Chapter 3
Junie
The first session, he kept his boots on.
That sounds like nothing. It isn't. A man who keeps his boots on has one foot out the door in his head, and I've learned not to argue with it, because the boots come off on their own around session four when he stops rehearsing his exit.
Tank's came off in session two. I didn't say anything. I just noted it, the way I note everything, in handwriting nobody but me can read.
We worked in his living room because it had the most floor. I moved a coffee table on the first day and he watched me do it with an expression like I'd rearranged his ribs.
"You can put that back after," he said.
"I'm not going to, though."
"Why."
"Because it's eleven inches into your walking line and you've been going around it since April." I set it against the wall. "You've built your whole house into a maze that flatters you. We're taking the maze out."
"It's a coffee table."
"It's a decision, Mr. Rhodes."
"Tank."
I looked up.
He was standing there with his arms folded, and he looked profoundly uncomfortable about having said it, the way men like him always do when they hand you a smaller name.
"Tank," I said.
"That's what people call me."
"I gathered. Sit down on the floor."
"I'm sorry?"
"Floor. All the way down. And then get up again."
And that — that right there — was where I found the actual injury, and it had nothing to do with a femur.
Because he could do it. It took him fifty-one seconds and it cost him something and it was ugly in three specific places, but he could get down onto that floor and back up onto his feet under his own power, and when he got there he was breathing hard and he would not look at me.
That's not a man who can't. That's a man who has decided that anything he can't do beautifully, he won't do at all.
"Forty-one seconds next week," I said.
"You don't know that."
"I do, actually. It's the second one that's slow. You're bracing for pain that stopped being real about six weeks ago." I wrote it down. "Your body's still guarding a bone that's already healed. It's like leaving the alarm on after you've moved out."
He sat down in the chair, hard.
"That's a hell of a thing to say to a man."
"Would you like me to say a nicer one?"
"No," he said, after a second. "No, that's — no."
I have put my hands on maybe four thousand people.
That's not a boast, it's a job. Hips, shoulders, spines, the soft place under the jaw where you check a pulse when the wrist won't give you one. It is the least mysterious thing in the world to me. I have felt more human bodies than I have had conversations.
So I would like it on the record that there was nothing whatsoever unusual about putting my hands on the outside of Beckett Rhodes's thigh, above the knee, to feel what the quad was doing when he fired it.
There was nothing unusual about it for approximately four seconds.
Then he went completely still.
Not tense. Men go tense; that's normal, that's guarding, you talk them down out of it.
This was the other thing. This was a large man going absolutely motionless in a way that had nothing to do with his leg, and my own hands — which have never once in nine years done anything but their job — became abruptly, catastrophically aware of themselves.
"Fire it," I said, and my voice came out fine, thank God.
He fired it. The quad came up under my palm like a cable pulling.
"Good," I said. "That's — that's good. Again."
Neither of us said one word about it. We were both magnificently professional. We were so professional that the room got about ten degrees warmer and the clock on his wall became the loudest object in Nevada.
Session five, he did the fifty-one seconds in thirty-nine, and I forgot to be professional and said "yes" out loud with both fists up like a woman at a ballgame, and he laughed.
First time. It sounded like it hurt him somewhere unrelated.
Then he ruined it.
"You know I'm forty-four."
I kept writing. "I read your chart. I know your blood type, your creatinine and the name of your emergency contact, which is your sister and which you have not updated since 2019, by the way."
"Forty-four," he said again, "and you're what."
"Twenty-seven."
"Seventeen years."
"Your math's good."
"When you were starting kindergarten I was—"
"Don't," I said.
He stopped.
I put the pen down. I'd been down this road with exactly nobody before and I could still see the whole length of it from the trailhead.
"You're going to do the thing," I said, "where you say something cruel about yourself, and then you get to sit back and watch to see if I flinch.
And if I flinch, you were right. And if I don't flinch, you get to say I'm being kind, which is also being right.
" I looked at him. "It's a good trick. It can't lose.
But it's not about me at all, is it. You'd be running it on the wall if I weren't here. "
His jaw did the thing.
"I'm not the one who brought it up," I said. "I want you to notice that. Twelve sessions. Not once. You brought it up, Tank, and then you handed it to me like it was mine to carry."
The clock again. That clock.
"That's fair," he said, eventually, and it came out of him like a rock out of a boot.
He asked me about myself in session fourteen, which for him is roughly equivalent to another man proposing.
"Fourteen contracts," he said. "Okafor told Judge, Judge told Ramona, Ramona told the entire—"
"—Great Basin. Yes."
"Why."
"Why travel?" I coiled the resistance band around my hand. "Twelve weeks. You go in, you're extremely useful, you leave. Nobody's disappointed in you at twelve weeks. There's a ceiling on how much you can let somebody down."
I heard it after I said it. That's the trouble with saying things in a quiet house.
"Huh," he said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said huh. That's a whole paragraph, out of you."
Which is when he stood up, without the chair arm, and went out the screen door onto the porch, and then down the step, and then across the yard.
Forty feet of gravel and dead grass and one buried irrigation line that makes a hump in the middle. No cane. No hand on anything. Nothing between him and the ground but a rod, four screws, and six months of doing it wrong in the dark.
He got to the fence post and put one hand on it and stood there with his back to me.
I did not clap. I did not say anything. I stayed exactly where I was, on the second porch step, with the resistance band still wound around my fist, and I let it be his.
After a while he said, to the fence, "It's forty-one feet. I measured it in June."
"Yeah?"
"Took me nine minutes then. On the cane."
"And now?"
He turned around. The light was going flat and orange across the whole ridge behind him, and he was standing in the middle of his own yard on his own two legs, and he looked at me for a long moment and did not say a number.
"Coffee's on," he said. "It's still bad."
"I know," I said. "I've had it eleven times."