Chapter 43 Mickey #2
He disappears inside. I hear fast footsteps, a zipper closing. He reappears in the doorway holding his bag in one hand and Frankie in the other.
“I’m ready,” he says.
The drive takes thirty minutes. Benji is in the passenger seat with his bag between his feet, Frankie on his lap and the window down. The salt air wrecks his hair, and he doesn’t fix it. His hand is on my knee. His thumb moves back and forth.
I park the truck at the Roadhouse and transfer to the chair while Benji comes around with Frankie and his bag, and we go in through the front door together.
The bar is quiet. Two regulars at the far end. Sheila behind the taps.
She sees us. Her eyes go from the uniform to Benji to Frankie in his hand and her towel stops moving for exactly one second before it starts again.
“Well,” she says. “It’s about damn time.”
Benji walks to the bar and Sheila comes around. She takes his face in both hands.
“You scared me, baby,” she says. “Don’t you do that again.”
“I won’t,” he says.
She kisses his forehead. One firm press. Then she lets him go and walks back behind the bar.
We take the elevator up. He sets Frankie on the nightstand next to George.
They’re together again. Then he turns to me.
“I need one hour. Do not come to the bathroom. Do not knock. Do not ask if I’m almost ready.
I need sixty uninterrupted minutes and then I will be the version of myself that goes on a desk at a sheriff’s station in Bay County, Florida for the rest of your career.
This photo is going to outlast us both. It needs to be perfect. ”
“Sixty minutes. I got it.”
“Not fifty-nine,” he says. “I’ll know.”
He disappears into the bathroom with his bag. The door closes. The shower turns on, then a few minutes later, the blow dryer.
I sit by the window and watch the pelicans diving in the water.
At exactly sixty minutes the bathroom door opens.
Benji walks out. His hair is pushed back with volume.
His face is clean and the puffiness from three days of crying is hidden under whatever he did in that bathroom with products I will never understand.
“I’m ready,” he says. “Now where should we sit?”
He walks the room, looking for the best angle to place my phone and positions us. He wheels me to the window where the light is best and turns the chair so the Gulf is behind us and the plants are visible over my shoulder.
“Where will you be?” I ask.
“Right here beside you.” He crouches beside the wheelchair. His face next to mine. His cheek against my cheek. His favorite teal shirt against the khaki uniform. His painted nails on my shoulder. “Ready for me to set the timer on your phone?”
“I’m ready.”
He jumps up to set the timer, then moves back into position.
“Smile,” I say.
We both smile and wait for the countdown on my phone. Benji checks the photo and frowns.
“One more,” he says before setting the timer again.
“Are we going to be doing this all night?” I tease.
We smile again and the flash goes off. Benji looks at the screen.
“Perfect,” he says, his voice cracking.
He hands me the phone. “What do you think?”
There we are. Two smiling men. One in a wheelchair in a sheriff’s uniform. One crouching beside him wearing a wide smile that I’m grateful for after the weekend we’ve had.
“This is the one,” I say. “I’m uploading it now and I’ll pick it up at the drugstore on my way into work in the morning. It’ll be on my desk before my first cup of coffee.”
He stands and looks at the photo on the screen one more time. “We look good together, Mickey,” he says. Then he steps back and the bright smile for the photo fades. The hurt is still there. He’s been holding it in.
“Come here, sweetheart,” I say, holding out my arms to him.
“You’ve never called me sweetheart before,” he says, moving towards me.
“I should’ve. There’s a lot of things I should’ve done. Please, come sit with me.”
He walks over. I pull him down onto my lap the way we’ve done a hundred times in this room — his legs across mine, his arm around my neck, his weight settling against my chest.
“I owe you more explanation than what I said on the porch,” I say.
“Mickey —”
“I need you to hear it and I need to say it while I’m looking at you.”
He doesn’t answer but he doesn’t move. His hand finds the collar of my uniform shirt and his fingers rest there, against the fabric.
“Do you remember the day you were sitting at the bar talking to Sheila about the lighting? You were arguing about the overhead fixtures.”
“I remember,” he says. “They’re still too harsh.”
“A guy named Ernie came in that day. He’s a regular. Retired plumber. Good man. He looked at you for one second longer than he’d look at anyone else and then he moved on. That was it. One second. No big deal.”
Benji doesn’t say anything.
