 9: Kirby

  “Where have you been all day?”

  My own best friend Amy has gotten really whiny lately. Apparently, she’s been texting me all day, but I never knew because I had my phone charging in the bedroom while John was over. A year ago, Amy wouldn’t have cared. But she’s taken my engagement so incredibly personally. She says that after I get married, she will be the last single girl in our circle of friends, and moreover, in the entire tristate area. It’s not true, but in Amy’s head, it’s really true.

  To be fair, Amy isn’t trying to meet anyone. She claims she is, but everything about her screams out, “I want to be single forever!” She has a great figure, but she wears blouses buttoned up to her neck, jeans that are several sizes too large for her, and chops off her straight brown hair in the least flattering style she can manage. Also, Amy has a uni-brow. When we first met years ago, the uni-brow was just barely visible, but now her eyebrows have come close to merging. I want to drag her along to my waxing place, but Amy and I don’t have the sort of friendship where I feel free to make commentary on her looks. So I just make frequent mentions to my own waxing appointments and offer to bring her along. She isn’t interested though.

  I called Amy as soon as I saw the slew of messages she left on my phone. She’s working on a doctorate in microbiology, and things are not going well with her project right now. According to her latest text, both her love life and her career are utter disasters.

  “I had company,” I tell her.

  “Is Ted in town?”

  “Not Ted,” I say, slightly offended that she thinks the only person I’d be spending time with would be either Ted or her. Although lately, it’s true. As I’ve gotten older, I socialize less and less. “I actually had his best man over. We watched a movie.”

  Well, two movies.

  “Best man?” Amy asks. I can almost hear her making a face on the other line. “Why are you hanging out with Ted’s best man?”

  “He’s nice,” I say. Well, sometimes he’s nice. “He lives in Jersey City. His name is John.”

  And that’s when it occurs to me. Amy is single. John is single. They’re both great people. Maybe there could be something to that idea.

  “Also,” I add, “he’s available.”

  Amy is quiet for a minute. “Oh?”

  “Are you interested?” I ask her.

  “Is he cute?” Amy asks. “I mean, he doesn’t have to be gorgeous, but is he at least passably cute? Actually, he doesn’t even have to be that. Is he, like, not horribly ugly? No facial deformities? At least, no gross facial deformities?”

  My best friend’s standards are just getting higher and higher.

  “He’s actually pretty cute,” I say.

  “Oh,” Amy says. I’m not sure if she sounds disappointed or not. She’s ranted to me before about the problems with cute guys. Ugly guys are preferable, she concluded. The fatter the better, as long as they can still squeeze through the door.

  “There is one thing though,” I add. “He’s sort of… um… disabled.”

  Amy is quiet for a minute. “Mentally or physically?”

  Well, at least she didn’t shut me down immediately.

  “Physically.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘sort of’ disabled?”

  By “sort of,” I meant “very.”

  “He uses a wheelchair,” I explain.

  “Oh,” Amy breathes. “Geez. A wheelchair?”

  “But he’s super nice,” I say quickly. Well, not really. “And really cute. Plus he’s half-Asian… didn’t you say you were into that?”

  “I guess,” Amy murmurs. She sighs. “Would it make me a horrible person if I said I wasn’t really interested?”

  “No,” I admit grudgingly. “It wouldn’t.”

  “Sorry,” Amy says. “I know you’re always trying to set me up and it never works out. You should just, like, give up. I’m a hopeless cause. I’ll be single forever.”

  “Oh, quit it,” I say.

  I know Amy wants sympathy, but really, John is the one I feel sad for. I mean, Amy is the least picky girl in the world—her major stipulation is that the guy shouldn’t have any gross deformities—and she wasn’t even willing to give him a chance. And that’s without even knowing his upper body limitations. If she saw the way he fed himself, she probably wouldn’t have even hesitated.

  Chapter 10: John

  Note to self: Never date a woman you work with.

  It’s good advice—wish I had taken it years ago. Instead, I’m two minutes away from a meeting with Rebecca Hanson, the girl I dated for nearly two years. She works at the same company as I do—thankfully, she’s upstairs doing PR, so I rarely see her aside from occasional meetings and awkward elevator encounters.

  Becky was the first and only real relationship I’ve had since my injury. I met her at a meeting when I was about two and a half years post-injury. At that point, I was glad that I was able to finally live independently again and that I had a job that paid the bills rather than relying on disability benefits, but working at an office made me realize how different things were now that I was disabled. Before I’d gone back to get my Master’s, I’d worked in a similar office, and I had lots of friends.

