Stroke It

by Ivy Jordan

  To this, I smiled. If there was anything I could help with, I was more than happy to do so. I worried a little about being entirely boring; to someone who had spent six years abroad, surely a woman who’d only been outside the US one time was a terrible bore. “I’d imagine. One of the best ways for people to recover from situations is to form new connections.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, new friendships and new social groups can bring out new parts in people. You expose different parts of yourself to different people, so the more people you talk to, the more you learn about yourself. It’s a pretty big reason why people do group therapy. If they can bounce their experiences off other people, they’ll get more out of it than if they just talk to themselves or to me.” I hadn’t meant to go on a medical tangent and was a little embarrassed to divulge more than I wanted to. I didn’t want to be a nerdy psychologist. I wanted to be a sexy and confident businesswoman.

  His focus, though, made it difficult for me to be embarrassed at all. “That’s really interesting,” he said. “It makes sense. When things rattle around in your brain too long, you start to look at them funny.”

  “Definitely. People distort their own realities.” I smiled at him and took a sip of water. “I don’t mean to chatter. What’s your game plan, now that you’re back?”

  “Like I said, to start over.”

  “And that entails?”

  “That’s about all I know at this point.” He admitted. “But like I said, meeting new people is a start.”

  “Well,” I summoned courage from some part of me that I didn’t know existed, “if you ever want to get dinner and get to know a stranger, let me know. I’m usually free after work.”

  Sawyer raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to answer my question, and at that exact moment, I felt my aunt’s hands come down on my shoulders.

  “Oh, good, you two met,” Janet chimed. “I was going to introduce you.”

  Jesse came up behind her and smiled. “You two getting along well?”

  “Of course,” Sawyer assured them.

  “I had a question, Sawyer, about your commanding officer. I think I met a young man from your division the other day,” Jesse said.

  I could tell that they were looking for a longer conversation with Sawyer, so I smiled and waved a little goodbye to give them space. I certainly didn’t want to take up all of their time with incessant flirting—honestly, I felt a little bad that I’d done it at all. It wasn’t like me to put myself out there. I’d spent plenty of my life in a room studying and not caring at all for the company of other people. Men, women, or otherwise. I’d had a few boyfriends, but really only because it was something I felt like I was supposed to do.

  But I wanted to talk to Sawyer. Not only that, but talking to him proved to be easy. Even though it had only been a few moments, I got the feeling that we could have talked for hours if we hadn’t been interrupted. And Jesus, those eyes.

  This was inappropriate. It had to be, right? I wasn’t supposed to look at this returning soldier as some sort of personal conquest. Still, I didn’t think that that’s what I was doing. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t physically attracted to him, but in all fairness, it was probably a good idea for me to get to know him better. Especially considering how highly my aunt and uncle spoke of him.

  “Quinn? Hey, Quinn.” Sawyer’s mother, Kimberly, waved me over.

  I hadn’t spoken to her yet. I’d come with Janet and Jesse rather as a plus one, without any interaction with Sawyer’s mother. I hadn’t heard anything good or bad about her, either. She knew who I was, though, and I knew who she was.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for letting me over, Kimberly. It’s been really nice.”

  “Oh, we’re happy to have you. Any friendly face is good to have around,” Kimberly said. I wondered, briefly, where her husband was—or were they still married? I hadn’t seen him here at the party, and the party was being held at the place that he lived, so to avoid it he would have had to have gone out of his way. That spoke volumes about the situation, but I was leaping to conclusions.

  “Well, I’m happy to help,” I said, a little sarcastically. It was hardly biting the bullet to come over and have some free food and sit outside with friendly people. Even if I didn’t know everyone here, everyone here was perfectly friendly. Even Pete seemed friendly enough, with his missing front tooth and battered baseball cap.

  “Do you think he’s different?” Kimberly asked me.

  I was a bit confused and surprised by her question. “Beg pardon?”

