by Nic Joseph
Keith said it sounded like two explosions—one loud, the second deafening—and when the dust finally settled, he was on his back in a hospital bed, and his body—and his life—had changed forever.
If all else failed, I’d start to edit there, in room 213 at Presence Saint Joseph Hospital. I’d blur the face of the surgeon so it wouldn’t haunt me for months to come, or maybe I’d lift the corners of her mouth as she broke the news, making her say Keith’s chance of walking again was 30 percent, not three.
I could’ve taken thirty.
But three?
She could’ve just said zero.
With the whiskey glass in hand, I left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen to place it in the sink. Then I moved into the living room, making sure to leave the lights off so as not to wake Shelby, our three-year-old honey-blond boxer. She wasn’t actually sleeping—I knew it, and I’d bet my tips from the night that she knew I knew it. But this had become our nightly dance: me restlessly navigating through our dark apartment while Shelby pretended not to notice. Some nights, I sat on the couch and read or sketched; other times, like tonight, I’d take a shower and head back out the door. I tiptoed past her quilted doggy bed toward the bathroom, bending down as I passed to look at her face. In the thin trail of moonlight that slipped through the window, I could see her eyes were closed, just barely, as she lay there sprawled on her stomach.
“Yeah, right,” I muttered, loud enough for her to hear as I stood back up, because I am, for better or worse (but really just for worse), the kind of person who engages in passive-aggressive turf wars with her dog.
Getting a dog had seemed like a good idea before the accident. Keith and I had talked about kids and knew we’d be pretty good parents. But we also knew deep down that we’d be okay if it didn’t happen. We had nieces and nephews who adored us as Uncle Keith and Aunt Paula, the artists from Chicago. He had the addictive, rumbling laugh; I let them eat brownies for dinner sometimes. Keith was a swim coach by day at nearby Morton College, and he made amazing ceramics by night; I painted portraits for private collectors, a job that made us feel wealthy in good months and practically destitute in bad. We ordered out constantly and drank a bit too much wine on weekdays, but we worked. We didn’t know what children would do to that equation.
But a dog?
We could handle a dog.
It took me fewer than fifteen steps to cross the small room and make it to the bathroom. Moments later, I was in the shower, scrubbing the day away. I stayed in so long that when I stepped out, my skin was soft and wrinkled. With the palm of my hand, I cleared a circle in the steamy mirror and leaned close to it, inspecting the puffiness beneath my eyes—one blue and one brown—and my hairline, which seemed just a bit thinner and grayer than the day before. With two fingers from each hand, I pushed the skin beneath my jaw up and back, toward my ears. Not for the first time since I had driven away from the apartment at 115 West Oak, I thought about the woman with the heart-shaped face and chin-length blond bob who I’d seen in the second-floor window, peering down at Lotti.
She’d stood in the glow of apartment lights, the blinds pulled completely open. And the only word to describe her appearance was powerful. I could clearly see the outline of her body, svelte and toned, through the sheer nightdress she was wearing, and there didn’t seem to be an ounce of loose skin to be pulled or tugged anywhere. She looked like the kind of woman who dared to take pictures head-on, not turned strategically to one side; like she’d never owned a piece of shapewear but said things like “I should try it sometime!” while pinching the invisible fat above her hip bone.
It wasn’t just her appearance that struck me; it was her confidence. She looked powerful because of the way she peered out into the night, that smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. I knew I should look away from what was clearly a moment of exhibitionism meant for the man who’d just gotten out of my car, yet I’d remained frozen, arrested by the scene. She was either unconcerned or unaware of the fact that I was still parked across the street. The man had his back to me, and he had frozen too, his head angled up toward the window. I couldn’t see his face, but I could feel the tension in his body as he stood there motionless in the rain, his gaze on the woman.
Then, as if embarrassed, he had turned back briefly to look at my car before putting his head down and rushing toward the apartment.
I had sat there, overwhelmed by something I couldn’t quite define—embarrassment for watching them, jealousy, longing—and I had finally put the car in Drive, set the wipers in motion, and pulled away.
As I had headed home, I had imagined that the woman had texted “Lotti,” and he’d called a car to go see her. He’d been staying at a hotel, so maybe he was an old flame from college, in town for business. Or a traveler she’d met in a bar earlier that night.
Whatever their relationship, that interaction—the expression on her face, the rigidness of his body as he stared up at her in the rain—had told me everything I needed to know about them. They were normal, and sexy, and infatuated with each other.
They were Keith and me—before the medications, the fear, the whiskey, the guilt, the sleepless nights.
They were us, before.
• • •
As I stood naked in the bathroom, I tried to get the couple out of my mind. I did that often, making up stories about my passengers as I dropped them off. It seemed to make the monotony of pick-up, drop-off, pick-up, drop-off more bearable.
But there was something about this couple that I couldn’t shake. Maybe it was Lotti’s flirtatious smile before he got out of my car; maybe it was the expression on the woman’s face.
Maybe I was just tired.
I dropped my hands away my face and stepped out into the living room, a towel wrapped around my body.