“My brain took that one second and ran it through every person who might walk into the bar that night. The Saturday crowd. The bikers. The tourists who’ve had too many drinks and get loud.
I sat there running scenarios about what might happen while you were three feet away from me talking about light fixtures. ”
“What kind of scenarios?” he asks.
“Someone deciding your eyeliner is a problem. A hand reaching for your shirt. A man calling you a word I can’t unhear. And me sitting in this chair unable to stand up. Unable to get between you and whatever might happen.”
His fingers tighten on my collar.
“That’s when I moved my hand,” I say. “You reached for me on the bar top and I held it for a second and then I let go. I put my hand on the armrest. You thought I was tired.”
“I remember,” he says. “I noticed. Figured you might be tired.”
“I was putting distance between you and a target. Because I decided — without asking you, without telling you — that if someone in that bar saw my hand touching yours and had a problem with it, they wouldn’t come for me.
I’m in a wheelchair. They’d come for you.
And I can’t get out of this chair fast enough to stop it. ”
He pulls back enough to look at me. I can’t read his face and that scares me because Benji’s face is an open book.
“Are you telling me that every time you pulled your hand away from me,” he says, “you were running a threat assessment?”
“Yes.”
“On Ernie. An old retired plumber who is a good man.”
“On everyone.”
“Including your neighbor, Jim, at the candy store?”
“Yeah. Jim’s a good man too. He wouldn’t have cared.
I know that. But we were on the sidewalk at Pier Park.
My old patrol route. I’ve arrested people on that block.
Responded to domestics two streets over.
Everyone in that area knows me as Officer Weaver.
And you were standing behind my chair holding a stick of rock candy and I —”
“You what?”
“I couldn’t say the word. Boyfriend. I wanted to say it.
I was proud to have you standing next to me and I wanted Jim to know who you were.
But my brain got there first and all I could see was what could happen to you if the wrong person heard it on that street.
Two seconds. Jim was looking at you and all I had to do was turn my head and say this is Benji, my boyfriend.
And I let the moment pass because some part of my brain decided that saying it out loud on that sidewalk put you at risk. ”
“Really, Mickey? On a sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. In front of a man who wanted to bring you a casserole. How dangerous could he be?”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Do you? Because from where I was standing, it felt like you looked at me and decided I wasn’t worth one sentence. I was no one. Your mother called me her son’s boyfriend earlier and two hours later I was invisible.”
“You were never invisible to me, Benji. I was never ashamed of you. Not for one second. I know that’s what it looked like and I know that’s what it felt like. I’m telling you that is not what was happening in my head.”
“Then what was happening in your head, Mickey? Help me to understand. I’m having a hard time with this.”
“Fear. Pure and simple. I was afraid for you. Every single time. Not of what people would think of me.”
“Whatever your intention was, you still made me invisible to Jim.”
That lands. It’s supposed to. I take it.
“You’re right,” I say. “I made that choice. I told myself it was protection but it was a choice and it was mine. I didn’t give you any say in it.”
Benji doesn’t talk for a long time. His fingers are picking at a loose thread on my shirt pocket, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.
“What about the party?” he finally asks. “You said I was helping out with the party. To your sergeant. The man you work for. Am I in danger from your boss and your co-workers too? Are they a threat? Because if they are, I might need to rethink me being here in Panama City.”
“No, they’re not, and I know what I said.”
“I need to hear why you said it.”
I close my eyes. The party is the one I’ve been circling around because part of it I can explain and part of it I can’t defend. He deserves to hear both.
“Two things happened at the party. The first one was real. Around eight o’clock, the bikers pulled into the lot.
Patches I didn’t recognize. I asked Tex if he knew the motorcycle club and he said no.
He’d never seen them before. They set up at the high-tops by the pool table.
They were loud. Getting louder. And I noticed some of them watching you. ”
Benji doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting.
“The way men watch someone they’ve decided doesn’t belong. You were crossing the room with a tray. You were being you — visible, beautiful, impossible to miss — and these men were tracking you, nudging each other. I clocked it and I couldn’t do anything about it from the chair except watch.”
“You didn’t tell me or say anything about them.”
“I should’ve told you. You were smiling and seemed happy, and I didn’t want to take that away from you. The crazy thing is that I didn’t want you to be afraid at the bar.”