Tank's Little Nurse (Copper Ridge Kings MC #2)

Prologue

Tank

Eleven seconds.

That's the part nobody asks about. They ask how fast, they ask how far I flew, they ask whether I remember hitting. Nobody asks about the eleven seconds before, and those are the only ones I've kept.

I came around the bend on the grade with the sun going flat and orange across the hood of the world, and the deer was already standing in the westbound lane.

Not running. Standing. A big mule doe with her ears out sideways like she was listening to something behind her, and she looked at me the way you look at weather.

Eleven seconds is a long time. Long enough to do the whole arithmetic.

Forty feet a second, gravel on the right shoulder, the drop past the gravel, the guardrail that ends about sixty yards short of where it ought to.

Long enough to think, clean as a bell, this is going to be bad.

Long enough to think about my sister Connie, and what her face was going to do.

Long enough to be annoyed — actually annoyed, like a man who's left the stove on — that I'd told Judge I'd help move the beer cooler Sunday and now I wasn't going to.

And not one second of it long enough to do anything about any of it.

That's the thing I can't get people to understand. I wasn't helpless because I was hurt. I was helpless first, for eleven whole seconds, with my hands on the bars and my eyes open, doing math that didn't have an answer.

Then eleven weeks of ceiling tile.

Elko General has a hundred and eighty-four tiles in a two-bed room, and one of them, above the sink, is stained the shape of Oklahoma. I know because I counted, and then I recounted, and then I named some of them, which is not a thing I've told anyone and is not going in any file.

They rebuilt the femur with a rod and four screws. The surgeon was about thirty and enthusiastic. He said the word hardware like he was proud of it, like I'd come in for a kitchen remodel. He said I'd walk. He did not say how, and I have since learned that the how is the entire conversation.

Connie drove me home the last Sunday in October.

Six months gone. I unloaded my own bike off the trailer and it took me eleven minutes, and Rev stood there the whole time with his hands in his pockets and did not help, which is the single kindest thing anybody's done for me in my life.

He knew what it would've cost me. He let it cost me nothing.

Then everybody left, the way you want them to and then immediately don't, and the house was quiet in the specific way a house is quiet when it's been holding its breath for half a year.

The coffee pot was twelve feet from the kitchen doorway.

I stood there and I did the math again, because apparently that's what I do now.

Twelve feet. Counter runs the whole left side — that's four feet of it, then the gap where the dishwasher is, then three more feet of counter, then the stove, which is hot-adjacent but structurally sound.

Right side is open floor. The cane was leaning against the door frame where Connie had propped it, still with the hospital tag rubber-banded around the grip.

I looked at the cane for a while.

Then I put my left hand flat on the counter and I went.

Four feet of counter, easy. The gap by the dishwasher was where it got interesting, because that's eighteen inches of nothing and the leg didn't want to take a full turn of weight, and it let me know in a way that made my vision go gray at the edges and my mouth taste like a battery.

I stood there in the middle of my own kitchen sweating through a shirt, breathing like I'd carried something up a hill.

Then three feet of counter. Then the stove. Then the last stretch, hand over hand along the front edge like a man working his way down a boat rail in weather.

Four minutes. Twelve feet.

I got the pot filled and got it going and stood there with both hands braced on the counter while it ran, and the smell came up, and I want to be honest here because I'm not going to be honest anywhere else.

I counted it as a win.

Four minutes to cross a kitchen, and I stood there over that coffee pot feeling like a man who'd done something. Feeling good. Feeling like I'd put one over on somebody, though I couldn't have told you who.

That's how far down it had gotten. That's the part I'd like to skip when I tell it.

I drank the coffee standing up, because the chairs were four feet the wrong direction and I was done spending.

Outside, the light went off the ridge the way it does, all at once, like somebody pulling a sheet off a table.

From my kitchen window you can see about eleven miles of road.

You can see the bend on the grade. You can't see the sign, but you know where the sign is, the yellow diamond with the leaping deer on it that somebody put up in 1988 and everybody has been driving past without reading ever since.

I stood at that window with a cup in my hand and I thought: I'm going to have to look at that every morning for the rest of my life.

And then I thought, with the calm of a man who has just crossed twelve feet of linoleum and believes he has learned something: I can do this by myself.

Six months, that idea held. Six months, nine missed appointments, one unopened cane, and a limp that was quietly wrecking my other hip while I congratulated myself.

Then a nurse sat down on my porch step and would not leave.