Never a Hero

by Marie Sexton

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  I looked down at the open beer in my hand, thinking about how Nick hadn’t hesitated to open it. Every other time somebody had handed me a beer, they’d done it with the top on. I could hold the bottle against my body with my left arm and open it with my right hand, but that always led to them either apologizing and offering to do it for me or turning away and pretending they didn’t notice my awkwardness. Not with Nick. There hadn’t even been the telltale split second of hesitation as he wondered how to handle the situation. Maybe he would have opened it for anybody. Maybe the fact that I had only one hand had nothing to do with it.

  Why did it matter so much, anyway?

  I took a drink of beer while Nick went about clearing off another chair to sit in. His arms flexed as he shifted boxes. Hints of tattoo ink peeked from beneath his sleeves. When he bent over, his T-shirt rode up a bit in the back. His pants weren’t low enough to make it embarrassing, but I could see the curve of his back, the way the soft flesh of his sides dipped toward his spine. I could imagine the way that bit of skin would feel under my hand.

  I took a gulp of beer and looked away from him as he turned to sit down, rather than be caught staring. The kitchen was small and packed with boxes. From where I sat, I could see into what would have been the dining room, except instead of a table and chairs, it held Regina’s baby grand piano. So many times I’d heard her playing it, and yet this was the first time I’d seen it. The lid was closed, and like everything else, it was covered with boxes.

  “Takes up a hell of a lot of room.”

  “She used to play every night. I can’t believe she left it.”

  “Huh.” But he clearly wasn’t interested in Regina or her piano. Instead he was staring at my left arm. “Amniotic band?” He asked the question without apology or embarrassment.

  I felt a blush begin to creep up my neck. I nodded. Yes, it had been an amniotic band that had robbed me of my arm when I was still in utero. It occurred in approximately one of every twelve hundred live births. Not so terribly rare, and yet sometimes I felt as if it made me a freak, like I was the only person walking around who wasn’t 100 percent complete. And yet I found Nick’s candor refreshing. A lifetime of living with such a simple disability, but I’d never had anybody but doctors address me about it with such openness. “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged. “Just a guess. My sister’s your opposite. Missing her right arm.” He touched his forearm. “About the same placement too.”

  I looked down at the pink tapered end of my missing arm. I put my hand over it, trying to hide it, and yet when I looked at Nick, it was obvious he wasn’t thinking about my missing arm at all. He was looking around at the piles of boxes stacked ominously around us.

  “God, moving sucks,” he sighed. “It’ll be months before I get all this shit unpacked.”

  “Where’d you move here from?”

  “Across town.” His gaze was sheepish. “Got busted by my landlord.”

  “Like, with drugs or something?”

  He gestured at the dogs now sprawled around us on the kitchen floor. “Dogs. I only had Bert when I signed the lease, but more kept turning up, needing homes.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a veterinarian. I have an office downtown.”

  That surprised me, although I couldn’t have said why. He was so comfortably good-looking. So casually sexy. Somehow I’d expected him to have a glamorously dangerous job. Like a race car driver, although there were no race car tracks in Tucker Springs. The idea of him as some kind of doctor, spending his days helping wounded animals, only added to his charm.

  Charm I was suddenly desperate to ignore.

  “So you’re alone?” I asked, looking around at the boxes. “I thought maybe the guy with the tattoos….”

  I let my words trail to a halt, wondering if the question was too personal, hoping I hadn’t offended him by assuming he was gay, but he smiled. “Seth? No.” He leaned a little closer. “I’m not seeing anyone at the moment.”

  My heart began to race. I’d only thought to make small talk, to get my mind off how attractive he was, and I’d managed to make things a hundred times worse. The implication of his words filled me with something that was part dread, part absolute joy. I didn’t trust myself to speak without my old stutter appearing. “Oh,” was all I managed to say.

  He leaned closer, and I felt compelled to meet his gaze. He had dark blue eyes, and they bored into me with a directness that was unnerving. “Are you single?”

  Yes! Yes, I’m single.

  Fast on the tail of that thought came the fact that he had no idea how fucked-up I was.

  “Uh….”

  But before I could formulate an answer, before I could compel my heavy tongue to speak, his mood changed. The intensity of his gaze wavered and his shoulders slumped. His playfulness gave way to something new.

  Regret?

  He sat back in his seat, looking down at his dogs. “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.”

  My heart was still pounding. My palm was sweaty, and I wiped it on my jeans. I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “I think I started it.”

  He laughed, but it wasn’t the way he’d laughed earlier. This laughter had a hard edge to it. “I can’t believe I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  He put his head in his hands and rubbed his face, suddenly looking weary. “It’s been a long day.”

  I had no idea what had just happened between us, but I knew when I’d overstayed my welcome. I stood up, and when he looked up at me, I had a feeling he was relieved.

  “It was nice meeting you,” I said. The words felt inadequate. Utterly mundane.

  “You didn’t even get a chance to finish your beer.”

  “Yeah, well.” I floundered for something to say. “Maybe another time.”

