His Best Man

by Elle Keaton

  The nurse, her name tag emblazoned with the name Melinda, shot Travis a quelling look. Travis didn’t look particularly quelled; he looked mad and scared with a hint of relief.

  “You were in an accident, Mr. Beton. In a few minutes the doctor will be here, and she will run you through a few tests. In the meantime I’ll get you a cup of ice.”

  The doctor came in a few minutes later, and by that time Rod was ready to go back to sleep. The doctor insisted on shining a light in his eyes, poking and prodding, asking him questions about breathing, pain level, etc. Rod tried to answer, but he was tired and wanted to escape back into the cocoon of sleep.

  “He just woke up, you think you can go a little easy on him?” There was a frown in Travis’s voice.

  Rod let his eyes shut all the way. Keeping them open any longer wasn’t an option.

  “Mr. Walker—” There was a hint of impatience to the doctor’s tone. Rod smirked. Travis hated being called Mr. Walker. “—this is my job. I’m very good at it. Please let me finish without interruption.”

  “Is Rod going to be okay?” There it was, the undertone of worry Rod had detected.

  “Now that he’s awake, all signs indicate he will recover fully. It’s not going to be easy; there will be mobility issues until the bone and tissue in his leg heal, and a punctured lung is something to be very careful with. It’s going to take time, and he is going to need help at home.”

  “When can he go home?”

  “That is up to Mr. Beton’s body. I’d like him to be a little more alert. Physical therapy will start tomorrow. The punctured lung is healing nicely, but it’s six to eight weeks before he’ll be safe to go for a jog. Of course his leg needs to heal as well, so his full recovery will be longer than that.”

  Rod let himself fall back into sleep. Travis would take care of everything.

  The next time Rod woke up, Travis was gone and Cameron was in his place.

  “Where’s Travis?” Rod asked, his voice hoarse.

  Cameron looked up from what he was doing on his phone, smiling at him. “Hey, there you are. The doc said you were only sleeping now, but still… How are you feeling? Travis went to take care of a few things. Should I get the nurse?”

  “Water sounds good.” He did a mental assessment of how he felt. Thirsty, stiff, achy; his left leg and arm seemed hot, but the rest of his body felt okay. “I guess I feel all right for being in an accident. What happened?”

  The smile slipped off his friend’s face. “You never told me you put me down as your emergency contact. Getting that phone call from the hospital…”

  Rod had written Cameron down on his employment paperwork because he was irritated with Travis and both his parents were too far away. Something he’d forgotten until this moment. “How’d they get your number?” As far as Rod knew, it was only on the paperwork he’d filled out for the bus company.

  “Responders found some stuff in your truck, I think, with the name of the place you work for. They’re the ones who called me. Jeez, Rod, everybody’s been scared.”

  “My truck?”

  “Bless that 1980s steel beast. It saved your life. Mangled you a bit, but saved your life. You’re gonna need a new truck. The guy that hit you was driving too fast pulling a trailer. He overcorrected and ended up pushing you into a wall of rock.”

  Rod contemplated that his truck was gone. He loved that truck. The first time he’d kissed a boy it had been in the cab of that truck. Of course Chad Owens never spoke to him again after that… so maybe the truck wasn’t full of such good memories.

  “So, how’d Travis find out?”

  “I called him. Well, I called his house in Walla Walla. Left a message with someone who I think is his mother. To be honest, I wasn’t sure she was going to tell him. But he showed up and has been here ever since.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Four days. The docs kept telling us you would wake up when you were ready, your brain was active… but dude… really? Don’t do that again.” Cam shook his head.

  “Travis has been here the whole time?” There was no way that was going over well with his family.

  “About that. Rod, the guy is a serious hot mess. I had no idea. You two need to figure your shit out. He keeps leaving to take calls from his family or something.”

  “And you wonder why I stayed in a coma for four days,” Rod muttered.

  “Don’t joke about that, asshole. What are you going to do about Travis?”

  “Go back to sleep?”

  Cam shot him a glare.

