Furthermore his beautiful car accentuated his mystique. It was a Mercedes sedan, black, sleek, a suitable evolution it seemed to me from the red Trans Am of his college days. Except for the disability emblem on the license plate. Luke always drove us again, although now I did more than radio duty being hyper-vigilant as it were on the lookout for handicap parking. Most of the time there were ample spaces, but one day it so happened that the café where we had a lunch reservation had no special parking space free when we arrived. When I saw that one of the cars occupying one of the precious two spaces didn’t have a disability decal or tag I was indignant.
“Wait here,” I said angrily as I unbuckled my seatbelt. “I’ll get the manager.”
“It’s not a big deal, Rachel,” replied Luke. “I’ll get out and you can park the car.”
“No, Luke,” I charged. “It’s not fair. The manager just needs to call the police. That guy should be towed.”
“And we know it’s a man because?” laughed Luke.
“I’m serious,” I insisted. “People have to learn that they can’t do this.”
“Doing meter maid-duty now?”
“Luke—”
“Rachel,” he cut me off. “Give it a rest. You can park.”
Shutting off the engine, he opened his door. Then reaching behind him for the chair and the wheels, he quickly began to reassemble it on the pavement.
“Go on,” he continued matter-of-factly as he attached the second wheel. “Hop out and come around.”
By the time I was on the driver’s side, he had transferred into his chair.
“Get in,” Luke said.
“Luke, I…I don’t see why we can’t just—”
“We can organize a march—in my case sit-in—after we eat.”
The sarcasm stung.
“It is against the law,” I insisted defensively.
“We’re blocking traffic, Rachel,” he returned.
Reluctantly I got in the car. Luke closed the door and rolled himself back. I sat still staring at the hand controls, spellbound a little, afraid of them, as if they were too hot to touch, like they might be alive and capable of biting me. I was getting used to the wheelchair, to the way it was a part of him, and yet somehow the hand controls meant something else. He must lift his legs into the car one at a time, and his right foot could not press the accelerator or pump the brake. Now some self-important, inconsiderate idiot had made Luke’s life that much harder by taking the space that he was entitled to, sentenced to, because another idiot could not wait to send a message. I was on the verge of tears.
“You have to start it, Rachel,” advised Luke. “With the key.”
But I wanted to punish somebody for all of this, for the hand controls being necessary in the first place. I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“I-I don’t think,” I stammered. “I mean that I can—”
“What?” asked Luke.
“Your controls…I don’t—”
“Have to use them,” he finished for me. “It’s a regular car, Rachel. Like everybody else’s.”
For as long as I had known him, Luke had been this kind of go-with-the-flow guy. In college, one of his intramural teams could be behind in the third quarter, down in the eighth inning, yet by the end of the game come out on top, if not by score then by attitude. Like in the movie, Life of Brian, Luke looked on the bright side of life, hanging from a cross or confined to a wheelchair. Okay, maybe that was inspiring, but it could be infuriating too. Being unhappy, angry, frightened, these were real feelings too.
Eventually I parked the car and rejoined Luke out front, and we went inside the café. A waitress seated us by a front window, handed us menus, and took our drink orders. As usual, Luke suggested what I might like. From behind the menu that I held up in front of me I made little sounds to indicate that I was listening, but I was also sulking. So what if I was taking too long to get used to it? I was doing my best. It was a lot to get used to. Okay, yes, it had happened to him, but in a way it had happened to us too; and I wanted to fix it, and since I couldn’t, I wanted to fix things for him. Was that so wrong?
From the other side of the menu I heard Luke whimpering. I lowered the menu to see him holding his hands in front of him like he was pretending to be a dog begging.
“What are you doing?” I cried in a frantic whisper as other patrons turned to look at our table.
“Trying to get myself out of the dog house,” he continued to whimper plaintively, pawing at the air.
“Stop that!” I reached across the table and grabbed his hands pulling them down. “People will think you’re crazy!”
“Is it working?” asked Luke, holding tightly to my hand.
“People are looking at us,” I replied.
“Is it working?” he pressed, a sly grin filling his handsome face. “Can I come in?”
“You’re silly!”
“Maybe,” he replied. “If that’s what it takes.”
His gaze met mine intently. His lashes were still the envy of every woman who had ever purchased a tube of mascara, myself included. He began to softly caress the top of my hand with his thumb. I began to come apart like butter melting in a warm pan.
“Don’t you ever get angry, Luke?” I finally asked timidly.
He continued to stroke my hand.
“On average,” he said. “Ninety-two times a day.”
I was turning to liquid, right here in the café, next to the window, for all the world to see.
“But?” I followed because I knew there would be one.
“I move on,” he answered. “That’s all.”
“You always do.”
His smile changed, becoming ironic.
“Not always, Rachel,” he corrected me.
When was that I thought to myself. Then Christina flashed into my mind. Christina in billows of white as I always recalled her. Beautiful, sparkling, perfect. Beside him. Going with him, leaving me behind. Had she left him behind? Had she broken up his family when he needed them most? Forcing him back to Dallas to his mother and father?
