Chapter 16 Benji
I’m standing in the condo’s shell-pink bathroom at five forty-five in the morning in sweatpants, brushing my teeth with one hand and scrolling vendor emails with the other, when I decide Mickey needs to see this bathroom.
I’ve been describing it to him for days. The pink, the crack in the mirror, the water pressure that could be defeated by a garden hose. He laughs every time I mention it.
I hold up my phone and take a photo. The flash bounces off the pink tile and the cracked mirror and the sad little shower. I check the photo before sending and it’s perfect. The full horror of the shell-pink bathroom is captured in one image. I send the photo.
Benji: I present to you the shell-pink bathroom in all its glory. This is where I’ve been getting ready every morning. Notice the crack in the mirror, the mildewed grout situation, and the particular shade of pink that I can only describe as “retired flamingo.”
I put the phone down, pull a shirt over my head and start on my face.
Concealer under the eyes because the dark circles are winning.
The bruise on my cheek has finally faded to the point where I can cover it completely.
Thank God. I have a final walkthrough with Callie today and showing up to a client meeting looking like I lost a bar fight is not ideal for the professional image.
My phone buzzes.
Mickey: That pink is a crime against humanity. Also, how is your water pressure? It looks like the shower was installed during the Cold War.
Benji: The water pressure is a joke. I have to stand directly under the head and rotate like a rotisserie chicken to get fully wet. It’s humiliating.
Mickey: Rotisserie chicken? I’m going to think about that image all day.
I smile at my phone and finish getting dressed.
I send the same bathroom photo to Dante with the caption “This is the bathroom. Get used to it. You arrive soon and this pink nightmare is your home too.” Then I don’t think about the photo again until three hours later when I’m at the house measuring the cocktail hour flow path and my phone buzzes.
Dante: Did you send this same bathroom photo to Mickey?
I stop walking. My tape measure retracts with a snap that echoes off the white walls.
Benji: Yeah. Why?
Dante: Look at the photo. Look at the mirror. You’re shirtless. The mirror caught your back. Your whole back. And you’re in THE gray sweatpants. Please tell me you noticed this before you sent it to a paralyzed man in a hospital bed.
I pull up the photo and zoom in. And there it is.
The cracked mirror caught my reflection at an angle I didn’t notice, my bare back, tan from Miami, the line of my shoulders, the dip of my spine, the gray sweatpants sitting low enough to show the crack of my ass above the waistband.
I look like a thirst trap that accidentally photobombed a real estate listing.
Benji: Oh fuck.
Dante: Oh fuck is right. You sent an injured man a shirtless mirror selfie disguised as a bathroom complaint. How is he supposed to respond to that? What is he supposed to do with that information, Benji?
Benji: I didn’t notice!! I was sending the BATHROOM. The PINK. I was documenting the PINK.
Dante: If those pants were any lower you would’ve documented your pink ass. Your lats are in that photo.
Benji: I can’t be trusted with a phone.
Dante: Don’t freak out. Just be more careful before you send photos to the man you’re clearly falling for. Just a thought.
I put my phone face down on the marble counter and breathe.
I sent Mickey a shirtless photo. Not on purpose.
But the result is the same. He has a photo of my bare back on his phone.
I can’t unsend it and the best course of action is to pretend it didn’t happen and hope that Mickey was looking at the pink tile and not at my back.
Mickey is a cop whose eyes scan every room and every person and every detail, and there is a zero percent chance that he opened that photo and didn’t notice me in the mirror.
I pick up my tape measure and go back to work because my personal humiliation is not on the wedding timeline.
The day gets worse from there. The caterer can’t fill the organic greens order because of a “supply chain issue,” which in Panhandle vendor language means someone forgot to place the order.
The reclaimed driftwood for the arch was supposed to be delivered yesterday from a place in Seaside and wasn’t.
I drive to Seaside to track it down, spend twenty-five minutes circling for parking, pay fifteen dollars for a spot in front of the shop, and find the shop closed for “inventory.” I leave a note on the door that is professional in tone and murderous in subtext and drive back with my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ache.
Then Callie’s mother calls to discuss adding a unity candle ceremony. On an outdoor terrace. On the beach. In June. Where the wind comes off the water at approximately hurricane force every afternoon.