  It felt like a stupid thing to say, but he smiled at me anyway. “I’d like that.”

  I went alone back up the stairs to my porch and stood at the railing of my balcony, looking down at the yard. Bert and Betty were outside now, sniffing among fallen leaves and the dead husks of Regina’s flowers. The sky overhead was cloudless, the stars bright and clear. A cool breeze caressed my skin, and for once I didn’t care that my left arm was bare.

  It was a perfect fall evening, the kind of evening that made every kid think longingly of pumpkin patches and corn mazes and trick-or-treating. But I wasn’t thinking of those things. I was thinking of Nick’s parting words.

  I’d like that.

  Chapter Two

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed about Nick. I couldn’t remember the details when I woke, but I knew it had been about him, and I knew it had been erotic. I was left with a lingering sense of arousal that made me uneasy.

  I’d known since I was a teenager that I was attracted to men—I was well past being able to deny it—but somehow I’d never pictured myself in a homosexual relationship. Plenty of gay men married women and made lives for themselves. That was what I wanted, not because I thought homosexuality was a sin, but because I’d already disappointed my mother too many times. First I’d had the bad luck to be born flawed. Later the stutter had developed. Then there’d been high school.

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  It was all in the past anyway. If I settled down and had a family, maybe she’d be proud of me. Maybe having grandchildren would erase the grim scowl from her face.

  Of course, in order to marry a woman, I’d actually have to meet one. And date her. I’d have to fall in love.

  Hard enough to do without thoughts of Nick Reynolds clouding my brain. And why should I waste my time obsessing about him, anyway? When I’d come home from Nick’s apartment the night before, I’d felt almost giddy, but in the cool light of day, the events began to seem far less romantic and far more casual. What had really happened? Nothing. I’d sat in his kitchen with him. I’d drunk half a beer. We’d exchanged pleas
antries. Nothing more. Upon closer examination, I was sure he’d never actually been flirting with me. After all, why would he? Nick was gorgeous and confident and could probably have any man—or woman—he set his sights on. And what was I? A one-armed shut-in with borderline social anxiety.

  Why would he want me?

  By the time I heard him come home from work, I felt like I was back to normal. I found myself missing Regina, whom I’d never even talked to. She’d been the cornerstone of my fantasy. The linchpin in my illusion that my life could ever be normal.

  I missed hearing her play.

  I went on like that for the better part of a week, alternately obsessing about Nick and doing my best to pretend he didn’t exist. I’d see him come and go from work, although I stayed out of sight. Occasionally I saw him in the backyard with his dogs, but I was too scared to go down and talk to him. I wished desperately for him to knock on my door again, to offer me another beer, but he never did. I spent hours debating how I could approach him, planning exactly what I’d say, only to have my courage fail when I had the opportunity to follow through. Then, when the day had ended and the house was quiet both upstairs and down, I lay in bed scolding myself, telling myself I was just lonely, I needed a friend, but that finding a male lover was the last thing on my mind.

  Mostly, though, I went about my life as usual, which was to say, I stayed hidden in my home.

  When I finally spoke to him again, it was coincidence more than anything. I paid to have my groceries delivered to my front door each week. I requested they be left on my front porch. I paid online and left the driver’s tip under the mat. It was all arranged to allow me to avoid the grocery stores, the pointing children, the awkwardness of holding my wallet pinned to my body with my stump while rooting through it with my good hand, the embarrassment of the delivery man who didn’t know whether to hand me the groceries or whether to offer to bring them in.

  I was just stepping out onto my front porch to retrieve them when Nick arrived home from work. He could have waved, maybe yelled hello and gone on his way around the side of the house to his door, but instead he came up to the porch.

  Great. Now, instead of a delivery man, I had Nick to deal with.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, looking at the bags and boxes at my feet.

  “Groceries.” I gathered up most of the plastic bags by their handles and draped them over my left arm. My left elbow was intact, and I had nearly two inches of arm below that, so I could hang them from the bend of my stump.

  And that’s what it was—a stump. Some people preferred the term “residual limb,” but to me, that didn’t do it justice. It was like changing the diagnosis of “shell shock” to “post-traumatic stress disorder.” As if adding more syllables to it could alter the truth of the situation. As if having a longer phrase could make my arm longer too.

  I could feel Nick watching me as I looped the bag handles over the crook of my elbow, although it didn’t make me as uncomfortable as it usually did. He didn’t offer to help either. Most people turned away and pretended not to notice my predicament, or they fell all over themselves trying to do it for me, but Nick just stood there watching. So many times I’d been annoyed at people for helping when it wasn’t needed, but now I couldn’t help but wonder why he wasn’t.

  I picked up the last bag in my right hand, leaving only one box.

  “I’ll get that one,” he said.

  And in the blink of an eye, I did a one-eighty. I went from being annoyed because he wasn’t helping to being annoyed that he was. “You don’t have to do that.”

  He smiled at me, and I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew exactly what I was thinking. “I’m not being charitable. I’m being rude. This way I can walk into your house rather than waiting for you to invite me in.” He balanced the box on his left hand and opened the door for me with his right. “After you.”

