Broken Read online

  “I’m…I’m young?” I think I should be pissed off.

  “Really young.”

  I get the feeling he doesn’t just mean my age. “Well, you’re old!”

  He’s got his clothes on now, though nothing’s buttoned or zipped, and he’s got his tie clutched in one hand like it’s a snake he’s trying to choke. Joe runs a hand through his hair. I’ve never seen him look so rumpled.

  “No hard feelings?” He asks.

  “No. I guess not.”

  What else can I say? I can diet and exercise to shrink my ass and I can keep my legs closed, but I can’t make myself any older than I am.

  Joe leans over to kiss my forehead. “See you, Brandy.”

  He lets himself out of my bedroom, and a few moments later I hear the front door slam. I go to my window and watch him drive away. The next time I see him at the coffee shop, I make Cyndi wait on him and I pretend I don’t see him.

  Joe looked pensive. We ate and drank in mutual silence for a few minutes. I didn’t have anything to say about what he’d told me.

  “It was like getting a blow job from a puppy,” he said finally. “All slobber and gobbling and wriggling around.”

  I burst into laughter, though I felt bad for poor Brandy. “Oh, Joe.”

  He gave me a sly smile. “It’s true. She was…”

  “Young,” I finished for him. “She sounded young.”

  He toyed with his drink. “Yeah. She was.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go out with girls in college,” I ventured. “If it bothers you.”

  He looked up at me, one brow raised. “It doesn’t. At least, it didn’t.”

  It wasn’t quite warm enough to eat outside, but in the atrium, the sun beating down through the glass was brutal. Everything seemed moist and sticky, but also somehow…waiting. The plants seemed to know spring was coming. Maybe they waited for it the way children wait for Christmas. I took a long drink from my bottle of water, but sweat still pearled in my hairline and trickled down the knobs of my spine to tickle the crack in my buttocks.

  I don’t know what to think. I’m never really sure half the things Joe tells me are true. I certainly know my own imagination provides details I can’t know, things he can’t know, either. Our lunches are absolutely about fulfilling fantasies, and if Joe’s lying to me about the women he fucks, I’m not sure I want to know.

  There’s a lot about Joe I do know. He doesn’t like to share food or drink, or kiss on the mouth. He lost his virginity to his mother’s best friend. He has expensive taste. I know where he went to high school. We shield ourselves with stories of the past because revealing the present would be too intimate.

  I know everything and nothing about him all at the same time.

  “But it bothers you now?”

  I looked at him. He studied his hands. The cuffs of his shirt, a dark pink, like the petals of a Stargazer Lily, peeked out from the edges of his dark suit.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?

  “Hey, even ice cream tastes bad after a while if that’s all you eat.”

  “Oh, Joe.” For a couple hours, every month, he made it easy for me to be a woman who could laugh. “Don’t tell me you’re becoming more discriminating in your old age.”

  Joe tipped his face to the bright sunlight streaming through the windows. I admired his profile when he wasn’t looking at me. He’d had a haircut, and he looked shorn. His ears protruded endearingly. The nape of his neck looked vulnerable. I caught a glimpse of silver in the gold of his hair, which seemed darker in its shorter state.

  “D’you think I’m old?” He asked me.

  “If you are, I’m ancient.”

  He looked at me with one eye squinted shut against the brightness. “Oh, you’re a real grandma.”

  His story had revealed his age to me, something I hadn’t known before. One more piece of Joe for me to ponder over. I wished he’d been older, or younger, but we were almost exactly the same age.

  “When’s your birthday?” he asked suddenly.

  I didn’t want to tell him. It betrayed our unspoken agreement not to discuss the now, only the then. But a birthday was then, wasn’t it? Even if it was also now? I’d been born in the then, in the past we could talk about.

  “April nineteenth. I’ll be thirty-five, too.”

  Joe snorted. “So you are older than me.”

  I laughed at that, too. “Thanks.”

  “My birthday is April twenty-fourth.”

  We both stared. Heat rose in my cheeks. Along my throat. Even into my fingers, which busied themselves with crumpling my trash.

  “So…” I said slowly. “What do you suppose that means?”

  “It means,” Joe said, leaning infinitesimally closer, “you’re not young.”

  The clatter of heels on the slate floor sent us apart like rubber bands stretched to snapping. The couple rounding the corner was laughing and didn’t stop when they saw us, but the moment had passed.

  Joe got up and threw away his trash, then held out his hands for garbage. I let him take it. He put it in the can while I fussed with an imaginary problem in my purse.

  I heard more laughter, and when I looked up, he’d already gone.

  Chapter

  06

  Most people I knew relished the weekends and dreaded Monday’s return to work. I was just the opposite. My weekends were harder than anything I ever had to do during the week. On days when other people looked forward to sleeping in, I woke, bleary-eyed from regularly interrupted sleep to take care of Adam. I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without making arrangements for someone to be there to care for him—and, much like parents of young children who most often felt that the effort of arranging for childcare made the pleasure of going out to dinner and a movie not worth taking, I just grew accustomed to staying home. It wasn’t solely the inconvenience, it was the expense. With our combined salaries and the carefully invested money from the settlement granted by the ski boot company, our lives were much easier, financially, than many others of spinal cord injury patients. We were lucky. But even with all that, finding someone to stay with Adam on weekends was more effort and money than I generally cared to spend.

  Another Friday night and I was already yawning when Dennis rapped on the door. He waited until Adam called out for him to enter. That politeness, the willingness to grant Adam the courtesy of waiting until he was ready, was but one of the qualities that endeared Dennis to me.

  “I’m heading out, guys, but I’ll be around tomorrow when you’re ready to go, Sadie.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled at him. “You look very dapper.”

  He did, in a clean white shirt and dark trousers. His arm muscles bulged under the fabric. His shoes gleamed, and I knew he’d spit-polished them.

  “Hot date tonight?” Adam’s chair is chin-operated, and now he turned it to face Dennis.

  It was funny to see such a large man blushing. “Yeah. Sort of. You ready for bed?”

  “Sadie?”

  I’d been covering my yawn with the back of my hand, and I smiled a little guiltily. “I think we’re just going to watch a few movies, Dennis, so sure, if you could help me…”

  “Be happy to.” Dennis is always happy to help.

  Together we maneuvered Adam from his chair into bed and Dennis did a last check of all the vital and important facets of Adam’s existence. I appreciated his concern. I could do everything he’d just done, but by doing it for me, Dennis allowed me to be Adam’s wife, not his nurse. It was a small gesture, one I doubt anyone outside of the situation would have noticed.

  “You didn’t answer my question.” Adam reigned from his place in the special bed that adjusted to nearly any position and allowed his body to be moved easily to prevent sores. “Hot date, or not? Sort of isn’t an answer, man.”

  Dennis gave me a look, but I could only shrug and laugh. “You’d better tell him. He won’t let up until you do.”

  “Yeah, I have a hot date.” Dennis