  “You’re a psychologist, right? Do you think he’s different than he was?” Kimberly asked.

  I glanced at Sawyer, still talking to Janet and Jesse. “I couldn’t say, really. I didn’t know him very well before he left. Don’t think I ever met him.”

  “I think he’s different,” Kimberly said. She pressed her lips into a thin line. “He’s still my baby boy; he’s still sweet as can be. Hasn’t said a rotten word since I picked him up at the airport this morning. But there’s something a little different about him. I expected him to be different, to be a little stiffer, being that the military does that to most people. But he’s got something behind his eyes now.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that exactly. I supposed it was my status as a psychologist that gave me license to be privy to this information at all. “A lot of veterans get loaded down with experiences when they go overseas. PTSD’s pretty common in ex-military because of it. He’s seeing a therapist, right?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kimberly replied. She fidgeted with one of the rings on her finger, a silver cross that extended from knucklebone to knucklebone. “Do you think he needs to see a psychiatrist?”

  “Well, some kind of psychologist,” I said. “For sure. I don’t know if he needs to be taking medication, but it would be a psychiatrist that would sort that out.”

  Kimberly thought about that for a moment. “You know, I don’t think he would go for it. I tried to get him to talk to somebody when he was overseas, and he told me was going to see the psychiatrist on site. But he said all that fellow did was push medicine over the counter, and it was too much for him.”

  “Medication should be a last resort,” I agreed.

  “And it interfered with his thinking, so he quit going,” Kimberly said. “And you know, I don’t think he’d spring for it. He’s always been a terribly somber fellow. Even before the military, he kept everything to himself.”

  I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be listening to all this private information, but I wasn’t about to depart from the conversation. “Getting him in to see someone wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I reiterated. I did believe firmly in psychotherapy, after all, because of its obvious effects. And veterans often needed extensive, prolonged treatment. The longer their issues went untreated, the worse they got. It was like a physical wound that way. If it was a left to fester, it would fester, and infect the whole body.

  I saw Janet and Jesse waving at me from across the yard. Sawyer wasn’t with them anymore, and I could hear my aunt calling, ‘We need to leave!’ I smiled at Kimberly and said, “I hope everything goes well.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it will. Thanks for lending an ear, doll.” Kimberly squeezed my hand and took off to go and attend to some other partygoer.

  I walked back over to my aunt and uncle. “Are y’all ready to head out?”

  “Yeah, just about.” Jesse put his hands in his pockets.

  Sawyer was walking back outside; he’d gone inside for a beer, it seemed. I wondered if I might get another chance to talk to him. Before I could bring it up, though, my aunt squeezed my shoulder.

  “Well, let’s get out of their hair. I’ve got a casserole in the oven, and I’d imagine Sawyer wants a little quiet.”

  Chapter Five

  SAWYER

  “Sawyer, honey, breakfast is ready.”

  I squinted up at the ceiling and, for a moment, hadn’t a damn clue where I was. I wasn’t in t
he barracks, I wasn’t at my station overseas, and those were the only two places I’m come to know. My mother’s voice reminded me I was home; I saw the baseball poster on my wall and sighed.

  “Be there in a minute,” I grumbled, and began to sit up. Just as I’d done so, Mom came and sat down at the foot of my bed.

  I loved her, very dearly, but apparently she still saw me as fourteen and in need of a little talking-to in the morning to get out of bed. I smiled at her, perhaps a little bit impatiently in my tiredness. “Good morning, Mom.”

  “Sawyer, I’m worried about you,” she said. Her eyebrows were knitted together, pressing firmer the lines in her forehead. I’d noticed by now that her face had aged over the last six years. She hadn’t become an old hag by any means, but she’d gotten older, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d contributed to this process with my being gone and in danger for so long.