  “What am I supposed to do, Cam? He’s getting married, his mother hates me, his dad’s indifferent. I have no idea about his kid sister. I’m moving on. I should have years ago.”

  “I still think you should tell him how you feel.”

  “One, it’s too late: he’s getting married. Two, I did. Kind of. I left a note.” Thankfully Travis had never mentioned it, so Rod could pretend he’d never left it for him to find.

  The nurse bustled in just then, which Rod was thankful for. By the time she was done checking everything and asking personal questions, the moment for more conversation about Travis had passed. The man himself showed back up as the nurse was leaving, and Cameron left too, with the promise he’d be back to visit, but he had a bunch of shifts coming up.

  “Unless they let you out. Be sure to keep us updated.” With that, Cameron left Rod and Travis alone.

  Travis shoved his cell phone into his pocket, wearing a slightly hunted expression.

  “How’s Lisa?” Rod asked wearily. He didn’t dislike Lisa; they’d never spent enough time together for him to like or dislike her. She’d hung around with their crowd of friends, but Lisa was a 4-H horsey girl, always raising goats or rabbits or something, riding in the Fourth of July parade. Rod and Travis rode dirt bikes and went hiking when Travis wasn’t being fielded for some sports team. But she and Travis had been neighbors all their lives. And now, apparently, lovers.

  Travis was good at organized sports, always one of the best at hitting, catching fly balls, making three-pointers from the middle of the basketball court… but he didn’t enjoy it. Something his folks didn’t seem to understand. Rod also remembered Travis’s sister was just as good at all that, but they didn’t make nearly the big deal of her that they did Travis.

  “I don’t want to talk about Lisa right now. She’s fine.” He started to sit down on the chair next to Rod’s bed but changed his mind mid-sit, perching instead on the edge of the bed. “You scared the crap out of me. They had to use the Jaws of Life to extract you from your truck. If you’d been driving anything else, you’d be dead.” Travis’s voice sounded funny.

  Rod rolled his head on the pillow to look at his friend, cataloging his general appearance. Travis looked terrible. Rod probably looked terrible too, but he had an excuse. Travis normally looked like a rugged, slightly hipster mountain man. Scruffy, but with a spark of life that had proved impossible for Rod to deny. Today he was pale and careworn, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.

  Rod did his best to refocus, but he was sleepy again. Travis was still speaking. “You almost died. And if Cameron hadn’t figured out how to find me, I wouldn’t have known. I came as soon as I heard. Don’t ever do that to me again.” Rod shut his eyes as Travis talked, letting himself fantasize that Travis had come because he cared for Rod as more than just his best buddy.

  On Monday morning the physical therapist departed (no doubt fleeing Rod’s bad humor), declaring Rod would soon be able to go home—contingent upon the doctor signing off—as long as he continued his exercises, continued PT for time immemorial, and promised to put no weight on his left leg until they okayed it in triplicate: at least sixteen weeks. Rod wanted out of the hospital badly enough to promise, even though the exercises made his eyes tear up and he wanted to beg for a painkiller when they were finished.

  The cheery therapist reminded him daily he was lucky to have his leg with a good possibility of regaining full use of it
, as it had nearly been crushed in the accident. Rod knew that. But when she was manipulating it back and forth, sideways, seemingly backward—all for the sake of mobility—teaching him to use crutches properly and being all freaking happy, he didn’t feel grateful.

  He was in an especially foul humor because he’d had a vivid dream about Travis. It was more memory than dream; he must have fallen asleep thinking about their childhood or something. The dream/memory was from the summer when they were both fourteen. It had been especially hot that year. The haze of wheat dust hung heavily in the sky, creating intense sunsets but making farmers and townies alike worry about fire danger.

  The bike ride from Rod’s house to Travis’s was long, and it was already hot that morning. On a typical day, it would creep over a hundred degrees by three p.m. By the time Rod arrived at the Walker place out in the valley, it was in the eighties and he was drenched with sweat and covered by road dust from all the trucks passing him. One direction they were full of freshly harvested wheat heading for the closest silo, the other they were empty and ready for another load. Travis met him at the front of the house, not even waiting for Rod to prop his bike against the side.

