She stares at Michael across the room and whispers, “If you are in a hostage situation, blink once, sir.”
I spin my lollipop in my mouth. It makes me think of Mary again, and how I wish we were warm and quiet in bed. Makes me wish Michael would just vanish forever.
“I’m fine. He’s my brother.”
“Sir. This is a safe space. I have training.” She taps her name tag, drawing special attention to the little part that says MANAGER.
“Seriously. Thank you, but we’re good. I need ten thousand, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
Which is when she nods, and touches her crunchy curls, and says, “Families, eh?”
No. Shit.
Marge obliges, but is sure to discreetly pass me her business card, “Should anything be amiss.” And then she hands me ten grand in a white envelope, and we’re on our way.
Out on the street, I give Michael his cash. He doesn’t say thanks or fuck you or sorry I ruined your day. He just strolls off down Damen Street like he won the goddamned lottery. Annie trots after him, trying to catch his swinging hand with hers. After three tries, he finally notices what she’s doing and lets her hold his hand. But he doesn’t squeeze it, doesn’t pick her up and snuggle her close. Instead, he grabs his phone with the other hand and they disappear around the corner.
With a lump in my throat and anger in my gut, I return to my building, cracking my knuckles the whole way. I’m not a guy who feels a lot of hate, but goddamn it, do I hate him. And I’m stuck with him, by DNA and blood, and bound to him by Annie most of all. You can’t tell a guy to fuck off when you’re the only adult for a thousand miles that loves his kid. At least I can’t. I’ve tried.
Rather than taking the elevator, because I just can’t fucking stand the idea of being in there without her, not so soon after yesterday and the disaster of this morning, I bound up the steps two at a time. I go straight to my bedroom, but before I even grab my training shoes, I take one long second to press my face to the place where her head was on the pillow. I haven’t heard a word from her, and I feel fucking awful.
But I get to see her at work. So at least there’s that.
Driving up the exit ramp, I slow as I approach the door and think, Christ, what the fuck happened here?
The first panel is bent outwards. There’s a folded piece of paper in front of the electric eye, blocking the laser beam. Up higher, the door has been sort of dismantled, almost, maybe with a crowbar. The bars are bent and the door is stuck halfway up. It takes me a minute to piece it together, but only that long. Fuck. Just high enough for a Wrangler to get underneath.
Well, that seals it. I scared her away and then she had to break out of the goddamned parking garage. I’m officially an asshole.
I let my head fall back onto the headrest. What a fucking day this has been already.
In my parka, my phone buzzes. I do a quick fumble-around to find it—patting myself down until I do. It’s a text from her that says:
Dr. Curtis is going to be doing your PT today.
I think you and I need to take a little step back.
Fuck.
25
Mary
When I arrive back at our apartment, I trundle up the stairs feeling defeated, tired, and in desperate need of a shower. Inside, I see that Bridget has cleaned up. I find her on the couch with cotton balls tucked between her toes. She’s also wearing leg warmers and looks a whole lot like Pat Benatar, circa 1981.
“Hi!” she says when I walk inside. Then she gets a look at me. “Uh-oh.”
I sniffle. I’m in that snot-riddled stage of a meltdown where my ears are ringing and my sleeve is all covered in tears and gunk. “Why didn’t you tell me he’s a playboy? You’re my best friend. You’re supposed to warn me about things. Because I don’t know how the world works, apparently.”
She cocks her head. “Well, because he isn’t…”
Around my feet, Frankie makes a kind of figure eight to get my attention. I pick him up and snuggle him, and he jumps into tear-cleaning duty. Bridget has given him a haircut, and his fur is smooth and soft under my fingers, but his muzzle is wet from sloshing in the water bowl.
“Google disagrees. Vehemently! So does Wikipedia,” I say, trying to turn my head to keep Frankie from sticking his tongue up my nostrils. It’s not working, so finally I just let him give me the full treatment.
“Please! You can’t believe everything on the internet!”