  Whether my annoyance was rational or not, he’d managed to derail it. I couldn’t be mad, which left me with nothing but nervous butterflies in my stomach.

  He followed me in, and without being asked, he began taking groceries out of the bags, setting them on the counter for me to put away. “I haven’t seen you,” he said.

  I was glad I didn’t have to face him. Instead, I could concentrate on picking up cans of soup and putting them in the cupboard.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Working.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I work for Here and Now. They’re a marketing company. Mostly I design brochures and newsletters and put together postcard advertising campaigns.”

  “You work from home?”

  “Yes.”

  The groceries were all laid out on the counter now. He leaned back against my table to watch while I sorted through them and put them away.

  “You have your groceries delivered.”

  It wasn’t a question. “Yes.”

  “I notice an awful lot of catalogs in your mailbox.”

  I stopped, staring down at the boxed entrée in my hand. Our mailboxes were side by side on the front porch, and not deep enough to hide anything as big as a magazine. It was something anybody might have noticed, but it felt like an intrusion.

  “So?”

  “So I’m beginning to think you don’t get out much.”

  I slammed the cupboard door closed, harder than I’d intended, and turned to face him. I wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. The last thing I wanted was to start stuttering.

  He stared back at me, completely unfazed by my discomfort. He pointed at the box in my hand. “That stuff’s crap, you know. Too much sodium. Tons of glutamates. No nutritional value whatsoever.”

  Too fast. Talking to him made my head spin. He was always jumping too quickly from one thing to another, from intimate to casual in the blink of an eye. I looked down at the chicken potpie. “It’s kept me alive this long.”

  He laughed. “Still, I think we can do better. How about if I make you dinner instead?”

  He wanted to cook for me?

  I cleared my throat, tested the obedience of my tongue, and finally managed to say, “Sounds great.”

  I’D NEVER been in the basement apartment other than my first visit there with Nick, and even then, we’d gone in the back door, straight from the backyard into the kitchen. I hadn’t been able to see much of the living space. I’d always imagined white carpets, sleek black furniture, and warm afternoon light falling through the windows onto Regina’s piano.

  The reality was quite different. The floors were covered with a mottled brown berber, and the walls sported wood paneling straight out of the seventies. Nick’s furniture looked soft and cushy, but was all hidden beneath blankets.

  “The dogs aren’t supposed to get on the couches, but they do anyway,” he told me. “The minute I walk out the door.”

  Betty, Bert, and Bonny jumped exuberantly around his feet, all of them trying to nose their way to the front. I wandered through the living room into the dining room where I found Regina’s piano with two unpacked boxes and a pile of mail on top. I sat down on the bench and lifted the hinged overlay covering the keys. I ran my fingers over them, not playing any notes but feeling the smoothness of the keys. I imagined how it must feel to be able to tease art from such a mundane object.

  Nick went past me into the kitchen and came back out with a bottle of mineral water and an open beer. He placed the latter on the piano in front of me. I stared at it for a moment, seeing the brown glass and the condensation already forming on the outside. “You should use a coaster.”

  “Ha!” he laughed. “Wow. Do I look like the kind of guy who even owns coasters?”

  I felt myself blush. “I wouldn’t want her piano to get messed up.”

  He regarded me for a moment, looking puzzled. “She left it, you know,” he said at last. “It must not have meant that much to her.”

  I looked down at my lap, sudde
nly worried we weren’t talking about the piano anymore. That maybe he knew my secret, the way I’d tried so hard to convince myself that I could have a life with her. I felt him watching me. I could almost taste his curiosity.

  “Are you going to ask?” I asked.

  “Ask what?”

  “Why I live like a hermit?”

  He cocked his head at me, almost smiling. “Should I?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I took a drink of my beer, not because I wanted it but because I felt awkward and it gave me something to do.

  “Listen, do you mind if I shower before we eat? I’ve been working all day, and I feel kind of gross.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be out in a flash.” He set his mineral water down on the piano. Halfway out of the room, he stopped short and came back. He pulled an unopened envelope out from his stack of mail and placed it under the bottle of water in lieu of a coaster. He winked at me as he turned away. I was glad he was out of the room and couldn’t see me blush.

  The water began to run. The sound seemed unusually loud in the hushed apartment. I pictured him shedding his clothes, climbing into the shower, letting the hot water run down his chest—

  Stop.

  I took a huge swig of beer, draining at least half the bottle, although it made me cough. I put the remainder down on the envelope next to his water.

  Now what?

  The piano loomed in front of me, mute and morose. Did it miss Regina? Did it resent being reduced from an instrument of beauty to a glorified coffee table?

  I reached out, touching it gently, as if the keys might disintegrate beneath my fingers the way my dream of Regina had. I gently pushed a key. The sound was barely distinguishable above the sound of the running water. I played it again, louder this time. A single note. I didn’t know how to play a chord. I didn’t know how to add harmony to melody. I could only hit random keys, a mockery of real music. It made me inexplicably sad.