Luke had said that he had returned for a career promotion, and I believed him, but I was also convinced that it must have something to do with his divorce too. We rarely talked about our marriages. It was perhaps too soon after our reunion to talk too much about our others, the better halves who had left us. Besides all I really wanted was for it to be just us anyway. So I kept quiet about my Christina thoughts.
“I learned my lesson,” Luke said with my hand still in his. “Sometimes the most righteous indignation can still get you the wrong results.”
In college one of his fraternity brothers had nicknamed him Cool-hand Luke, using the movie title to describe the balanced style that had never failed him.
When the waitress returned with our drinks, Luke let go of my hand and sat back. As she set the two ice-teas on the table, I clasped my hands together tightly under the table. What I was feeling right now, it wasn’t like that between Luke and me anymore. Thankfully by the time the waitress addressed me I was able to order the grilled chicken salad calmly. Luke ordered the same.
“Hold the bacon and the egg,” he added, passing his menu to the waitress.
“Got it,” she said.
I would have asked for the same thing, but it would have made me look like I was copying Luke so I said nothing. Was that what worked about us? That opposites attracted? He was so totally unflappable and I was so not. Leather and lace. But he hadn’t spent a lifetime having to prove something.
“I just want things to be easier for you, Luke,” I decided to explain myself once the waitress was gone. “That’s all. I didn’t mean to embarrass you or anything.”
“Don’t make me one of your causes, Rachel,” he replied. “It’s not a good look.”
“That’s not what I mean, Luke.”
“I know,” he smiled again, this time warmly. “I got this. And it’s nobody problem. You’ll just have to trust me this time.”
SEVEN
Despite his wheelchair, I was, like always, intimidated by Luke’s fitness. It was probably more out of necessity than vanity now, his upper body forced to compensate for his legs, but regardless I was determined not to look like his fat friend, and faithful asexual sidekick. I was working out that much harder in Jazzercise class since the reunion, and I had started hitting the weights too. I supposed Luke had always been good for my heart medically speaking; too bad he had been just as effective at breaking it into pieces.
Corrine noticed my maniac pace at the health club we belonged to and was very suspicious.
“Okay, so who is he?” she eventually demanded to know one night after Jazzercise class.
“Who is who?” I asked back, playing dumb.
“Mr. Inspiration.”
“What?” I played it off. “Just kicking it up a notch.”
“A notch that means you’re definitely planning on getting naked with somebody.”
An image of Luke filled my head and everywhere else.
“You have a dirty mind, Corrine” I laughed, heading towards the abs equipment.
Hopefully I could work off the feeling. There was nothing like total exhaustion to at least let me fall asleep. I had tried a little self-work before, but it had been more work than anything else. And now with Luke in real-time it was pretty much just tedious.
“Nothing dirty about it as long as you shower after,” Corrine quipped following me. “So tell me, sister dear,” she insisted hovering over me as I worked towards the set target of fifty fast reps. “Who put the pep in your step?”
“Pep?” I said catching my breath. “I’m pooped.”
“You’re horny,” replied Corrine.
And hopeless, I thought, and stupidly happy over it anyway.
“Always checking your cell, tied up on the weekends,” Corrine listed her evidence. “‘I gotta take this call, Corrine.’ A woman knows when her best friend is kicking her to the curb and it usually means a new man.”
Or an old one.
It was time to fess-up, or at least make real the man of my alcohol-infused stories of unrequited love. I would have to do it carefully, so that Corrine wouldn’t feel sorry for me for wanting a second chance at what had never been mine in the first place. Now she would know his name. She might even Google him. Then she really would feel sorry for me. Fairytale princesses were not forty-somethings who had to wax-off their facial hair.
I still hadn’t told Mommy about the reunion either, which felt very not right. Fortunately she had only asked me once if I had heard from Luke since running into Mrs. Sterling at the mall. Lying, I had told her no. “Humph,” she had said disdainfully. “Maybe you’ll get a Christmas card this year.”
Mommy had been skeptical of my friendship with Luke from the start. Yes, he had been nice to me and to her, but Luke wasn’t my type, she had never let me forget. Because in her eyes I wasn’t his. “Section-8 and high society don’t mix,” she had warned. “Betty Sterling won’t stand for it.”
When I was still in high school, a HUD program had helped Mommy buy us a nice two-bedroom house with a backyard big enough for her vegetable garden, yet that was how Mommy had always understood us, as Section-8 people, and the Sterlings, regardless of Mr. Sterling’s roots, were high society. If Mommy knew that it was Mrs. Sterling, herself, who had reconnected me to Luke, then she would conclude that Mrs. Sterling had only done so because her golden boy had lost some of his shine, that he had fallen down to me, not that I might have climbed up to him. For a supposedly classless society we certainly clung to our social order.
