Chapter 27 Benji #2
“I’m absolutely terrified you’re going to drop everything here, your career, your life, and move above a bar in Panama City to take care of Mickey forever.
And one day you’ll wake up and realize all the pieces of you that are wonderful and full of life are gone.
” He picks up his cup and takes a sip. “There, I said it. That’s what I’m worried about. I’m sorry.”
“Mickey would never ask me to do that,” I say.
“Has Mickey asked you to do any of the things you’ve been doing? Name one thing.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. “You’re not wrong,” I admit. “About me being impulsive. I’ve already thought about it. Moving up there. I looked at apartments in Panama City Beach on my phone at two in the morning last week. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d say exactly this.”
Dante closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, there’s no anger. Just the tired patience of someone who has been catching me before I jump off things since we were twenty-two.
“Benji. Really? Two in the morning? Apartments?”
“Don’t worry. I closed the app. I haven’t looked again.”
“Promise me something.” He reaches over and takes my hand again and this time he doesn’t let go.
“Promise me you won’t make any decisions about moving until Mickey is out of rehab and you’ve seen what his life actually looks like.
Not what you imagine it looks like. Not what you’re building in your head at two in the morning.
What it actually is. Can you do that? You’re young and you have time to figure this out. There’s plenty of time.”
I look at our hands. His fingers around mine, the grip that has caught me a hundred times.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can do that.”
“Great. Now one more thing. I have an idea for you to think about. Try turning off the Benji caregiver mode.”
“How do I do that? That’s the mode I’ve slid into. How do I turn it off now?”
He smiles at me. “You flip on the Trouble Benji mode. The one who can walk into any nightclub in Miami and pick up the hottest guy in the room on a dare. Be that guy for Mickey and see what happens. Then there’ll be no confusion about if you’re feeling sorry for him, or feeling guilty over the shooting.
Right? Mickey might need a little push in the right direction. ”
“That’s actually not a terrible idea,” I say. “I’ve kinda missed my Trouble Benji mode.”
“My ideas are always good. Now finish your cortado before it gets cold. Cold cortados are a crime against the bean and I won’t have it in my home.”
The conversation settles back into the easy rhythm that we’ve had since we were twenty-two, the one that absorbs hard conversations and keeps going.
But his words stay with me. The image he painted of me waking up one day with all the pieces gone.
I know that version of myself. I’ve been that version before, with men who needed too much, and Dante was the one who picked up what was left.
He’s not wrong to be scared. He’s not wrong about any of it.
The difference is Mickey. Who has never once asked me to come. Mickey doesn’t take pieces. Mickey doesn’t know how.
That’s the problem. He’s too proud to ask for anything, and I never know if he wants me or not.
But I don’t say that to Dante.
On Wednesday, I have dinner with my mother. She lives in Coral Gables in a tidy ranch house with a screened-in porch and a garden that she tends to with intensity. My Aunt Lori lives there too.
Mom is in the kitchen when I walk in. Blonde hair pulled back in a clip, eyes that are lighter than mine, an apron that says Kiss the Cook that Aunt Lori bought her as a joke and that she wears without irony every single day. The whole house smells like chicken and cheese.
“Benjamin,” she says. She sets the casserole down and looks at me and the look is the full-body scan that all mothers do. “You’re too skinny.”
“I’m always skinny, Mom.”
“Skinnier than normal skinny. Sit down. I made chicken casserole. Lori made her banana pudding last night so you’re not leaving until you’ve had two helpings of everything.”
She fixes me a plate without asking what I want or how much.
She decided the answers to those questions when I was eleven and has not revisited them since.
The casserole is the one she’s been making my whole life.
The one with the rotisserie chicken and the cream of mushroom and the crushed crackers on top.
Comfort food. Food that doesn’t try to impress anyone and doesn’t need to.
Aunt Lori eats with us and talks about a neighbor’s dog that keeps digging under the fence. After she finishes, she kisses the top of my head and goes back outside to wage her ongoing war against aphids in the garden.
Mom clears the plates. She sits down across from me and takes off her reading glasses. When my mother takes her glasses off, she’s about to have a serious conversation. I’ve known this forever.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she says.
“About what?”