When Keith and I had first moved in three years ago, we’d been concerned about the size of the small home and the fact that there was only one bathroom.
What happens when we have visitors?
Maybe it’s too much of an inconvenience.
Maybe we should hold out for a place with one and a half bathrooms.
Maybe Keith will get into a car accident exactly six days after our thirteenth wedding anniversary, and the pain medications will make him so sick that he’ll need a bathroom close by at all times.
We never imagined that last one.
Aside from the size, Keith and I had grown to love the place. The house had been an investment of a lifetime—small, simple, and worth every single penny of the savings we’d put into it. We’d both dreamed of owning our own home our entire lives, a fact we learned about each other very early on in our relationship.
“My parents are both social workers,” he’d told me on our second date as we ate dinner in a small restaurant in Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood. “They found their calling in each other and in missionary work, which means I lived in nine apartments on three continents by the time I went to college. Don’t get me wrong—my parents are the kindest people I’ve ever met and probably ever will meet, and I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything. I just think I’ve always craved a little stability in terms of the place I call home.”
I had nodded. We were in a U-shaped booth at the back of the restaurant. Throughout the course of the night, we’d each moved toward the center and were sitting side by side, our shoulders almost touching. I remember thinking that we’d gotten too close to each other, that it should be awkward by now, but it wasn’t. I’d started falling in love with him that night—with the soft smile that came across his face when he talked about his family, the broadness of his shoulders, his nerdy sense of humor, and the gentle, polite way he asked the waiter for more water.
“I know what you mean,” I’d said. “I can definitely relate to not feeling like you have a place to call home.”
“Oh yeah?” he’d asked. “What was it for you? Let m
e guess: Military parents? No, high-powered execs who moved around all the time? Or was it missionaries too?”
I had smiled softly as I thought about all the times I’d watched my parents scream at each other until they lost their voices. “Nothing so noble,” I had said, and when he raised an eyebrow inquisitively, I had shaken my head. “But that’s for date number three…if you’re that lucky.”
Now, almost fourteen years later, I stepped into the bedroom, and the sound of Keith’s breathing filled the air—he always snored when he drank too much before passing out. I opened the dresser next to the bed and quietly began to pull out clothes, sneaking a look back at him as I did. It was dark, but in the moonlight, I could make out the craggy lines of his face, his strong jaw, the curve of his lips. In my mind, I could see the graying hair around his temples and the laugh lines that had crept up in the last few years.
I know it’s selfish: my sadness, my exhaustion, my inability to accept it all. They’re thoughts I keep close, tears shed only in sudden fits in the back aisles of grocery stores or in the breakroom at work. Keith’s right there beside me all the time, yet he’s gone, so far gone, and I miss him. I can only admit that in tiny, shallow whispers to myself, because no good person could say something like that out loud. But it was the truth. I missed Keith, the carefree couple we once were, and the people we’d always planned to be.
Before, we would lie awake in bed for hours, talking about everything under the sun. That was one of my favorite parts about marriage—talking about mundane things like what kind of salad dressing we’d had for lunch or a friend’s annoying Facebook status, content in the knowledge that someone cared enough about me to spend so much time discussing nothing at all.
Once, while lazing around in bed, we got into a long, fairly academic discussion on the topic of booty calls.
“That’s not what it was!” I had exclaimed, whipping him with a pillow as he’d doubled over in laughter. “How dare you cheapen our relationship like that?”
“I’m not trying to cheapen it,” he had said, flinging the pillow across the room and then pulling me close, his nose nestled against the back of my neck. “How do you define a booty call?”
“I don’t, typically.”
“Okay, but if you had to, what would you say?” he had asked, and I could feel him smiling against my skin. “Is it the actual encounter itself, or is it the intent behind it? Because even though I knew we had something special from day one—”
“Yeah, yeah…”
“—I did call you late at night sometimes, and those calls often resulted in boo—”
“Ugh!” I had cried, yanking the other pillow from beneath his head and smacking him with it. “You’re disgusting,” I had said, but my giggles had made it clear that I didn’t find a single thing about my husband disgusting.
• • •
I think that was why I couldn’t get Lotti and the woman in the window out of my mind. I was jealous of their modern-day booty text. It was so incredibly silly, so pathetic, so disappointing, but that’s how I felt. I could see the stiff brushstrokes that would illustrate the tension in Lotti’s shoulders as he gazed up at the window, the whispery curves of the woman’s body as she pressed herself against the glass.
And I was jealous as hell.
I finished getting dressed and looked back at the bed. There was a part of me that wanted to crawl back in beside Keith and pull him on top of me so I could feel his weight crushing down on me. But I knew he wouldn’t wake up, or worse yet, he would and turn his back to me. So instead, I picked up my purse and left the bedroom.
I walked past Shelby, who was still sprawled on her stomach, unmoving. I grabbed my phone off the coffee table where I’d tossed it earlier. It was sitting on top of a pile of scratch-off lottery tickets I’d bought from a gas station on my way home. I scooped them up so I could throw them away later; if Keith found them in the trash, I’d hear about it for days.
