I don’t know what to say. For Lily’s sake, Theo needs a steady job. I don’t know how we’d explain it to her if his life fell apart completely. She deserves a father who isn’t a loser. And as much as I wish I were, I’m not her father. And I never will be.
“Please, Noah,” he says again. “I see how much everyone respects you at the hospital—if you asked around, I’m sure there would be a job for me. I work hard, I learn quick… I wouldn’t embarrass you. I swear.”
“Shit,” I breathe.
I don’t want to help him. Every fiber of my being is crying out that this is a mistake. But what the hell am I supposed to do? This is Lily’s dad. Theo is a part of our lives, whether I like it or not. It’s better for everyone if we’re on good terms. Hell, maybe we could even be friends.
No. Probably not.
“All right,” I say slowly. “I’ll put in a good word for you, but only on three conditions.”
He nods. “I’m listening.”
“First…” I hold up a finger. “You quit disappointing Lily. If you say you’re showing up at three, you fucking show up at three. You got it?”
He nods. “Yeah. You’re right—I’ve been a shit. I won’t do that anymore.”
“Two…” I hold up a second finger. “I don’t want to hear you’re giving Bailey a hard time about the wedding.”
“I haven’t—”
“Please.” I shake my head. “I’m not a moron. I know what you’re doing. Stop. Now. Bailey and I are getting married, whether you like it or not.”
“Okay,” he mumbles. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just stop.”
“Right. Okay.”
“And finally,” I say. “You get a goddamn haircut. I’m not recommending you to anyone unless you clean yourself up.”
Theo opens his mouth as if to protest, but then he shuts it just as fast. “Okay, Walsh,” he says. “You got a deal.”
Chapter 19: Bailey
Tonight my father and Gwen have invited me, Noah, and Lily over for dinner.
It’s sometimes weird that Noah’s mother is married to my father. Technically, that makes us stepsiblings, although obviously, we’re not actually related. We were dating before our parents were. Still, if I wanted to confide in my father about Noah, I couldn’t do it, because he’s my father’s wife’s son. Not that I’d want to tell my father anything about the guy I’m living with. That’s not the kind of relationship me and my father have.
The best thing about our arrangement, however, is that I never have to visit the in-laws. Because my one future in-law lives with my father. And Noah’s mom Gwen won’t be a bad mother-in-law. She’s pretty nice and not too intrusive. But I’ve heard that once we have kids, that could all change. We’ll see.
Gwen has cooked spaghetti and meatballs that Lily is happily shoveling into her mouth. My daughter is the pickiest eater ever, but she likes Gwen’s cooking. Gwen could make just about anything, and Lily would gobble it up. She could serve Lily dirty shoes. Horse manure. Chicken nuggets that aren’t shaped like dinosaurs. Anything.
“I like your cooking, Grandma Gwen,” Lily announces as she takes a thoughtful bite of a meatball. “You make good meatballs.”
Gwen beams. “Why, thank you, Lily.”
Gwen lights up every time Lily calls her “grandma”—it’s sweet. Gwen has only one child, and up until last year, no prospects for grandkids in the near future. But it looks like that’s all changing now.
“It’s very good,” I chime in, because I want to suck up to Gwen too. But I don’t think I’d ever be able to call her “mom” or anything like that. I had one mother, and cancer took her from me.
Prior to dating Noah, I’d been downright emaciated because I was too depressed to eat much, and decent food wasn’t exactly in my budget. But in the last year, I’ve packed on ten pounds. It’s probably to my benefit, but it means I can’t shovel in a plate of guilt-free spaghetti anymore.
“How is work going?” Gwen asks Noah. “You look tired.”
He shoots his mother a look. “I’m fine.”
I suspect she’s responding to the fact that he was limping again when he walked into their apartment with me. He swore to me he made a doctor’s appointment but he won’t tell me when it is. So there’s a fifty-fifty chance he never actually made the appointment.
“Have you saved any lives lately?” Dad asks. He always says that to Noah. He thinks it’s clever.
Noah smiles thinly. “Just a few. The usual.”
And then my father says the other thing he always says when Noah visits: “Do you think you could take a look at my elbow? It’s been acting up.”
It’s not always his elbow. Sometimes it’s his knee. Sometimes it’s his hip. Sometimes he wants Noah to check his blood pressure. Usually Noah is a good sport about the whole thing—he thinks it’s funny, actually. But I can tell Noah isn’t in the mood tonight. This pain in his leg has been dragging down his mood—he used to like to go out more, but now he just wants to stay in most nights.
“Sure,” Noah says. “I’d be happy to take a look.”
“Also…” Gwen lowers her voice a few notches. “Have you given any more thought to… you know, what we talked about?”
Noah’s eyes widen. I have no idea what she’s referring to, but I have a feeling it’s something that shouldn’t have been brought up around the dinner table.
“No,” Noah says flatly. “I haven’t.”
“But, Noah—”
“No.”
And that’s all he’s willing to say on the matter.
I’m dying of curiosity for the rest of the evening. I hint at it a couple of times when nobody else seems to be listening, but he doesn’t take the bait. I have no clue what Gwen wanted him to do, but it’s clearly something unpleasant. It isn’t until we’re driving home later that evening and Lily is passed out in her booster seat in the back that I can’t wait anymore. I have to ask.
