3. Maya
MAYA
The plate lands in front of me and for a second I forget Lilly is even sitting there.
Pancakes.
Three of them, thick as paperbacks. The kind of golden that only happens on a griddle that's been seasoned since before I was born.
A scoop of butter slides off the top of the stack, and there's a little steel jug of syrup that Donna sets down next to it like she's daring me to be sensible.
I am not going to be sensible.
"Careful," Donna says. "Plates are hot."
The plates are always hot.
The plates have been hot at Marlene's since 1987, and Donna has warned every single customer every single time, and I love her for it.
Then she sets Lilly's down, and Lilly actually gasps.
Because Lilly, who is five foot nothing and somehow eats like a longshoreman, has ordered the works.
A cheeseburger the size of her own face.
A mountain of fries.
And, because apparently a burger and fries is a starter in Lilly's world, a strawberry milkshake so tall it comes with its own spoon and the metal mixing cup on the side, in case the glass wasn't enough.
"Oh, that's obscene," I say.
"Don't you dare." She's already pulling a fry free. "Don't you dare judge me. You got pancakes at one in the afternoon."
"Pancakes are a respectable lunch."
"Pancakes are dessert wearing a hat."
She's not wrong.
I pour the syrup anyway. All of it, more or less.
For a minute neither of us says anything. There's just the first bite.
The good one.
The one you actually taste before your mouth stops paying attention.
And the hum of the diner around us, plus the little involuntary noise Lilly makes that would get her thrown out of a nicer establishment.
This is the best part of my week.
I'm only realizing it now, with syrup on my chin.
Then Lilly puts her burger down, props her chin on both hands, and fixes me with the look.
The one that means small talk is over.
"Okay," she says. "First week. Tell me everything. And I mean everything."
"It was good," I say. "Busy."
"No no no." She points a fry at me like a tiny prosecutor. "Not the version you'd tell your mom. The real one. Are the doctors hot? Is anyone there hot? Give me one hot person, Maya. I've been working from my couch in sweatpants for three weeks and I am starving."
"You have a milkshake the size of your head."
"Starving for gossip," she says. "Different food group."
"It's a hospital, Lil. Not Grey's Anatomy." I cut into the stack. "Most of the doctors I've met this week are old enough to be my dad."
"There has to be someone,” she says.
"The first one I met has a comb-over and tells every person he passes the same joke about the cafeteria meatloaf.
The second is about a hundred years old and calls me, exclusively, 'the new girl.
' Nobody's brooding in the rain,” I say.
“Nobody's gorgeous and emotionally unavailable in a supply closet.
There's me, my supervisor Brenda, who's sixty-one and has opinions about my posture, and Frank at the front desk, who's been threatening to retire since the Clinton administration. "
"I don't believe you," she says. In a tone that says she does believe me, but wishes there was something more exciting to hear about.
"My Tuesday was a man named Gerald who won't wear his hearing aids because they make him feel old." I point my fork at her. "He's seventy-three."
Lilly winces.
"Then there was a lady with a new hip who showed me forty photos of her cat,” I continue, “a teenager who tore something playing football and cried when I touched his knee. And a guy who put his back out lifting a kayak onto his truck. Alone. To prove to his wife he could."
"Okay, but?—"
"That's the job, Lil,” I say. “Knees and hips and people who did something dumb and now can't sit down. It's not romance. It's the opposite of romance. It's the human body filing a complaint."
I say it like it's a hardship.
But, the truth is I love it.
I've wanted it since I was twelve. Since the summer I came off a trampoline the wrong way and broke my ankle in two places and spent three months with a woman named Patrice who taught me how to walk again and made me feel, the whole time, like it was the most normal thing in the world that I would.
I didn't want to be the kid on the table. I wanted to be Patrice.
"Besides," I say, "I've been too busy to so much as look up. First week in a new department. I'm still learning where everything lives, whose name is whose, which printer doesn't eat the paper. You don't notice anything your first week except how much you don't know yet."
All true. None of it the part she's asking about.
"Anyway." I point my fork at her. "Enough about me. How's the freelance work going? Any new clients? Didn't you say there was a big one circling?"
Lilly's eyebrows go up.
"And that logo you did last month was incredible, by the way. Genuinely. The colors, the little—" I gesture, because I do not have the words for what graphic designers actually do. "The font of it all. Very impressive."
Lilly puts her burger down.
"You're doing the thing again," she says.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you talk too much because you don't want to say what's really on your mind," she says. "It was a logo for a refrigerator company, for God's sake. It wasn't that good."
"Well," I say. "I thought it was brilliant. I was very impressed."
"Of course it was brilliant," she says. "I'm amazing. Now… Back to you. Spill the beans. What's really on your mind."
I focus on my pancakes instead and take another bite, trying to act as calm and casual as I possibly can.
"Nothing," I say. "Really."
I don't look at her when I say it.
I look at my cappuccino, which is the safest thing on the table, and take a long sip through the foam.
Then I cut another bite of pancake and chew it slowly, like a woman with absolutely nothing on her mind.
When I look up, Lilly hasn't moved.
She's just sitting there. Both elbows on the table, chin in her hands, with an expression on her face that says she'll stay like that all afternoon if she has to.
Her burger sits forgotten in front of her.
I last about four more seconds.
"Okay. Fine." I put my fork down. "There was one patient."
"I knew it," she says, in a triumphant voice. Like she'd just guessed the number of jellybeans in the jar at the county fair and walked off with the whole thing. "I knew it the second you ordered pancakes. You only order pancakes when something's eating you."