  “Come on! I’m gonna show you something today!”

  Rod’s parents were out of town; where, he now couldn’t remember. He had refused to go. Summer was sacred time when he and Trav hung out as much as they could. Travis was supposed to be working for his dad. When Michael had realized that Rod had nowhere to be and was going to be underfoot regardless, he laughingly hired him to keep Travis out of trouble.

  “You know the routine, son: help Travis think before he acts. I’ll pay you ten bucks a day.”

  In the dream they went from standing by Rod’s bike to the cab of a pickup truck. In reality it had taken Travis a lot of fast-talking to get Rod to take the keys, but Rod had wanted to learn to drive, and his self-preservation instinct was drowned out by the intense desire to get behind the wheel of the big pickup truck.

  “Everybody needs to know how to drive, Rod! My dad said so.”

  “I don’t think he meant me.”

  “It’s totally legal, on a farm you don’t have to be sixteen to drive.”

  Rod was certain Travis was glossing over some important legal points, but sitting behind the wheel of the farm truck was intoxicating. It didn’t matter that it was a beat-up truck, over thirty years old and closing in on three hundred thousand miles; to Rod it was a glorious freedom. A sign of adulthood.

  To give Trav credit, both of them actually, ninety percent of the driving lesson went really well. Rod had practiced a little with his own dad in their boring sedan, but that was nothing like being behind the wheel of the farm truck, so much higher off the ground with a much more powerful engine.

  Michael was having them take water and lunch out to the various crews across the Walker spread. Rod was driving the truck upward along a track that zigzagged up one of the rolling hills of the Palouse where wheat was being harvested that day, when he glanced over at Travis for just a second.

  It was the longest second of his life. It had been fourteen years since that moment, and Rod could still recall with intense clarity Travis’s silhouette as he stared out the windshield, watching where Rod was driving. The track was narrow and steep, and thick dust billowed out behind them as Rod kept the truck slowly moving up the hillside. At the time it seemed like he could see into the future and know what Travis was going to look like as a grown man.

  “You’re riding the clutch. You gotta go faster or you’re gonna stall out,” Travis said matter-of-factly.

  The truck stalled. Rod panicked, forgetting to stomp on the brake, instead hitting the gas and flooding the engine. The odor of gasoline permeated the cab. It freaked him out, and all he could think was that, between the gasoline and the wheat dust, there was going to be a fire. Everyone worried about fire out there, and every year there were a few fires caused by carelessness or lightning.

  Rod was so scared he couldn’t even speak. On either side of the truck, the hillside fell down and away. They were perched at the top of a golden wave of wheat; all he could see was the undulating landscape in every direction, the horizon occasionally marred by farm buildings or irrigation turbines. There was nowhere to pull aside.

  “It’s okay, stomp on the emergency brake,” Travis instructed.

  Rod scrambled, looking for the brake. He had no idea where it was; in his parents’ cars it was always between the front seats.

  “It’s to your left, on the floor.” Travis’s voice was steady.

  The truck started moving backward, and Rod couldn’t get his hands off the steering wheel. Next thing he knew, Travis was climbing over him, jamming himself between Rod and the steering wheel, forcing him to let go. Travis was sitting in Rod’s lap with his ass pressing against Rod. Trav stomped on the foot brake before twisting around to the left and setting the emergency brake, which was conveniently located to the far left of Rod’s feet.

  By then, Rod already knew he didn’t like girls the way most of his other friends did. He didn’t dislike them, but he sure didn’t want to kiss any of them, and the porno stuff that Mitchell Atkins had brought and shared around under the bleachers was unsettling. To suddenly have an erection during a near-death experience was shocking and embarrassing. As quickly as he could, he scrambled out from under Travis’s ass.

  “Dad says to wait a few minutes for the carburetor to drain and then try restarting. So, hey, guess what?”

  Rod arranged himself on the other side of the truck’s bench seat, trying to hide his erection and not freak out about nearly running them off the road.

  “What?”

  “Me and Shauna White kissed last night.”