  “You know, you used to be all over the place.” Mom had her hands wrapped around an old mug, one that I’d bought her as a child. Or, rather, that I’d painted at a ceramics shop for art class in middle school. One or the other. “You might not have talked much, but you were always out and about. You spent just about all day in your room yesterday. I’ll admit, it probably wasn’t a great idea to throw a party the first day you came back. But the whole day, Sawyer, and we couldn’t get you to come out.”

  That was strange. No one had tried to get me. “I was tired, Mom,” I explained. I didn’t want to have this conversation with her, and I also didn’t want to hurt her. If she was going to be wondering about my seclusion, the possibility existed that I needed to go somewhere else.

  “Well, maybe so,” she said. I could tell she didn’t believe me. “But you’ve had a good long day in your room, and a long night, so I expect you to get outside a little today. Get back into the groove of things. It’s no good to knock around inside your own head too long.”

  I understood now that my mother worried that I was obsessing over my time overseas. The problem, though, was that going outside made it impossible not to think about my time overseas, and I still felt duty-bound to remember. The worst thing, possibly, would be to forget. “I understand, Mom. I’ll try to get out.”

  “I want to hear your plan.” This was something she’d always done. She asked me for my specific plan so that I couldn’t leave any wiggle room for lying or sneaking out later than intended.

  I smiled. “I’ll go visit Pete up on his farm; how about that?”

  “That sounds good.” Mom stood up, content to leave with that answer.

  I took a moment to get up and ready. I’d wanted time to myself the day before and didn’t know how to make that clear without being an ass. The party was fine, kind of everyone to think of me, but the only thing I wanted was to be alone. Starting over fresh in the place I’d grown up might have been a bad idea from the start, but the least that I could ask for, I thought, was a little bit of quiet time.

  Still, I didn’t want to worry my mother in exchange for it. I took a quick shower, almost forgetting that the water wasn’t going to shut off on its own, but still taking under five minutes to get through. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and left my baseball cap sitting in my room.

  In the kitchen, I could see the back of my father’s head. He sat at the table, hunched over a newspaper, reading glasses bent over his tiny ears only made to look normal by his bald head. Eugene Gains was a quiet man overall—most of my family said that he was where my quietness came from. But he wasn’t a passive man. When he had a grievance, he made it known.

  When I sat down at the kitchen table, he looked down his glasses at me. While Mom had aged a bit, he’d remained the same, though to be fair he’d looked sixty since he was thirty.

  “Morning,” I said. I drummed my fingers on the table and looked up. “Mom, you need any help back there?”

  “She’s got it,” Dad said. “You in a rush to leave?”

  Such was his way. I stopped drumming my fingers and looked at him. He didn’t meet my gaze, rather remained fixated on the paper. I couldn’t tell which it was. The news I got mostly came from a small TV in the recreation room in my barracks overseas.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good.”

  Silence. I raised my eyebrows slightly and glanced at Mom, who conveniently had her back turned to the conversation, as though the feet between her and us made for an impenetrable barrier to any and all hearing. She’d always chosen to go deaf when it came to my father’s faults. I supposed I couldn’t expect her to change that.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, in a stupid attempt to make conversation.

  He frowned. “Never seen a newspaper before?”

  I wondered, for a moment, if he’d even noticed that I was gone. Six years I’d been gone, and now he acted like I’d bothered him, like this was six years ago and I was still twenty-two, and he still wished I’d go make something of myself. Only now, at twenty-eight, I had made something of myself, and I was still somehow a nuisance for that.

  “I told Pete I’d help him on the farm,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’d better head out before traffic gets too bad on thirty-five.”

  “Your mother made breakfast,” Dad said, his voice a warning.

  “Oh, it can certainly wait. I’m glad you’re going out to see a friend, Sawyer. I’ll see you when you get home,” Mom said. Quick to gloss over Dad, quick to cover his ass. I nodded to them both and ducked out of the house after grabbing the keys to my old truck. They were just where I’d left them on the key ring.

