Seven
Craig
I dreamed of her again. It was the same smile and the same shine in her hair, but instead of sunshine there were stage lights.
But it was still her. And we were at a table, just not the metal one I remembered.
That was strange, remembering a dream while dreaming an entirely different dream.
Instead of streaming sunshine there were bright lights, and in place of sun warmed air was a stale crispness, like an aggressive HVAC system.
Instead of a dull roar, the babble of incomprehensible singing flitted about and onstage out of the corner of my eye, was a prancing cow.
But Rilee was still smiling when she looked at me, which did something to my stomach.
The flip flop of my stomach disturbed me and I woke way too early for a Saturday morning.
I tried rolling over and going back to sleep, but I couldn’t find my way back into the dream.
Why was it different? I’d dreamed the same dream for weeks and now it had changed.
Was that good? Rilee was still in it, but we were in a different place.
Was it only the place that changed? I reached for the memory but it was wispy like gripping fog, you can feel it’s wet but everything else slips away.
Then actual memory blended with dream memory and I saw her across the table with a touch of donut glaze on her lip a moment before she licked it clean.
Rolling the wrong way, my bad leg seized in a spasming cramp and I jerked upright with a grunt.
I was done with bed. Slapping my brace on, I rubbed at my thigh while fumbling my way through the bathroom.
Then I put the coffee on and paced around the kitchen.
Sometimes Lukas is up on Saturday morning, it can be a busy day at the store, but today he wasn’t moving around.
Lukas sleeping in was rare, and it left a warm feeling behind my sternum. The man wasn’t a machine after all.
Looking up from pouring a cup of coffee I spied Jackie standing in the kitchen doorway, the line of a pillow fold still crossing her face like a scar. My rattling about must have woken her.
“You’re loud.”
“Sorry,” I shrugged, blowing on the coffee before carrying it into the living room. With my peg leg, drinking and walking at the same was too much for me to manage. I’d get a nostril full of hot liquid.
Easing into the recliner section of the sofa I put my legs up and then took a sip. Jackie collapsed on the other end of the sofa, a mug in her hand.
“Does your mom know you’re drinking coffee?”
“Their door is locked. I’ll be done before they’re up.” The pillow crease was fading from her cheek.
“The door’s locked?” I asked, not processing the connections.
Rolling her eyes Jackie huffed her fifteen-year-old sound of contempt.
“They went out for dinner last night and took a cab home.” Dinner last night was pizza and all Jackie had said was her parents would be late.
“So the door is locked.” She rolled her finger in a spiral like I should be catching on, “and neither of them will be up for a while. Geez you are dense.”
And then I got it. Date night. My sister and her husband and a locked bedroom door and a seven-year-old in the house. “Come on, she’s my sister, I didn’t need that in my head.”
“And they’re my parents so back at you.”
“Drink your coffee,” I grumbled.
“Mom said you had an interview. And a date.” She threw the word date at me across the rim of her mug.
“Coffee, it was just coffee.”
“And.”
And I watched your coach lick her lips. I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, “It was better than the job interview.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very high bar.”
Sighing, I started in, “They said they’d call my references and let me know.”
Jackie sat up a bit straighter, probably hoping that she’d get her own room again soon. “That sounds pretty good.”
Maybe it was because as a kid she didn’t know what the world was really like yet and needed her bubble burst, or maybe I just needed to put into words what I suspected so I would believe it myself.
Shaking my head I disagreed, “He told me this story about how his dad injured his back and was never the same afterwards. That was right after I literally stumbled my way through the interview.”
“Ouch.”
“Not a great experience. Took me twenty minutes to rub the charlie‐horse out from just sitting in their crappy chairs.” Why was I telling her this?
Her eyes widened momentarily as she glanced down at my brace as if she was seeing it for the first time. “But the date went better?” Her voice came out with an unintentional squeak that made her blush.
Shrugging, I hid behind my coffee for a moment until I realized I’d done the same thing with Rilee and went back to just holding the mug. “I didn’t fall over.”
Jackie’s teenage half glare, half eye roll broke through the dam and I started talking, “It was good. At least I think it went good.” I’d learned with Veronica that just because I thought something was fine didn’t make it so. “We went to this trendy place on First by the theater.”
“Oh, I know that place,” Jackie perked up. “They have the craziest craft donuts, sprinkled with flowers and herbs and stuff.” Looking at me with slightly narrowed eyes she asked, “Did you pick the place?”
I shook my head. Craft donut? Seriously, I thought that was for small batch beer. “I’m not that cool, she chose.”
That must have been the reassuring thing to say because Jackie relaxed back into the couch. Can’t have your own family be too cool, I guess.
“Well, keep going. She sounds neat.”
Neat? She was a little bit messy. I kept thinking about that frosting on her lip. “I wouldn’t mind seeing her again. It was nice talking with her. No offense.”
“None taken. You have to play with kids your own age once in a while,” Jackie said with a wry smile. “So, are you? Going to see her again.”
“We didn’t make any specific plans.”
“But you can call her. People your age do that right, call people.”
I started to say we’d exchanged numbers but realized it wasn’t true. She’d taken my number but hadn’t given me hers. Nor had I asked for it. What did that mean? That she wasn’t interested in me? What did it mean to her that I hadn’t asked? Oh, I screwed this up too.
“She has my number, but I didn’t get hers.”
“Well, that’s not horrible. If she contacts you again you’ll know she’s interested because she has no pressure to respond to you. Are you going to run into her again? Where did you two meet?”