  Rod woke up.

  Really? That what his subconscious wanted to remind him of? Rod petulantly snatched the remote for the TV, turning the thing on even though all that was showing right now was reruns on ESPN and Mexican soap operas. He couldn’t stomach the news these days.

  He was watching a telenovela through half-open eyelids, pretending he was practicing his Spanish and very interested in the over-the-top dramatic plotline, not brooding about the dream he’d had, when a voice cut across his thoughts.

  “You’re awake!”

  Travis wore a huge grin as he practically bounced into Rod’s room, a lot like Tigger. Rod felt like Eeyore. Somebody certainly was in a good mood. Trav plopped himself down on the edge of Rod’s bed, causing it to dip. Since Rod first woke up in the hospital, Travis had made a habit of sitting next to him on the bed instead of using the chair.

  “There’s a perfectly good chair, you know.”

  “Aw, is somebody in a bad mood?” Travis teased.

  Rod felt himself crack a smile involuntarily. God fucking dammit, it was impossible for him to be out of sorts around Travis. He hated that he responded like that.

  “Guess what, though. I have grrrreaat news!” Maybe Tony the Tiger instead of Tigger.

  “What?” Rod knew he sounded surly and ungrateful. But dammit, he was emotionally compromised and messed up in the head, and he’d just had that dream, and he wanted to know why Travis was here. And when he was leaving. Rod knew he needed to prepare himself, but he wasn’t ready for that yet. He wanted something he couldn’t have, and it seemed that even being in a terrible car accident hadn’t knocked any sense into him.

  “I rented us a place.” Travis was grinning like a fool now. He had a great smile, not like Rod, who ended up looking like he needed to go to the bathroom when he smiled hard.

  “What the fuck?” Rod had a place, thank you very much. “I have a place.”

  “Yeah, but it’s upstairs in an old building, and I found a great house! It guess it’s a bungalow. It’s small but has two bedrooms. Cam helped me find it. And I tracked down your landlord and he’s being pretty cool; I’m paying rent through the end of April, but he’s letting you out of the lease.”

  Rod gaped at his friend. What the hell?

  Rod
did not know what to think. Did. Not. Know. What. To. Think. Travis watched him, clearly waiting for some sort of response.

  “Cam helped you?” Rod managed to squeak out.

  “Yeah. Some college guys are moving out today, and I’m moving your stuff over tomorrow. That way, when you get out, you’ll have a place.”

  “What?” Rod sputtered. “How is this happening? How can you be doing all of this? I can’t afford a house by myself. This is ridiculous.”

  Travis laughed. “It’s not ridiculous, it’s the only thing that makes any sense at all. You’re going to need help doing your exercises and getting back and forth to doctors’ appointments—hell, you’re going to need help getting your ass to the bathroom for a while. The physical therapist told me if you didn’t have someone to help at home, you’d need to go to an assisted care facility until you were mobile. Believe me, this is the best solution.”

  “But…” Rod couldn’t think of anything to say. Travis staying? He’d fantasized about him and Travis being together, Travis moving to Skagit—after that the details were foggy, because Travis moving to Skagit would never happen—but… “What about the farm?”

  Travis waved off his protest, but Rod caught that Travis didn’t exactly look him in the eye, instead focusing somewhere just above his shoulder. “I’ve got everything taken care of. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Rod narrowed his gaze at Travis, who was still inspecting the wall behind Rod. Memories surfaced of several situations over the years that Rod most certainly should have worried about when Travis had that look on his face.

  He didn’t get the chance to interrogate him, though; one of the day nurses poked her head through the open door.

  “Mr. Beton? Are you feeling up to several guests? There are some folks out here who are anxious to see you.”

  There was muffled whispering and shuffling coming from the hallway, followed by hushing and shushing noises. Rod couldn’t imagine who was out there. His few friends in Skagit had already been by to visit. He nodded his okay. The nurse motioned to someone, and a few seconds later a humongous balloon bouquet floated into the room. It took Rod a second to realize there were several pairs of short legs underneath the balloons, which were large enough to obscure whoever was holding them.