Chapter 30 Mickey #4
He takes the Panama City exit. Soon we’re on Front Beach Road, the route I patrolled for nine years.
The road where I clocked truck nuts and fender benders and tourists in the wrong lane.
I know every intersection, every turn lane, every speed trap.
I drove this road ten thousand times in a cruiser and I never once thought I’d come back down it in the passenger seat of Tex’s truck unable to feel my legs.
Tex reaches for his phone and pauses the playlist. “Saved this song for last,” he says. “On purpose.”
He hits play. The opening piano of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama, I’m Coming Home” fills the cab.
The bar appears ahead of us, same as I remembered. Three stories of concrete and neon with the sign out front. Big Tex’s Roadhouse. The parking lot. Big Bertha with her welding scar waiting for Tex. The deck on the second floor where the Gulf stretches out behind it.
Tex pulls into the parking lot and puts the truck in park and neither of us moves. Ozzy’s voice fills the cab and my throat locks shut. Everything I held together at rehab, everything I held together for Benji, all of it breaks at once in the parking lot with my best friend.
My face is wet. I don’t wipe it. Tex’s face is wet too and he doesn’t wipe his either. We sit there until Ozzy finishes and the cab goes quiet and the only sound is the engine ticking and both of us breathing.
Tex sniffs, rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, and grins at me. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have played that one. Didn’t know you were still torn up about Ozzy.”
I laugh through whatever’s left on my face. He gives me the moment.
“Welcome home, Mickey,” he says.
He gets out, comes around, opens my door. He pulls the wheelchair from the back seat. Fourteen seconds. Brakes locked. I grab the door handle. Left hand on the seat. Push up, pivot, lower. Fifteen seconds. My arms don’t shake.
We’re getting faster.
Tex puts his hand on my shoulder and gives it one squeeze. The Tex version of everything he’s never going to say out loud.
What scares me most is coming home to a life that doesn’t look like the one I left.
“Let’s go inside,” he says. “Sheila and Stormy have been waiting.”
Tex waves me through the open front doors. The bar is closed, too early for dinner service. The neon signs are off. The jukebox is silent.
My eyes go straight to the hallway. To my right. Twenty feet away. The corridor that leads to the bathrooms. New drywall, new paint, new floor. I can see it from where I’m sitting and it sends my pulse racing and my hands tighten on the wheel rims.
The last time I was in that hallway I was running toward the sound of my best friend’s voice, four men, a gun and Benji bleeding on the floor.
The last time I was in that hallway I could run.
“Take your time,” Tex says behind me.
I wheel toward it. The chair rolls smooth on the new floor and the hallway opens in front of me, narrow, five feet wide, the bathroom doors at the end. No blood, no stain, no trace of what happened.
I stop in the middle of it and stay in the spot where I went down. Where the bullet entered my back. Where Benji was on the floor underneath me with my blood soaking through his shirt.
The hallway is just the place where it happened. The hallway didn’t take my legs. A man with a gun took my legs.
Places don’t hold power unless you give it to them.
I wheel back out. Tex is standing by the bar with his arms crossed, watching me carefully.
“It’s just a hallway,” I say. “Let’s go upstairs and see my place.”
He points me to the new elevator at the back of the building, past the kitchen, in the space where the storage room used to be.
Brushed steel doors. A single button. Tex presses it and the doors slide open with a sound like a microwave finishing.
The space is wide and big enough for my chair with room to turn.
I wheel in. Tex steps in beside me and the doors close. The cab rises, smooth and quiet, and I watch the number change from 1 to 2 and the rising takes maybe eight seconds.
In those eight seconds I’m between the bar where I almost died and the home my family built me.
The doors open and the light hits me first. The warm gold of the afternoon sun coming off the water and filling the space wall to wall. The windows face south and west and the Gulf is right there, blue and flat and endless. Exactly as I remembered it.
I wheel forward. The floor is smooth hardwood, sealed and level, and the chair rolls without catching.
The space is open, twelve hundred square feet of air and sunlight with the curtained bedroom space along the back wall and the main room stretching toward the windows. Stormy’s design. Every inch of it.
The kitchen area is to my left. Lowered counters and a sink with a lever handle. The countertop is butcher block, and the cabinets are within reach from the chair. I pull up to the counter and my armrests fit underneath it and the height is right, the exact height of a man who sits.
The bathroom is through a wide doorway on the east wall.
I can see the tile from here, white with a blue-gray accent that I’d bet money Stormy chose because it looks like the Gulf on an overcast day.