“Whatever it is you haven’t told me yet. You called me from the Panhandle and told me about the shooting. You told me you were hurt. You told me the officer was in the hospital. But you’ve been home for days and you haven’t said his name once and that tells me there’s more.”
She’s had three weeks of phone calls from me where I gave her the headlines and kept the rest. I told her about the bar, the hallway, the hospital.
I told her a cop stepped in front of me and took a bullet.
I said I was fine and protected her from the details.
Now her glasses are off and there’s nowhere to hide.
“His name is Mickey Weaver,” I say.
Her face changes. Not because of the name. Because of how I said it.
“He’s a cop with the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. He’s the officer, Mom.”
Her eyes go wide. “The one who stepped in front of you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve been visiting him. When you told me you were driving to Tallahassee, you were going to see him?”
“Yes. Every day that I could make it. I brought him pizza and coffee. I sat in his hospital room beside his bed and told myself it was guilt. That I owed him. That showing up was the least I could do.”
“Was it guilt?” she asks.
“At first maybe. And then it stopped being that. And then, he told me something about himself that changed everything and I —” I press my thumb against the bridge of my nose.
“He’s gay, Mom. He came out at seventeen on a dock with his best friend.
He became a cop anyway in a red county in the Panhandle.
He stepped in front of a bullet for me. I was a stranger to him and he did that because that’s the kind of man Mickey Weaver is. ”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. “Is he good to you?”
“Yes. He’s good to me. He’s in a wheelchair in a rehab facility in Jacksonville. He can’t feel his legs and he’s a good man. When I went to Jacksonville to see him on my way home to Miami, he told me he missed me. Out loud. To my face. While we were sitting outside on a patio.”
Her mouth is trembling at the edges and she is trying very hard not to cry at the kitchen table. “Can I meet him?” she asks. “I need to see him.”
“What, right now?” I ask.
“Benjamin. You just told me you met a man who held your hand on a patio and said he missed you. I’m your mother and I want to see his face.”
“Let me text him first. We can’t ambush him with a video call without warning. And he might be busy with rehab.”
I pull out my phone under the table like I’m sixteen again and text him.
Benji: Don’t freak out. I’m at my mom’s house. I told her about you. She wants to see you. On video. Right now. You can say no if you’re busy.
Three dots. Disappear. Appear again.
Mickey: You told your mother about me?
Benji: Yes!!! Of course. She took her glasses off. It’s like a superpower. I had no choice. Do you want to meet her? If you say no she’ll be fine but she’ll also spend the next three months asking me every Wednesday why she hasn’t met you yet. It’s easier to do it now. Trust me on this.
Mickey: Give me one minute.
I glance at Mom, who is watching me text with the patient expression of a woman who already knows the answer.
“He said yes. Give him a minute.”
Mickey: Okay. Ready.
I open the video call. It rings twice and then his face fills the screen. He’s in his room. Clean white shirt. Hair pushed to the side. I can tell he combed it in the last sixty seconds because there’s a faint wet line near his temple where he used water from his cup.
He combed his hair for my mother. In sixty seconds. With cup water. Damn. He’s killing me here. I blink and look away from the screen for a second so he can’t see my eyes.
“Mickey,” I say, turning the phone toward her. “This is my lovely mom.”
Mom takes the phone from my hands without asking. She holds it at arm’s length because she doesn’t have her glasses on.
“Hi, Mrs. Bennett,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you.”
His voice is different. More careful and respectful.
“Oh, call me Elena,” Mom says. “Mrs. Bennett was my mother-in-law and we didn’t get along.”
“Yes, ma’am. Elena.”
He called her ma’am. I watch from across the table as Mom’s face softens.
“Benji tells me you’re a police officer,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am. Bay County Sheriff’s Office.”
“And you were hurt protecting my son.”
Mickey wasn’t expecting her to put it right out there. His composure holds but something moves behind his face. He might’ve been expecting questions about the injury or rehab. Not this.
“I was doing my job, ma’am.”
“No,” Mom says. “You were doing more than your job. My son told me what happened and I know the difference.”
Mickey’s neck goes red. The flush starts below the collar and climbs. It reaches his jaw and then his cheeks and he drops his gaze for a second. He’s blushing in front of my mother and I’m going out of my freaking mind.
“How’s the food there?” Mom asks, pivoting when she sees the blush. “Benji says you like sweet tea.”