“Oh! Says the girl who organizes her day based on BuzzFeed lists!” I set Frankie down and toss his panda for him, but only halfheartedly. Just a pathetic little underhand that goes two feet. He attacks it with all the zest of a full-hallway lob.
From the door of the fridge, I grab the bottle of orange juice and then a glass from the cabinet.
“I saw him with Kate Moss, Bridge. Kate Moss. With her skinny body and her…” I gesture in front of my eyes. “…cheekbones. Kate Motherloving Moss. I can’t compete with that shit. I use Suave shampoo. I buy my clothes at Marshalls. We’re not playing in the same league.” Now I just give up any pretense of delicacy and swig the juice right from the plastic bottle. Bridget looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
And by about the third swallow, I realize why. I hiss and suck air through my teeth, coughing out the words, “There’s something wrong with this orange juice.”
She takes the bottle from me and turns it label side out. On a piece of tape is written SCREWDRIVERS in her neat, tidy, girly letters.
This day is off to a roaring start.
As the vodka hits me, I have to steady myself on the island while I take hold of an apple. I can’t say that Smirnoff is altogether a poor choice for how I’m feeling, even it if is barely 8:00 in the morning.
Bridget plants her hands on the counter top and lifts herself up to sit next to the apples, crossing her legs and dangling one heel over the other. She’s wearing these wildly patterned leggings with an old-fashioned wigwam thing going on, and of course, Bridget being Bridget, she makes them look freaking adorable. Her hair is on top of her head in a pineapple, and she’s clearly trying out a new shade of pink lipstick. I hear the lyrics to Hit Me With Your Best Shot in my head.
She grabs her phone from the charger by the toaster and says, “Bless your heart. You’re such an internet stalking noob.”
I huff. Because I’m an in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound kind of girl, I take another swig of screwdriver. And then Bridget holds up her phone.
“ESPN MAN OF THE YEAR,” says the headline.
“Oh sure. What year? Context, Bridget. Context!” I wipe off my mouth with the back of my hand.
“This one!” She taps on her phone repeatedly, which makes the screen zoom in on Jimmy’s face smiling back at me.
Deep inside, I feel a clenching for him. A need for him. A wanting so total, so simple that I…but what’s he holding there?
I peer closer, clutching the bottle of Tropicana to my chest.
Oh, you know. Just a tiny puppy in a bumblebee outfit.
“I want to know how they decide these things. Did he pay for that Man of the Year status?”
“They vote.”
“Who’s they?” I ask. “What’s our data pool here?”
“Just read it, won’t you?” Bridget swipes her thumb over the screen again, and a new image pops up.
At first, I don’t take the phone from her. I just lean in and squint.
There’s Jimmy, in a tux, with Annie on his shoulders. They’ve fuzzed out her face, but she’s in a pink ballerina costume and has these chunky little legs that remind me of pastry dough.
Then she scrolls through and I see words like donations to charity and Cure for Bone Cancer Half-Marathon.
“And he’s like a total Pinterest celebrity. Open the app! His screen name is TheFalcon.”
I shake my head so violently that my too-long bangs come right out of my braid, so I have to blow them away from my face. It doesn’t work. “No. Enough. Too much data.”
“Finnnnnne, but
you should see his decorative gourd board.” Bridget whistles. “He’s got taste. A guy who looks like that, with an appreciation for seasonal décor? I don’t know what more a girl could ask for.”
Someone who doesn’t have a brother that terrifies me, for one. Someone who hasn’t been asked to be on The Bachelor, for two. And someone who hasn’t gone to public events and walked on red carpets with Kate Moss, for three.
But I can’t deny that there is something about him. Something lovely. Or maybe that’s just me putting all my eggs in the Jimmy Falconi basket. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m also starting to see double and the room is getting a little spinny. With my Tropicana in hand, I slink down onto the floor of the kitchen, feeling the handles from the drawers digging into my back.
Bridget shakes her head at me and recrosses her legs. “I’m making you some eggs, bruiser. Drinking at eight in the morning. What will people say?”