Would saying, your school, be like one of those bad ‘your mom’ jokes? But Jackie’s mom is my sister, so I shouldn’t even joke like that. “At the gym.”
“Sooo, you see her there often?
“Nope. First time.”
“Seriously? What did you do just walk up to her and say, hey let’s go out?”
“Actually yeah.” I shrugged. It sounded significantly cooler and more self-assured when Jackie said it. “Well, I stared at her first and then worried I was creeping her out so I just walked up and asked her to go out for a drink. She chose coffee.”
Pounding her fist on the couch Jackie hopped up onto her knees. “That is so cool. You have to go out with her again.”
“Well maybe, if she calls.”
Coffee now forgotten, I had the full attention of a fifteen-year-old who’d never suffered a broken heart or body. Her shininess made me feel like used motor oil. “You’re going back to the gym, right? I mean if you don’t have her number she needs to see you again. So, you have to go back.”
A door down the hall clicked open and Lukas came striding out in his pajamas. His shirt was on backwards. Blinking the sleep out of his eyes he looked at the two of us sitting on the couch. “Oh, you’re up. Both of you. Is that coffee?” Lukas stared at Jackie.
Belting back the half cup in my hand I reached out and took the other mug from Jackie. “Yup. She was holding my other cup.” Raising it up with a smile in Lukas’s direction I took a sip. It was way too sweet, but I kept the smile on my face.
“Oh-kay,” Lukas nodded like a bobblehead on a dashboard. “Things go okay yesterday?”
“Yea.” I nodded.
“Good,” Lukas nodded back, glancing from Jackie to me and back to Jackie. Then he drifted into the kitchen.
“Thanks,” my niece whispered.
“Sure.” Then I knocked the rest of her mug back fast enough to avoid tasting it.
I didn’t need two cups of coffee but it was worth the perspective of a teenager.
Had I ever been that young and idealistic?
Recalling the sawdust on my father when he came home, or the perpetual grime in the wrinkles of his hands and him getting me my first job at sixteen, a grease monkey changing oil, yeah, I don’t think so.
Idealism is what happens when parents are good at their job. Way to go Kathy. And maybe Lukas.
“Here, take care of these for me.” I handed both mugs back to Jackie, closed the recliner, struggled to my feet, stretched, and then shuffled down the hall toward the shower.
I didn’t go to the gym. I probably could have used a good leg day, but the truth was I didn’t want to see Rilee.
Well I did, but I didn’t. This new dream had me messed up.
When it was the same scene over and over again it seemed special.
Like destiny was pushing us together. This new thing was weird.
Dream-like weird. Fuzzy around the edges with jumbles of images and sounds, totally lacking the clarity I’d come to expect each evening when I hit the hay.
Staring in the mirror, I ran my hand across my chin.
The stubble wasn’t long enough to bother with.
Shaving every day just didn’t seem that important any more.
Setting the razor aside, I ran the water hot and took a long shower.
Long enough that Jackie pounded on the door to yell at me for taking all the hot water. Good for her.
Now clean, I laid down for a while. If it was summer I might have tried to mow the lawn.
Instead, once Darren and Cami were up and everyone was doing their Saturday things, I vacuumed.
When you’re unemployed, Saturdays are just like every other day, and if you’re not careful you can forget they even exist because each day can be the same as the next.
Kathy and the kids gave me continuity. So, I could vacuum their house.
The kids hated to do it, and Lukas didn’t know how to turn it on.
I think he recognized the big bag of hot air as a distant relative. Vacuuming was also horrible.
Before the log messed me up it was no big deal to run a rug doctor through an apartment in thirty minutes.
But most of vacuuming is in the hips and low back, like a good golf or baseball swing.
Now with the motor running, which drowned out all the noise around me, it was all in my shoulders.
And I had to pay attention. Every back‐and‐forth stroke required constant thought to keep my hips and ribs right over my feet, letting all the movement come from my shoulders, and the push and pull from my arms.
First my room, and then carefully the hallway.
Only one motion at a time. Push, pull, turn the body, step, push, pull.
Even when you are careful it’s easy to forget and let a stray hip–swivel–push slip in.
Because that is the real way to do it. What I was doing was just a work around, like most things in my life right now.
And when I wasn’t careful I paid for it.
A twinge or a tweak, or a sharp shock down the back of the thigh.
When I got to the end of the hallway sweat was beaded across my forehead and I’d saved Kathy fifteen minutes of work.
Leaning on the black plastic Bissell I knelt down and unplugged the machine. Then pushing back up, I stood and shuffled out into the living room. Darren sat on the couch with a game controller, cordless thankfully. I wouldn’t be able to lift the vacuum over something on the floor.
“Can you plug this in?” I held out the vacuum plug.
Wordlessly and without judgment the kid hopped up and snugged the plug into a socket before sitting back down, all in one effortless motion.
I struggled through the larger room, carefully making back and forth circuits almost like mowing the lawn.
Darren slid from one end of the couch to the other to keep the television visible as he chopped up some pixelated creatures as I blocked his vision.
When I turned off the machine Darren leaped up and unplugged it without me asking.
I hadn’t been here a year and my hobbling ways were already just part of the furniture for him.
Was I just turning into a slow–moving mountain?
Collapsing on the couch with a glass of ice water and a handful of ibuprofen, I let the moving colors on the television numb me.
This stuff really was crack for kids. My surgeon should have just prescribed sixty minutes of nickelodeon twice a day instead of the oxy.