“It’s a waste of money,” he’d said when he’d found one errant ticket a few weeks back. He had become better at moving around, the wheelchair sliding easily between his fingertips, and he’d rolled himself up to the coffee table. “Besides, you know how I feel about gambling.”
I did know how he felt about it. He made a point to remind anyone who’d listen that he’d struggled with a “little gambling thing” in his early twenties, and even casual use of the term bet made him wag his finger.
“I only buy them once in a while,” I’d said. “And it’s not like I’m trying to become a multimillionaire. People win the smaller amounts all the time. We just need—”
“A hundred and eighty thousand dollars?” he’d asked, and he had let out a sigh of frustration when I averted my eyes. “Come on, Paula. How many times do we have to go over this? We can’t afford it. You have to let it go.”
As I stood there weeks later and stared at the tickets, I wondered, not nearly for the first time, if Keith was right.
Maybe I should just let it all go.
I stuffed the tickets in my purse and looped the strap over my shoulder before walking toward the door.
But I stopped abruptly in the middle of the living room.
The only excuse for what I did next is that I was angry, sad, and feeling sorry for myself. And that misery does, indeed, love company.
For no good reason at all, I spun around and darted back across the room, just four quick, quiet steps in the direction of the bedroom where Keith was fast asleep.
Shelby reacted immediately.
In an instant, she was up on all fours, just as I knew she would be.
The pretense of sleep long gone, she panted loudly, her gray eyes cutting through the moonlit room. I stared back smugly, prouder of myself than any decent person should be, and turned to leave the apartment.
“See ya, sleepyhead,” I said as I turned and walked out the door.
Chapter 2
The rain had let up by the time I left the house, but the oppressive, muggy heat remained, wrapping itself around me as I walked the four blocks to Deluxe Diner, my part-time gig, oft-time home away from home. It wasn’t the first time I’d shown up at the dusty, vinyl-covered restaurant at two in the morning with IKEA-sized shopping bags beneath my eyes.
My boss, David, was standing behind the counter as I walked in, and he tossed his head back dramatically when he saw me. “It hasn’t even been twelve hours, Paula,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “You know we’ve got labor laws around here. Can’t have you burning customers with coffee or shaking bleach in the eggs instead of salt ’cause you’re half-asleep.”
He walked around the counter and stood in front of me. He was a tall teddy bear of a man with thinning but neatly combed hair that was so black, it had to have a name, like midnight ink or shimmering onyx. He stared at me, the concern evident on his face.
“Go back home and go to sleep.”
“I would if I could,” I said, sidestepping him and sitting down on a stool. “Don’t worry. I didn’t come here to try to convince you to let me work. I just came in for a cup of tea.”
David sighed and walked back around the counter, grabbing a mug from the rack above his head.
Deluxe Diner is a diner, yes, but it’s anything but deluxe. The black vinyl stools that surround the main counter had uniform rips down their centers, and the tables, though clean, had scratches in them from decades of use. Still, there was something about the fluorescent-lit forty-seat restaurant that made you want to come back, and it was the first place I’d gone to ask about a job after Keith’s accident.
“Do you have any restaurant experience at all?” David had asked me a year ago as I sat on the same stool and pleaded with him to hire me. “Anything?”
“Does the fact that most of the meals I’ve eaten in the last ten years have been prepared in restaurants count as experience?” I’d asked.
He had glared at me. “Not at all.”
“Well then, not really,” I’d said. “But come on, David. How many times am I here a week? Four? Five? Who else can recite all of the ingredients in the Deluxious omelet?”
He hadn’t said anything, but he had raised his eyebrows.
I had leaned forward across the counter. “Bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, chorizo, spinach, tomatoes, jalapeños, chives, and, of course, your Deluxious choice of cheese.”
He still hadn’t spoken, but one corner of his mouth had turned up slightly. I’d started working there three days later.
As he put the tea down in front of me, David frowned. “Tell me again why you continue to resist my insomnia home remedy of a slice of cheesecake and a bottle of wine?” he asked. “It puts me out in minutes. It’s a Smith family not-so-secret. Sugar and alcohol. The quickest way to nighttime bliss…”
I smiled. I liked alcohol, but it didn’t like me, and since Keith had started using it to fall asleep, I tried my best to stay away from it.
“I’ll stick with chamomile tea,” I said, lifting the mug. “Thanks a lot.”
He nodded and turned to walk back into the kitchen.
Besides a tall, thin man eating eggs sitting next to me at the counter, there were only two tables filled in the diner—a group of teenage girls giggling and sharing french fries, and an elderly woman sitting alone by the front door, reading a book. It was a quiet night for Deluxe; usually, there was a steady stream of customers throughout the day and night, since the restaurant sat at a busy intersection in Chicago’s Irving Park neighborhood.
I heard a noise and looked up as the reason I’d come in emerged from the back of the diner. My friend Vanessa Flowers stepped out, carrying a pitcher of water. She strode quickly toward the woman with the book but stopped in her tracks when she saw me.