I unpinch my fingers and flip back to him with the bumblebee puppy. A few facts swim through the Smirnoff into the front of my mind. One: the man is adorable. Two: the man is a huge celebrity. Three…
I put the lid on the Tropicana. I peek at Pinterest. TheFalcon. 381K followers.
The man isn’t for me.
Mrs. Friedlander lies on a yoga mat on the floor. She is the frailest, sweetest little person I’ve ever met. Like a tiny injured bird. She says she’s 80, but I’m almost sure she’s older. She’s wearing old purple sweatpants, the kind you used to be able to buy at Mervin’s and Target. She’s wearing thick tube socks, doubled up, and an oversized sweatshirt that has Dorothy Zbornak of the Golden Girls silkscreened on the front, larger than life, with the caption-bubble: DON’T MAKE ME CALL SHADY PINES!
As usual, Golden Girls is also playing on TV. She has an almost preternatural sense for finding reruns. I’ve seen her sort of tune in to the ether, hovering her old gnarled fingers over the remote, like a state fair gypsy with a crystal ball. And then she’ll say something like “Lifetime!” or “Hallmark!” and punch in the channel number.
“You seem a little sad today, sweetie,” says Mrs. Friedlander. I carefully help her bend her knee toward her body. Before I started working with her, she’d hobbled around under a dowager’s hump so bad it was painful to see. But now, she’s nimble and healthy and able to almost touch her toes, which she’ll do for pretty much any visitor who comes by.
“I’m okay.” I sniffle. “Really.”
“Don’t kid a kidder!” she scoffs. And on TV, Blanche swoops into the living room wearing lots of floaty fabric and saying, “How to do I look?”
“What’s troubling you?” she asks me as we move to her other leg.
For as long as I have worked for Healing Therapies, I have made it a strict rule to never ever talk about my personal life with patients. It’s not that it isn’t allowed; it is. Lord knows Dr. Curtis relays his stories about Vietnam to every single patient who even passes by our client list. I’ve tried to tell him that reliving the minute details of the fall of Saigon might not be exactly what our patients are hoping to hear, but it’s okay. That’s his thing. For me, though, life and work have stayed separate.
Until Jimmy.
Until today.
“I met someone, Mrs. Friedlander.” I glance up at the rows and rows of pictures on her mantle of her and her husband together from before she became a young widow.
“Why, congratulations!”
I rub my nose on my sleeve. “I have a bad feeling about it. I think he’s bad news.”
She does some deep breathing as I stretch her leg. “My Harold was a bit of a bad boy,” she says in a far-off way. “Kept his cigarettes in his shirt sleeve like James Dean.” And then she smiles and smiles. “Bad boys aren’t bad forever. Men can change, honey. I promise. You never met a man so nice as my Harold. He said I was the one that tamed him. Like a wild beast.”
And she’s lost again, smiling and staring off at the memories that surround her every day, everywhere.
Now Dorothy is on the screen, talking to Stan. He’s showing her his new toupee. I feel like this is excellent proof of my side of things. Men are like Stan. They are the way they are. And that can be a good thing or a bad thing or a thing with a horrible toupee. I have no faith in change. My dad didn’t change. Eric didn’t change. Dr. Curtis hasn’t changed. Never will. Solid as a piece of marble; consistent from end to end. And Jimmy Falconi, for whatever else he is, is a man. A huge, sexy, yummy, cocky, Pinterest-obsessed man. I might have taken a peek at his gourd page. It’d make Martha Stewart jealous.
“Do you like him, this new beau?”
She does tickle me with that old-fashioned way she has. “I thought so. Until I learned some things about him.”
“Let me give you a little piece of advice,” Mrs. Friedlander says, holding my hand with hers. “Don’t believe anything, honey, unless you see it for yourself.”
I look her hard in the eyes as I bend over her to help her stretch her arm across her body.
“I want to like him, Mrs. Friedlander. I really do.”
“Honey, the world will fill you full of ideas. But it’s here,” she presses on my chest with a shaky finger, “that you’ve got to go when you’re not sure of anything else.”