“What does your mom want you to do?”
Noah adjusts the volume on the music blasting through the 4Runner so that it’s several notches louder while we’re stopped at a light. “Nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“Believe me. It’s nothing. Nothing I’d ever do.”
Wow. If he’s trying to kill my curiosity, he’s not succeeding.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
Noah gives me a look. Finally, he lets out a long sigh. “She wants me to call my father.”
“Your father?”
“Apparently, he had a heart attack.”
“Oh.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not going to do it. No chance.”
“But…” I look at his profile in the dim light of the car. His jaw is rigid. “He’s your dad.”
“Just genetically.”
“He lived with you for ten years.”
“I’d have been better off if he didn’t!” A vein pulses in his temple. “The best thing he ever did was take off on us. He disappointed me again and again and again.” He glances down at his legs. “After my accident, he didn’t even bother to come see me. Didn’t even care.”
“Maybe he didn’t know about it.”
“If he cared, he would have known.” He hits the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “I mean, shit—I almost died. I was in the hospital for months. He didn’t come see me once. I didn’t even get a phone call. ‘Hey, Noah, glad you’re still alive.’ That would have been nice.”
I don’t know what to say to that. He’s got a good point.
“No, fuck him.” He grits his teeth. “He was never there when I needed him. And now he wants to see me? Fuck him.”
I glance back at Lily, making sure she’s asleep. Noah doesn’t swear much and is careful to never swear in front of Lily, but he’s really pissed off right now. I haven’t seen him this upset in a long time.
“What if he dies?” I say.
“It wouldn’t mean anything to me
.”
I wonder if he means that. Part of the reason he’s so furious at his dad was because he did mean so much to him when he was a kid. And that’s why he gets so angry at Theo, for treating Lily the way his father treated him.
I just worry that there will be a time when Noah will regret not going to see his father. And by then, it will be too late.
Chapter 20: Noah
It took me two weeks to get this appointment, but I’m keeping my promise to Bailey: I’m seeing the doctor for my goddamn aching right leg.
I fucking hate doctors’ offices.
It’s ironic, considering I am a doctor. But there’s a difference between enjoying the job I do and enjoying it when I’m sitting in the examining room, getting told bad news. I’ve gotten a lot of bad news from doctors. A lot.
I’m not sure I can imagine anything good the doctor is going to tell me today.
Dr. Gerstman has a weekly clinic where he sees amputees. I’ve been going to see him since I got out of the hospital. Sometimes if I need a quick adjustment, I can go straight to the prosthetist, but I’ve already had some adjustments without improvement in my pain, so I need Dr. Gerstman. If I need an entirely new socket, he’s got to make that call and write the prescription. If there’s something else going on, he’ll figure that out too.
I’m the youngest person in the waiting room. Most amputations are from complications of diabetes or vascular disease, which are more common in the elderly. There’s a guy in the corner of the room who’s maybe in his seventies with gray skin that I associate with smokers. He’s sitting in a wheelchair and he’s got a shrinker sock on what’s left of his right leg, which was amputated below the knee. In six months, that guy will be walking better than I do.
“Noah?”
I look up at the pretty young nurse calling out my name. I use the armrests of my seat to push myself into a standing position, then limp after her in the direction of the examining room. I stayed off my prosthetics all day yesterday, but when I put them on this morning, the pain was there like it never left me.
I sit down in one of the chairs in the examining room. They don’t have an examining table in the room. That would be a joke.
“Dr. Gerstman will be right with you,” the nurse tells me.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
She glances down at my legs. I don’t know if she’s seen my chart and knows the extent of my injury. If she doesn’t, I bet she’s curious. What is a guy in his thirties doing with two missing legs? I don’t blame her for wondering.
When I first heard the name Dr. Isaac Gerstman, I’d be picturing an old man with a white beard and wise eyes. But when I first met Dr. Gerstman, he was about the age I am now. Like me, I bet all his elderly female patients try to set him up with their daughters and granddaughters. What I like best about him is his sense of humor—on one occasion, he came into the examining room with a machine that made fart noises in his back pocket.
Dr. Gerstman doesn’t have the fart machine today, but he has a big grin on his face when he walks into the room. “Noah! My favorite patient! What’s going on?”
It’s hard not to return the smile even though I feel like shit. Fart noises would help right now.
“My right leg is killing me,” I admit. “It hurts every time I try to walk on it.”
“How about when you’re not walking on it?”
“Still sort of hurts, but not nearly as bad.”
“Does it feel like when you had the neuroma?”
I shake my head no. About a year after my amputation, when I was finally doing well at school and had some friends again, I developed a lot of pain in my right limb. It hurt all the time—it made it hard to even sleep. It turned out the severed nerve endings turned into this painful lump called a neuroma. I had to get the damn thing surgically removed. Not how I wanted to spend Christmas break during my second year of med school.