Roll-in shower with a bench. Grab bars that don’t look institutional because Stormy found ones that look like they belong in a beach house.
A mirror set at two heights, standing and sitting.
The bedroom space is along the back wall, partitioned by a curtain track mounted to the ceiling. The curtain is pulled open and the bed is there, lower than a standard bed, with a navy comforter. The same color as the sheets in my house. Stormy must’ve seen them when they picked up my things.
I wheel to the windows. The Gulf is right there with the pelicans working the surf and a fishing boat sitting on the horizon.
A small deck is on the other side of the glass, accessible through a sliding door wide enough for the chair, and the deck has new planking, smooth and gapless. Interlocking composite tiles.
The last time I saw the water from this building, I was standing on the lower deck, holding a beer and watching the sunset.
I could feel the wood under my bare feet.
The warmth of it after a full day of sun.
I didn’t think about it. You never think about the things your body does until your body stops doing them.
Now I’m sitting on the second floor gripping the armrests of my wheelchair and the wood could be hot or cold and I wouldn’t know.
But the Gulf is the same as it ever was. Every bit as beautiful. The water goes gold in the afternoon and pink at sunset and black at night and it will do that whether I’m standing or sitting or lying in a hospital bed five hours east.
I hear a soft sound behind me. Sneakers quietly moving across the floor.
I turn the chair around. Stormy is standing one step inside the room at the threshold, one hand on the doorframe, his body angled like he might bolt.
He’s wearing jeans and a pink Big Tex’s Roadhouse shirt and his blonde hair is falling across his forehead.
He’s chewing the inside of his cheek and his free hand is opening and closing at his side.
He’s waiting for my verdict.
“Stormy,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
“Come over here.”
He takes one step. Then another. His eyes are scanning my face fast and thorough, looking for the reaction that will tell him whether the thing he built is right or wrong. Whether the weeks of measuring and researching were worth it.
“It’s perfect, Stormy.”
“The tile in the bathroom, I wasn’t sure about the color, if you wanted white I can… “
“No. The tile is perfect.”
“The counter might be a quarter inch too high. I measured it six times but the butcher block has a slight bow in the center.”
“Stormy.”
He stops talking.
“Come here.”
He walks to me slowly. He stops in front of my wheelchair and his hands are at his sides.
I reach out and pull him into a hug. My arms around his waist because that’s the height I’m at and his body goes rigid for exactly one second before it unlocks.
He bends forward and his arms come around my shoulders and he holds on.
Tight and shaking. Stormy doesn’t know how to say the big things.
He never has. So he drew up a blueprint and built me a home.
“You built this,” I say into his shoulder. “You did this for me.”
He doesn’t answer. His arms tighten. His breathing is ragged against my neck and I can feel the shaking in his chest.
Tex is downstairs. I know he is because I can hear the creak of a barstool taking his weight. He sent Stormy up alone on purpose. He knew this moment belonged to the two of us.
I hold Stormy until the shaking stops. He pulls back and wipes his face with the back of his hand. He doesn’t look at me because looking at me right now would undo him again.
“Thank you, Stormy. For all of it. This is unbelievable.”
“We can change anything you need changing,” he says.
“No changes,” I tell him. “None at all.”
Stormy nods once and straightens up. He’s Stormy again, composed and quiet. Instead of taking the elevator, he heads for the stairs.
“Hey, Stormy.”
He turns back around.
“I’m going to take photos of everything and send them to Benji. He’s going to go crazy when he sees it.”
He smiles. That made him happy. Then he’s gone running down the stairs.
I pull my phone out and take a photo of the room and another of the view of the water.
Mickey: I’m here. Stormy built me a home above a bar. It’s perfect. The Gulf is right outside the windows and the light is filling the whole space. I can’t wait to show it to you. Here are photos. You’ll love it!
Three dots.
Benji: Mickey! It’s beautiful!! Can’t wait! The plants better have their own shelf by the time I get there.
Mickey: I’ll leave the decorating to you. Miss you.
I hear Tex’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. I suspect the elevator is too slow for them to use it much.
“Everything okay up here?” He comes over to join me at the window and hands me a beer.
“I’m so damn happy to be home, Tex.” I choke on the words. “I can’t tell you how happy I am.”
“Me too, Mickey.” He puts his big hand on the back of my head like he did the first night in the hospital.
“Don’t worry, we’ve got you now. Everything’s going to be alright.
That’s my promise to you. Just wait. You’ll see.
You’re home and good times are coming again. I swear on my life, they’re coming.”