26
Jimmy
I’ve worked with some intense motherfuckers in my day, but this guy Colonel Curtis is straight out of Apocalypse Now. As I lie on the floor looking up at him, I realize the guy even has a version of the same goddamned name. Colonel Kurtz. Colonel Curtis. Christ. He smells like an Old Spice factory and has a buzz cut so high and tight, I’ve got this weird feeling he probably stopped by the barber this morning to get it touched up. Or he’s one of those guys who does his whole face and head at the same time in the shower. Hardcore.
He’s got me doing these fucking therapy band repetitions that are so boring, so mind-numbing, that I have to resist the urge to nod off, which I would if I didn’t feel so fucking nervous about Mary. It’s been crickets since this morning. In spite of the fact that I’ve said:
Please. Mary. Give me a chance.
My brother is an asshole of epic proportions.
He talks to everybody like that.
Not women. There are no other women.
Not now.
Just you.
Mary?
C’mon.
Nada. Not a word. Not a read confirmation, not a blinking typing sign. Not even a middle-finger emoji. Zip.
He glares down at me and snatches the blue band, replacing it with a green band slightly thicker. “Give me ten more.”
“I don’t think this is helping.” I can bench press two hundred and twenty pounds and this guy’s got me doing chest stretches with a rubber band. “It’s not a strength problem, Colonel Kurtz.”
“Curtis!”
“Curtis. I can throw, but just sometimes I can’t.”
“Is that your professional opinion? Because that’s very good work. Sometimes you can. Sometimes you can’t. I’m pretty sure I saw that in the Journal of Physical Therapy.”
I do a few more repetitions and look at Curtis’ precise, short sideburns. I wonder if he’s got a ruler.
“You’ve got your business and I’ve got mine.” He whacks his clipboard with his pen. “Copy?”
“Yeah,” I answer, and close my eyes. “Copy.”
I stretch the band wide and feel it pull tight across my chest. From where I’m lying, I can see up his pants, sort of, and see he’s got those sock garter things on. This guy is legit. The kind of guy who watches documentaries on weapons advancements in World War II for fun. “Where’s Mary?” I ask.
“Classified information, Mr. Falconi,” he barks and gives me this look, this piercing stare that says he knows a whole lot more about the situation than he’s letting on. And that he’s not pleased at all.
“Did you talk to her?” I finish the ninth rep and open my arms back up again.
Curtis grinds his teeth. “I’m
not at liberty to say,” he growls, dropping to a crouch. “I believe Google might have informed her of a few things.” He glares.
Oh fuck. Great. Well, that explains the radio silence. I can’t even imagine what she’s thinking now. Bad things. Really bad things. Probably realizes that there was a time when what Michael said was exactly right. That’s not now. That was then, but she doesn’t know that. Once an asshole, always an asshole, on the internet at least.
He grinds his jaw back and forth a few times. I can see in his expression that he wants to give me the business but is too professional to do it. His beady eyes dart from side to side, and he mutters in a low grumble, “But let me tell you something, young man. That girl is like a daughter to me.”
I blink up at him with the band stretched to its max.
“Understood,” I say, and find myself adding, “sir.”
He gives me a quick, angry nod and hands me a football. “Get in throwing position, please.”
I roll to my side and get up. Front foot out, I palm the ball in my right hand and keep it solid with my left. Curtis gets behind me like we’re dancing the tango. I get a whiff of original Listerine. He puts his hand on my throwing shoulder as I go slowly through my pass motion.
But then Curtis tightens his grip on my arm and gets right up near my ear. “And if you break her heart,” I hear a crackle of emotion in his voice, “I’ll deflate your balls so fast, you won’t know what hit you.”
Once Curtis has finished with what every other physical therapist on the planet would call “exercises” but what he calls “drills,” I head for the weight room. I get on the leg press machine and move it to five pounds, lifting it with only my right leg, which is feeling a lot better than it did yesterday, but would be feeling a whole lot better if Mary were here to rub something on it. And then I do the thing I haven’t done in a thousand years. I Google myself, typing in j i m…
Jimmy Johns
Jimmy Johnson
Hail Mary Page 15