  Now I wasn’t John anymore—I was The Guy in the Wheelchair. Most people avoided eye contact with me. Every conversation felt forced. I didn’
t understand why everyone was so goddamn awkward around me—my brain was completely normal, just my body was messed up.

  Things were even worse on the dating front. I hadn’t been dating anyone when I got injured, and I hadn’t dated anyone since. Not even a single date. A few months ago, I’d joined one of those dating sites and been honest about my disability and… not a single response. I felt like a fucking loser. I knew there were quads out there who dated and even got married, but it just didn’t seem possible. Not with the way women looked at me.

  Becky was working on PR for a project I was involved with, and I first saw her walk into the meeting carrying three poster-boards filled with terrible ideas. Her ideas were terrible, but I liked Becky right away. She was really curvy in a way that I know a lot of other guys would have called fat, but I found really sexy. Huge tits. Cute, round face framed by short, blond hair. It was hard to have to point out the terrible-ness of her ideas. I was tempted to let it go, and let the entire project fail just because I thought she was hot.

  But I didn’t do that. I shot down her ideas. And because it’s my MO, I wasn’t exactly nice about it.

  When the meeting was over, Becky lagged behind. She sank into one of the conference room’s leather chairs that I’ve never gotten to enjoy, and sighed miserably, “I don’t know how to fix this, John.”

  And because I was already half in love with her, I helped her. What else could I do? But as we talked, I noticed there wasn’t that awkwardness that I always felt with everyone else. She talked to me like I was anyone else—just a regular guy.

  We spent another hour in that conference room, until it hit five o’clock. “Do you want to continue this over drinks down the block?” Becky asked me.

  “Uh, sure,” I said.

  Of course, the whole thing drove me nuts. If it were Before, I would have assumed that this was a situation that could lead to a hook up. I mean, the girl invited me out for a drink. But now… fuck if I knew. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the building. I wanted it to be more. Obviously. But I wasn’t an idiot. The last thing I wanted to be was The Guy in the Wheelchair Who Got the Wrong Idea.

  So I assumed it was all platonic. Until we both had a few drinks in us, and Becky got very touchy-feely. I still wouldn’t make a move though. Becky had to do it first.

  Your first relationship after a spinal cord injury is like your first relationship. Before, I’d learned that even though I wasn’t perfect, I didn’t have anything to be self-conscious about. Now—not so much. Fucking everything made me self-conscious.

  For example, taking my shirt off for the first time in front of Becky scared the shit out of me. When I was a teenager with my first girlfriend, I was embarrassed about her seeing my skinny-ass chest, but in retrospect, that was nothing to be ashamed of. I looked fine then. Since my injury though, I had lost almost all the muscles in my chest. Over the last two years, I’d developed the infamous “quad pouch,” which is essentially a beer gut from the muscles of my abdomen being too weak to hold in my abdominal contents. I couldn’t exercise and get rid of it, because those muscles didn’t work anymore—they were gone. So I had my skinny arms and shoulders and then a big belly jutting out. I looked like a drunk. The first time I took my shirt off, I felt compelled to say, “Sorry.” Becky was understanding though.

  And the fact that I have a suprapubic catheter coming out of my belly—that’s something that’s fun to share with a woman you’d like to sleep with. Most men don’t have a tube of piss sticking out of their pelvis. Becky took it like a champ, but I could see the look on her face the first time she saw it.

  With time, I started feeling less self-conscious about those things. Becky knew the worst of it and she had accepted it all. There’s a lot of comfort in being with someone who gets it. If I were on a first date and I had a muscle spasm in my leg that wouldn’t calm down, it would be a big deal and I’d be apologizing and explaining like a crazy person. But with Becky, she’d seen it before.

  We had a good time together. Okay, we fought sometimes. We didn’t have that much in common aside from working at the same company. But I loved her. I really, truly did.

  I started thinking about a future with Becky. I was twenty-nine and she was thirty-one. I was thinking about asking her to marry me, but I was trying to get a feel on whether that was something she wanted. It ended up backfiring, because the more she thought about the future, the less she saw me in it.

  “I still love you, John,” she told me when she was breaking up with me. “I just don’t see us together in the long term.”

  It’s because of the wheelchair, isn’t it? I wanted to scream at her. But I didn’t. I took it like a man.

  Okay, fine. I didn’t take it like a man. I begged her not to leave me. I bargained with her, telling her I’d do anything to stay with her. It didn’t work though. The only thing she wanted was Not Me.