“So what do you think is going on, Dr. Walsh?” he asks. He says it a little bit teasing, because the guy has known me since I was a twenty-three-year-old med student, but I know he also respects my opinions. When I was debating about what specialty I wanted to do, he did his damnedest to talk me into his own field. But I would have missed the adrenaline rush.
“I think the socket isn’t fitting well,” I say. “I see a couple of red spots. I had the prosthetists make some adjustments, but it’s not enough. My right side is sensitive.”
Dr. Gerstman nods. “All right, Noah. Let’s have a look.”
He has me walk across the room a couple of times. Then I strip off both my legs and let him look at both the sockets and my stumps. They’re both just barely longer than my boxer shorts—they wanted to leave me with enough of my femurs to be able to fit prosthetics. But what I really wish is that I’d been able to keep at least one of my knees. I’d have a lot more stability if I had even one knee to work with.
It sucks, but what can you do?
“I agree with you, Noah,” Dr. Gerstman proclaims after he’s done palpating my legs. “I’m going to write a prescription for a new socket—I think this one has gotten too small. You gaining weight?”
I grin crookedly. “Well, I did get engaged. So maybe I’m letting myself go a little.”
“Engaged?” He takes a step back. “Well, that’s new! Mazel tov!”
“Thanks.”
He looks down at me thoughtfully. “So the next thing I’m going to tell you, you’re not going to like. But I’ve got to say it.”
“Okay…”
“I think you need to stay off your prosthetics for a couple of weeks.”
I suck in a breath. “Off… completely?”
He nods. “Yeah. I’m telling you to stick them in a closet for two weeks and pretend they don’t exist.”
I rub the ends of my legs. For several years after my amputations, I got phantom sensations in my legs. It felt like they were still there even though they weren’t. I could literally feel like I was moving my foot, even though I wasn’t (obviously). Sometimes I’d get cramps in my calf, even though I had no calves to speak of. But that eventually went away. I don’t remember what it feels like to move my feet. That sensation has vanished from my brain.
“I hate doing ER shifts in my chair,” I say. “Patients always look so shocked. And it’s a whole conversation.”
“You think I don’t know?” he snorts.
There was a bitter moment soon after my injury when I accused Dr. Gerstman of not knowing what I was going through. That’s when he lifted up his pants leg and showed me he knew better than I thought.
“I’ll do it,” I mutter. “It just sucks.”
“I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think it was important.”
I nod. “I know.”
Dr. Gerstman rests a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Good. And next time you come, bring your gorgeous fiancée. I want a crack at her.”
“Only if you bring the fart noise machine.”
He grins at me. “You want me to lend you one for the ER?”
“Maybe next time.”
I’m smiling when I leave his office, but the second I get to my car, my mood deflates. Two weeks without my prosthetics. Could be worse. Could be a lifetime. But it’s the last thing I want in the months leading the wedding.
Chapter 21: Bailey
It’s not that I don’t get frustrated by Theo being late picking up Lily all the time. I do. Of course I do. But part of the reason Noah gets so angry when Theo is late is he doesn’t expect it. If you just assume Theo’s going to be an hour late, it comes as no surprise when it happens. You can plan around it.
Today I take Lily straight to the playground by Theo’s apartment and let her play there while I mess around on my phone, waiting to hear back from Noah. He finally got in to see his doctor today, and I’m terrified to hear what he’s got to say. I mean, it’s not life or death. But it’s hard to see the man you love in pain every time he takes a step.
Finally, a text appears on the screen: Just got out
of appointment.
So????????
He says he thinks it’s the socket. Will get a new one.
Okay, that’s not so bad.
Also, he wants me to stay off my prosthetics for two weeks.
I wince. Noah must hate that. But I agree with the doctor. One of the first things he told me when we reconnected was that he couldn’t be on the prosthetics too much, but he’s on them all the time these days.
Could be worse, I write.
Yeah. I guess.
All right, he’s upset. But we’ll have the apartment to ourselves tonight, and I’ll work on making him feel better. I’m pretty good at that.
There are a good number of kids and parents at the playground today, so Lily is having a great time. She’s so social—I don’t know where it comes from. Certainly not me. I glance around, wondering if I should try to make conversation with another friendly-looking parent. There’s a woman in leggings and a hoodie sweatshirt who looks nice enough, although she’s got a baby carriage that seems to be occupying her attention. There’s another woman with a cute blond bob across the playground who seems friendly, although she’s talking on her phone.
And then I notice the guy.
He’s a father, I assume. Maybe in his early forties. He’s got this sexy, lanky look, and he’s rocking the shaved head look with a bit of a goatee, a white T-shirt, and blue jeans hanging low on his waist. He reminds me of Chris Daughtry. Noah is objectively really hot, but I always had a thing for more lean and lanky guys.
The guy turns his head and catches me looking at him. And then? He winks at me.
My face burns. I can’t believe I got caught out staring at some random dad at the playground. But at least he seems appreciative of my attention. That’s an ego boost.
And here comes the creepy part:
The guy walks right up to Lily. And then he starts talking to her. What the hell? Why is she talking to him? Didn’t she learn anything in that stranger danger unit they did last year? She’s supposed to be yelling “help” and “I don’t know you!” Instead, she reaches out and takes his hand. Seriously, Lily?
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