Chapter 2
Tank
Here's what nobody gets about the door.
Everybody in this town thinks I don't answer it because I'm stubborn.
Judge thinks it. Connie definitely thinks it, and Connie says it, because Connie has never in forty-one years had a thought she kept indoors.
Even Rev thinks it, and Rev thinks less about people than anybody I know, which is a compliment.
It's not stubborn. Stubborn is a decision.
This isn't a decision, it's arithmetic, and the arithmetic is this: if I open that door, somebody sees me open it.
Somebody sees the hand on the frame. Somebody sees the four seconds it takes me to come off the hip and get square.
And then that person walks out to their truck carrying a new fact about me, and there is not one thing in this world I can do to take it back out of their head.
I'd rather be the guy who won't answer than the guy who can't cross a room.
That's it. That's the whole engine. Difficult is a thing a man chooses.
Diminished is a thing that happens to him.
I know which one I'd rather have my name next to and I have known it since I was nine years old and my father came home from the mine with his hand in a bandage and spent six weeks letting everybody help him and never got the rest of himself back.
So. The door.
She sat on my step for two hours and eight minutes.
I want it on the record that I checked the clock more than once.
I also want it on the record that I looked out the window twice, and the second time she was eating a granola bar with her boots crossed at the ankle like the porch belonged to her, and I stood there in my own hallway feeling something I could not name and did not care for.
Nine women from that clinic have come out here since July.
All right — three women and two men, and one of them was Okafor himself, who stood out there and said my name in that patient voice like he was calling a dog in from weather.
Every one of them left inside twenty minutes.
That's the design. You wait them out. Twenty minutes is the outer wall of what a person with a caseload can spend on a man who won't cooperate.
She'd blown past twenty minutes like it was a speed limit in a county she didn't live in.
At three-thirty-eight I ran out of ways to be a man standing in a hallway.
And she didn't flinch. She looked up at me from the step with her laptop open and no expression on her whatsoever, and she said okay — just okay — when I told her I wasn't doing PT.
Six months of people encouraging me. Six months of you're doing so well, Beckett and baby steps and Connie's friend Deb who brought a casserole and told me her cousin's husband had the exact same injury and was back on a horse in ten weeks, which, I don't know what to do with that, I don't have a horse.
And this one just says okay and then tells me I'm going to wreck my hip.
Not softly. Not with the head-tilt. She said labral tear and she said that's a joint, not a bone, different conversation entirely, and she looked me straight in the sternum and asked would I like the hip or not.
Nobody has asked me if I would like anything since April. People have been arranging things for me. There's a difference and I hadn't had a word for it until she stood on my gravel.
Then she got the other thing, the one I hadn't said out loud to a single living soul: that I've been doing it myself.
Nights. Twelve feet of kitchen, then twenty, then the length of the hall and back, then the porch step, over and over, at eleven at night with the lights off so the road can't see in.
She got that off two hours of watching a door.
So I let her in. I told myself it was to make her go away. I've had four months to look at that sentence since and it doesn't hold water in any weather.
She came in and looked around my house the way a nurse looks around a house, which is not the way a guest does.
Rugs. Cords. The gap by the dishwasher. She didn't say a word about any of it, but I watched her eyes do the walk, and I got the distinct sense that my kitchen was being read like a chart.
"You've got a step down to the carport," she said.
"I do."
"How's that going?"
"It's a step."
"Mm." She sat down at my table without being asked, which nobody does. "Three sessions."
"What?"
"Three. Not a program, not a course of care, not a treatment plan.
Three sessions and then we both decide, out loud, whether it's worth doing a fourth.
" She pulled a card out of her bag and wrote on it.
"Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. One o'clock.
Your house, because you won't come to the clinic and I've stopped pretending you will. "
"And if I say no?"
"Then I sit on your porch on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and do my charting, and you sit in here being extremely difficult about a coffee pot." She slid the card across. "I have thirty-one open notes. I could ride this out until Christmas."
I looked at the card. Small, neat handwriting, the kind they teach you in school and most people abandon by twenty.
"Three," I said.
"Three."
"To make you go away."
"Sure." She stood up and put her bag on her shoulder and did not smile, exactly, but something happened at the corner of her mouth. "Whatever gets us to Tuesday, Mr. Rhodes."
By Wednesday the whole club knew.
Ramona Bright runs the bar at the clubhouse and also, as far as I can tell, the intelligence apparatus of six counties. I came in for the first time in three weeks and got about four steps past the door before she said, without looking up from the glass she was drying:
"Green Tacoma."
"What?"
"Green Tacoma, Elko County plate, parked at your place Monday from about one-forty to about a quarter of four." She held the glass up to the light. "Two hours, Beckett."
"She's a nurse."
"Mm-hm."
"She's a nurse, Ramona. She's got a bag with a stethoscope in it."
"I'm sure she does." She set the glass down. "Otto says it's two hours because it's a thorough exam."
"Otto's a—" I stopped. "Where is Otto."
"Behind you."
"Hey, Tank," said Otto, delighted, holding a beer he had not been asked to bring me and a juice box he had, apparently, brought for himself. "Two hours, huh?"
"She sat on the porch."
"Sure."
"She sat on the porch, Otto, doing paperwork, because I wouldn't open the door."
Otto and Ramona looked at each other.
"That's worse," Ramona said.
"How is that worse?"
"Because that's a woman with patience, Beckett." She picked up another glass. "The other thing wears off."
I sat down at the end of the bar and drank a beer I didn't want, and I looked at the little white card in my coat pocket about six times, and on Tuesday at one o'clock I opened the door before she knocked.