  They say that living well is the best revenge. I don’t want to get revenge on Becky—she didn’t want me, but she wasn’t a bitch about it. But at the same time, I do want to get revenge on Becky. I want to show her that she fucked up by dumping me. That it was the biggest mistake she’d ever made.

  Either way, I’m not winning in that respect. Becky and I broke up over two years ago, and I haven’t had a serious relationship since then. Whereas she’s now married. She’s fucking married.

  And today she comes into the meeting visibly pregnant. I almost throw up.

  “Becky!” my boss Delilah cries out. “Congratulations! I had no idea! When is the baby due?”

  Am I an asshole for wishing she’d respond she wasn’t really pregnant and had just gotten fat? Fine then. I’m an asshole.

  Anyway, it turns out she really is pregnant. And she’s due in June. It’s a girl! So exciting. We’ll have to throw her a shower at our next meeting. So fucking exciting.

  Nobody makes eye contact with me while they’re fussing over Becky. It’s no secret that the two of us used to date. But at least nobody knows I wanted to get married.

  “Hi, John,” Becky says quietly as she slips into a seat not too close to mine.

  “Hi,” I say. I swallow a big lump in my throat and force myself to say, “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” she says stiffly. “Um. How are you doing?”

  How the hell am I supposed to answer that? I’m exactly the same as I was when she broke up with me.

  “Fine,” I mumble.

  I can’t believe it’s only ten in the morning. Christ, I need a drink.

  Chapter 11: Kirby

  One of the hardest things about working in a bakery is how early I need to get up. I never was a fan of waking up at the crack of dawn, but that’s what you need to do in order to have fresh baked goods for the morning customers. But on weekdays, we close at three o’clock in the afternoon, which means I get to go home and take a nap. So that’s how I manage to make it work so that I don’t have to go to bed at eight o’clock every night like an old person.

  Still, it’s five in the morning and while I roll out dough, I’m in a bit of a fog. My aunt Minnie is mixing muffin batter next to me and singing to herself. I don’t understand how Minnie can be so bright and peppy this early in the morning. If I didn’t love her, I might hate her right now.

  “Just a small town girl,” Minnie sings, “living in a lonely world…”

  Minnie loves Journey. But it’s too early for Journey. She needs to sing some classical music. Right in the middle of Minnie crooning not to stop believing, I yawn dramatically. It’s one of those yawns where my whole body gets involved. You know what I mean.

  Minnie laughs at me. She’s got flour in her hair so that you can’t tell what’s gray and what’s flour. “Late night last night?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Was just hanging out watching movies yesterday.”

  “Ted isn’t in town, is he?”

  Minnie always pulls a face when she brings up Ted. She isn’t the biggest Ted fan in the world. It’s not that she dislik
es Ted per se, but she doesn’t approve of the fact that we got engaged after only a year of a long distance relationship. She thinks we’re getting married just because both of us feel pressured to get married to someone. You hardly even know him!

  It’s hard not having Minnie’s complete support on this. My mom, Minnie’s sister, died of pancreatic cancer during my last year of college. I was close with my mother and it was really hard on me when she died—I blew off all my exams and thought I might not graduate. But when I was at my lowest point, Minnie brought me home with her, and for a week, all we did was bake.

  At first, it was just Minnie baking. Cakes, cupcakes, scones, muffins, cookies. But eventually, I was drawn in by the amazing smells and I started helping her. When I was whipping up the batter for a batch of cupcakes, I wasn’t thinking about my mother. It was the only time since her death that I wasn’t overcome with sadness.

  That was when I knew that baking was what I wanted to do with my life.

  Minnie has two sons but no daughters, so I’ve become, in many ways, her surrogate daughter. But our relationship is more nuanced, in that I feel comfortable telling her things I never could have told my mother because… well, she was my mother. For example, I can talk to Minnie about sex. Not that Ted and I can have much sex when most of our interactions are through FaceTime.

  Minnie knows everything about me and Ted. She was skeptical about the long distance thing from the start, but figured it was just a casual relationship. But since Ted and I got engaged, her disapproval has raised several notches. She hasn’t outright told me not to marry him, but I know what she’s thinking.

  “No, Ted’s not in town,” I say. “I was hanging out with his best man.”

  “Guy or girl?”

  “Guy. Obviously. He’s the best man.”

  Minnie’s eyes widen as she starts whipping the batter with more vigor. “Oh…”

  “It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “He’s… I mean, he’s a total jerk. I’m just trying to be friendly for Ted’s sake.”