But hopefully it would be different with Corrine, and besides I was absolutely desperate to tell somebody. Things needed to be analyzed. I needed a safe place to let off some steam. It wasn’t easy to deliberately lie to your mother. The one enormous drawback of being in love with your best friend was that you couldn’t talk to him about it. Could Luke really my best friend again? Maybe I really did need a dose of Corrine’s blunt reality.
“Okay, okay,” I sighed, moving to the next piece of equipment. “Buy me a juice and I’ll tell you the latest.”
“A juice?” replied Corrine. “Girl, I bet this story deserves a margarita.”
That was probably true, but it was a weeknight so I told Corrine she’d just have to settle for a Snapple.
The music in the juice-bar was the same as what filled the rest of the health club, and it was designed to get the heart racing and the blood pumping. The subject of Luke made me excited enough and I wanted to be calm when I told Corrine about him, so we ended up sitting in her car.
“Wow, paralyzed,” said Corrine. “And his mom didn’t tell you?”
“He says she doesn’t like to talk about it,” I explained.
“He didn’t tell you either.”
“We didn’t talk very long that first time. We just set a time and place to meet.”
“He should have prepared you for it.”
“What was he supposed to say, Corrine? ‘By the way I was in a car wreck and I’m crippled.’?”
“After twenty years, you’d expect some highlights,” countered Corrine. “Of which that would be one, yeah. You sure he wasn’t testing you? You know, to see if you’d freak out or something.”
“Luke’s not like that. He doesn’t care what people think.”
“Twenty years, Rae, remember? Everybody changes.”
“Not Luke.”
“So y’all been going out ever since?” she asked, sipping her peach-mango flavored, diet Snapple.
“Yes. But not going out, not really. I mean, not like regular going out.”
“Going out is going out,” she frowned.
“We’re just hanging out,” I clarified. “The way we used to do, back in college.”
“When you were in love with him, you mean?”
“That was a long time ago, Corrine.”
“And according to you he hasn’t changed. So have you?”
“We were just friends back then,” I said and sipped my diet Ocean Spray Cranapple. “We still are.”
“Well at least he was your first,” she reminded me thoughtfully. “You have something to remember. It’s kind of romantic, I must admit.”
Except firsts didn’t matter so much to Luke. How stupid of me to still be hoping that he could be my last. But Corrine didn’t need to know that.
“Even if he can’t…” she continued. “You know…”
“Who says he can’t?” I asked sharply.
Corrine made another face.
“You mean the little blue pill?” she asked. “Oh well. I guess it’s getting to be about that time for a lot of us. And they can always do that artificial-insemination-in-vitro-fertilization thing if you wanted to have a baby.”
“Let’s change the subject,” I replied.
EIGHT
Sighing, I shifted restlessly in my seat on the pew, drawing a reproachful glance from Mommy who sat beside me. It was Sunday morning—well afternoon now, and Reverend Milton had launched into another one of his sermonettes before at long last getting to the benediction. He often did this, so we were all used to it, even the little children. It was never time to go until the last song had been sung.
I was dying to check my cell phone for messages. Through the soft leather of my clutch bag the hard plastic form of the flip-phone tempted me like Eden’s serpent. I had respectfully shut it off before service, but now I was obsessing, wondering whether or not there might be a message waiting to come to me with the phone’s ON button, a message from Luke.
Of course I didn’t really expect there to be one—not from him. We didn’t talk on Sundays. He didn’t call me. I didn’t call him either. My Sundays were spent with Mommy. They began in the morning when I drove over to Mommy’s house to pick her up and drive her to Sunday School. They lasted right through the morning worship service, and then a Sunday lunch at a restaurant usually of Mommy’s choosing. They finished up with us watching Sixty Minutes toget
her when a football game didn’t delay the broadcast.
Since Mommy had been a teenage mother, we were close enough in age to make us good companions, and the older I got this seemed to become increasingly true. Sometimes we seemed more like sisters than mother and daughter.
Luke must have his own family time too. Perhaps they even went to church sometimes. The older people got the more they recognized their own mortality. Maybe religion was still more social with the Sterlings than anything else, but it might have become a social relationship they took more seriously, since Luke had had to face his own mortality so much sooner than anyone could have expected.
I fingered the form of the cell phone. Luke could be thinking of me, perhaps even missing me a little. He liked my company, and regrettably or not, my world was beginning to revolve around him again. Mommy, Corrine, work, other friends, the health club, even T-T and Agatha, all kind of had to fit in around the time I was spending with him. Corrine had nailed it that night at the gym, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it to her. I wasn’t admitting it to anybody. And especially not to Mommy or Luke. Making a fool of myself was a private affair.
I had mastered my own art of diffident deportment. I would not forget that completely revealing myself to him had turned out badly. By coming on too strong I had seemed desperate. Asking for more than he could give me had driven him away. I had lost my best friend because I had been greedy. If Mommy was right about a man wanting to feel needed, then there must be a delicate balance between need and greed, and this time I was determined to strike that balance and hold fast. Okay, so I was always readily available, but it was up to him to make the request. Not crowding him must count for something.
Walk on Water Page 5