“I love that idea,” I say. “Let me look into windproof options and I’ll get back to you by end of day.”
My phone buzzes.
Mickey: How’s the day?
Benji: The caterer forgot the greens. The driftwood has vanished. The supplier’s shop in the hellscape known as Seaside was CLOSED. Callie’s mother wants a unity candle on an outdoor terrace in June where the wind would extinguish the sun if it could reach it. I’m running out of time.
Mickey: Okay. One thing at a time. The greens. Can you source from a grocery store and plate them yourself? Nobody at a wedding is going to know the difference between farm-to-table arugula and grocery store arugula.
I stare at the text. He’s lying in a hospital bed and he’s problem-solving my wedding like it’s a dispatch call.
Benji: That’s actually not a terrible idea.
Mickey: The driftwood. Do you have a backup material? Something you can get locally in two days if the original doesn’t show?
Benji: I could do bamboo poles wrapped in white fabric. It’s not driftwood but it reads the same in photos. There’s a garden supply place that carries bamboo.
Mickey: Go to the garden supply place tomorrow morning.
Buy the bamboo. If the driftwood shows up, great.
If it doesn’t, you’re covered. The candle thing, tell the mother you’ll use LED candles in glass cylinders.
They look real in photos and the wind can’t touch them.
Blame it on the venue’s fire safety policy.
Nobody argues with a fire safety policy.
Benji: Are you... wedding planning from your hospital bed right now?
Mickey: I’m a cop. We solve problems under pressure. This is basically the same skill set except nobody’s armed.
Benji: You haven’t met Callie’s mother.
At five, I finish the last vendor call, get in my car and call him. “Are you free to talk?” I ask.
“You bet,” he says. “Are you on the road headed this way?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Okay, that’ll give us plenty of time to work through the issues you were having today with the wedding. What do you tackle first?”
It’s almost seven by the time I’m knocking on his door. I walk into the room and the tightness in my body loosens the way it does every time I see him.
He takes one look at me and frowns. “Sit down, Benji,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Sit down and drink something before you pass out in my room and hit your head on the floor. When’s the last time you ate?”
“I had a protein bar.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“It’s seven o’clock at night, Benji.”
“I didn’t have time today.”
“Open Sheila’s cooler then and let’s eat.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, frowning. “Didn’t you eat that food earlier today? You were supposed to eat the leftovers for lunch.”
Sheila’s cooler is still sitting on the nearby table from last night. He gestures at it. I reach for it and unzip it. The food is all still there. Every container. Untouched. The ice packs have melted and nothing has been opened.
He hasn’t eaten any of it. Not a bite.
The cooler has been sitting nearby all day, two feet from his bed, filled with his favorite foods that he loves and he couldn’t reach it.
He couldn’t lean over far enough to unzip it and pull out a container because his body doesn’t bend that way from this position.
Nobody came in to help him. The nurses were too busy doing rounds to notice that a man in their care had a cooler full of food that he could see and not reach.
“I thought you were going to ask the morning nurse to help you with it,” I say, my voice cracking as I look at the melted ice packs.
“I meant to,” Mickey says. “And then the shift changed, and it was busy, and I figured I wasn’t that hungry anyway.”
He’s lying. He was hungry. He just didn’t want to ring the call button for help. He didn’t want to be a burden over food.
The tears come before I can stop them, sudden and hot. I’m standing there holding the open cooler with tears running down my face because the image of Mickey lying in this bed all day, hungry, with Tex’s food right there and not being able to get to it is more than I can handle.
“Benji...”
“No,” I say, and my voice is shaking and I don’t care.
“No. This is exactly why someone needs to be here with you. Not for a fucking hour a day. All day. This is exactly why family needs to be with people in the hospital, Mickey, because the staff can’t do everything, and they miss things.
And you sit here all day with food you can’t reach and you don’t call anyone because you don’t want to be a burden and that is exactly the kind of bullshit that.
..” I wipe my face with the back of my hand and take a breath that hurts my ribs.
“That’s why I need to be here. If your mom can’t be here and Tex can’t be here every day, then I need to be here.
Because this can’t happen again. I can’t stand the thought of you needing something and nobody is here. ”