So I tell her.
I tell her about Cole.
How he had to dip his head to get through my door. How he's a firefighter who got hurt in a building collapse, his back a roadmap of scars.
How he's about the size of a barn and just as chatty as one.
And then I get to the part that's been sitting under my ribs all week.
"The thing that really got to me," I say, "is that he wasn't taking it seriously. Any of it. Not me, not the recovery, none of it. It was like he didn't want to be in the room at all. Like the whole appointment was just something being done to him that he had to wait out."
"A firefighter?" Lilly says, raising an eyebrow. "Is he handsome?"
I take another few bites of my pancakes and try to pretend like I haven't been dreaming about Cole every night since I met him.
"Please, Lilly," I say, "I'm a professional health care provider.
I don't think of my patients like that. He's just a guy who got hurt.
It's my job to help him get better. And he's not taking it seriously, which is the part that actually worries me.
A shoulder and a back like that don't fix themselves.
If he doesn't put the work in, he’ll carry those injuries the rest of his life.
They get worse, not better. And in his line of work that's everything.
You can't carry someone down a ladder on a back that locks up halfway.
If he keeps this up, it won't just hurt him. It could cost him the job entirely."
"I knew it," Lilly says, picking up her burger and taking a huge delicious looking bite. "He's hot. He must be, to get you this worked up."
We eat in silence for a couple of minutes after that.
Which I take, foolishly, as a sign that it's over.
That Lilly's had her dose of gossip, made her joke, and we can get back to the serious business of pancakes.
But, I should know better.
Because even with my mouth full and my best friend finally, blessedly quiet, I can't get him out of my head.
That's the problem.
That's been the problem all week.
I keep thinking about his hands. How enormous they are.
I had to guide his arm through half the range-of-motion tests, my fingers on his wrist, and his hand could have closed around both of mine without trying.
I keep thinking about his shoulders.
The size of him under that shirt, and then with the shirt gone. All that muscle the job had put there, none of it for show.
And the scars.
His whole back is a map of them.
Old ones gone silver. Newer ones still angry. And one long mean one I didn't ask about because I wasn't sure my voice would hold.
Mostly, though, I keep thinking about how he hid it.
He was in pain the entire appointment. Real pain. The kind that should have put something on his face.
But, he gave me nothing.
Not a flinch. Not a breath out of rhythm.
A man doesn't learn to bury pain like that without a lot of practice, and that thought has been sitting behind my ribs ever since.
I wish Lilly wasn't quite such a good mind reader.
I'd come to lunch hoping to escape my thoughts. Maybe hear one of her hilarious stories about her awful neighbors.
The ones who play music and have parties until early in the morning, and have tattoos all over their faces.
"So," she says, right on cue. "What are you going to do about it?"
I poke at the last of my pancakes.
"Get him to take it seriously, I guess. Get him doing his exercises.
" I shrug. "I don't actually know how yet.
Maybe I'll ask one of the senior physios how they handle the stubborn ones.
There has to be a trick to it. Some way you get a grumpy, six-foot-something wall of a man to do what he's told. "
Lilly sets down her milkshake and looks at me with those big blue eyes of hers that could cut through steel, if she wanted them to.
"No, Maya," she says. Slow and patient, like she's explaining something to a child. "What are you going to do about your feelings for him?"
I put my knife and fork down on the plate and sit back in my chair.
I let out a breath.
"There's nothing I can do, Lil,” I say. “Honestly.
He's a patient. My patient. And I've been at this job exactly one week.
You don't get to walk in the door on day five and start making eyes at the people you're supposed to be treating.
There's a whole list of things you absolutely do not do, and 'the patients' is right at the top of it, somewhere just above 'controlled substances.
' I'd be fired. Not slowly, either. New girl asks the firefighter out over the parallel bars? They'd have my badge before lunch."
"Okay, but you're skipping a step." Lilly dunks a fry in her milkshake, which is a war crime I've chosen to stop commenting on. "Nobody said anything about asking him out at work. I said feelings. Feelings are allowed. They don't come with a dress code."
"Mine do." I shake my head. "Lil, I've wanted this since I was twelve.
You know that. I went to college for it.
I spent years studying so I could be good at it.
Real years. The placements, the exams, the night I cried in a stairwell over a shoulder diagram because I couldn't keep the rotator cuff straight in my head.
I'm not setting all of that on fire in my first week over a man with nice shoulders. "
"So, they are nice,” she says.
"That's not?—"
"You said nice shoulders,” she says. “Unprompted. I'm just noting it for the record."
I close my eyes for a second.
"All I'm going to do," I say, slowly, like slow makes it true, "is my job.
I get him doing his exercises, somehow. I'll figure out the trick.
He plays ball, he gets better, and the day he gets better he stops being my patient.
And then I get on with my life. Exactly like before.
Doing the thing I've wanted to do since I was a kid who couldn't walk right. "
Lilly doesn't say anything for a moment. She just looks at me.
"Well," she says, "if you ask me, I think you should just go for it."
"Lil," I say.
"I mean it, Maya. I've known you a long time.
You don't go soft over any good-looking man that just happens to walk into your life.
So, if this one's got you ordering pancakes and staring into your cappuccino, then it isn't nothing.
" She shrugs. "You're allowed to be happy.
And people meet the love of their life at work all the time.
My cousin Renee met her husband working at the DMV, for God's sake. It happens all the time."