  My truck was just where I’d left it, too. I’d gotten something of a replacement for it by the barracks, but this one was my favorite: an old red pickup. It wasn’t flashy or too big to drive around Austin. It was a respectable car that could get me around the city and handle just about any disaster I could throw at it. I hopped in and made my way to Pete’s farm.

  The moment I reached the outskirts of Austin, where the country rolled on and on for endless miles, I felt a little better. Pete’s property started sooner than I was used to with his extra acres of crops, but his home was just where I remembered, perched at the top of a hill.

  “Sawyer! What the hell you doin’ all the way out here?” Pete shouted at me from down his driveway. I saw a tractor parked not far; he must have been in the middle of something or another.

  “You working on something?” I could still hear the tractor’s motor running.

  “Nah, just going for a ride.” Pete flashed me a missing-tooth grin. “Did you come out here to help?”

  “If you’ll let me.”

  “I ain’t have anything to pay you.”

  “Don’t need money. Just some quiet.” I offered him a smile and began to wish I’d grabbed my baseball cap. At least the sun wasn’t coming down too hard; in the summer, it would beat down mercilessly in Texas, and even the strongest soldiers would choose death over a day in the field in that heat.

  “Well, I don’t have any work for you,” Pete said. “And I hate to send you away after you drove all the way out here n’ all.” He put his hands on his hips and looked out on the open field. “Tell you what, why don’t you park the tractor and I’ll fix lunch?”

  It was a fair enough deal. I’d only driven the tractor once before, but parking it was easy. When I went back up to the house, Pete was wandering around the kitchen like he’d never seen a kitchen before.

  “Sandwiches alright with you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We set our sandwiches on paper plates and grabbed a beer out of his refrigerator before walking onto the back porch. The occasional fly buzzed by, but besides that, there wasn’t a disturbance in the world.

  “What’s got you runnin’ out here lookin’ for work?” Pete asked. “Your old man giving you trouble?”

  I nodded, taking a drink of my beer. “Little. Nothing new.”

  “I’d think he’d be mighty grateful for your service.”

  I made a face. I preferred
Dad’s distaste towards me to any kind of worship. “I’m just a person, Pete. I’m not farming for gratitude.”

  “Come back tomorrow and you’ll be farming for beets,” Pete said, pointing at the acre in front of us with a laugh. When it subsided, he sat back in his chair. “Shit, man, what was it like? Out there, overseas. You were, what, in Syria?”

  “Afghanistan,” I corrected. “And Iraq, and Syria. Middle East. Hopped around.” That was about the most that I was allowed to tell people, really, and it was the most I felt comfortable sharing.

  “Shoot. Did you get any terrorists?”

  I rubbed my nose and took a drink of my beer. “Nah, they all went home. We’re fighting circus clowns now, Pete. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “Shoot.” Pete shook his head and rolled his eyes at me. “It was, what, you and a team? Were you on some kind of special forces team?”

  I didn’t appreciate the onslaught of questions from Pete. “Yeah, and what did you do, go to law school?”

  “What?”

  “I feel like I’m getting cross-examined.” I shook my head and sat forward in my seat, looking out on the landscape.

  “Ah.” Pete spat off to the side. “You can’t expect to be gone for six years and not have me ask you a single damn question when you get back. Especially when you didn’t tell me shit over the phone, neither.”

  “That was by design.”

  “Shoot.”

  A moment of silence passed between us, and I started wondering if I ought to ask Pete about renting some space out here. He didn’t have a shed, and knowing him he didn’t have a permit to build anything either, but the police wouldn’t care if I built something to live in. It would give me a place to be where I wouldn’t be bothered.

  “You know, your mom talked to me yesterday. At the get-together.” Pete pushed his cap down onto his forehead.

  I looked back at him. “Yeah?”

  “Awful concerned about you bein’ gone so long. And I told her, ‘Kimberly, you shouldn’t be all worried. Sawyer’s a grown man now.’ But she thinks you seen somethin’ out there you can’t shake.”