9. Against Medical Advice
Chapter nine
Against Medical Advice
NELLIE
There are four outfits on my bed and I hate every single one of them.
That's a lie. I hate that I care. The outfits are fine.
The green top makes my eyes look good, which is a problem, because I don't want my eyes to look good. I want my eyes to look like the eyes of a woman who is leaving in nine weeks and knows it.
The black dress says trying. The scrub-adjacent T-shirt says not trying so hard it loops back around to trying.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I end up in front of the mirror in my bra, and I give myself one honest minute.
My body has been humming since Saturday night. Since a spotlight and a tight shirt and a man looking down that beam at me like a structure fire he meant to walk into. So, I let myself have it. Ten seconds. His hands. That scowl aimed at my mouth from two inches out.
Then I snap my ponytail elastic hard enough to sting and file the whole thing under never.
The blue thing with the buttons says nothing, which is why I put it on.
Then I take it off and put the green one on anyway.
"You have a rule," I tell the mirror.
The mirror does not care. The mirror is busy watching me fix my hair for the third time.
Rule one: thirteen weeks, then gone. Rule two: nothing you can't pack in an hour. Rule three: you leave first. It's tidier. I recite them like my mama used to recite Bible verses, right before she did the exact opposite of every one of them.
I grab my keys and go before the mirror can say anything smart.
***
The Wagon Wheel sits out past the feed store, a low wood building with a gravel lot and a neon sign missing its G.
Owen's truck is already there. Early. Interesting.
He kept a whole diner full of gossips waiting on Sunday, but tonight the man beat me here by a country mile. Somebody's making a point.
He's in a booth by the window. Clean shirt. Damp hair. He stands up when he sees me, and he does not pull out my chair, and I can see it costing him.
"Learned your lesson," I say.
"Wrote it on my hand." He shows me his palm. There's actually ink there. DON'T, in block letters.
I laugh before I can stop it. He looks pleased with himself, which should be annoying.
It is a little annoying. It's also a little something else.
We order. I order for me. He orders for him. Nobody dies. The waitress, a girl named Charlene who has definitely already texted somebody that we're here, brings sweet tea and a basket of fries big enough to require a permit.
"So," he says.
"So."
"You gonna throw that tea on me?"
"Night's young."
And there it is. His mouth does the thing. It's not a smile, exactly. It's the ghost of one, the outline where a smile used to live, and I want to trace it, and I put a fry in my mouth instead.
Here's the problem with Owen Peterson when he forgets to be mad.
He's funny.
Not trying-funny. Dry-funny, the kind that sneaks up sideways.
He tells me about the probies at the station, how one of them waxed the pole so good that Tater came down it like a greased pig at the county fair and hasn't lived it down since.
He does Tater's voice. He does the chief's voice, and it's so dead-on I choke on my tea.
And when I tell him about Dwayne Pruitt and the fishhook, and Dwayne's follow-up visit for the second fishhook, in the same thumb, Owen laughs.
Out loud. A real one. It cracks out of him like it surprised him on the way up, and he looks almost embarrassed by it, like the sound belongs to somebody he used to be.
I stare. He stares back.
"What," he says.
"Nothing. Didn't know you could do that."
"Do what?"
"Sound like a person."
He points a fry at me. "You're a menace."
"I'm a delight. Ask anyone."
"I did. Debbie Sue says you're a menace."
"Debbie Sue loves me."
"Debbie Sue loves everybody. It's not the character reference you think it is."
I steal his pickle off his plate purely to reestablish dominance. He watches me do it and doesn't say one word, and that, right there, is more dangerous than anything he could've said.
***
Halfway through the fries, it gets quiet. Not bad quiet. The other kind.
"Ask me something," he says.
"What?"
"You want to. You've been circling it all night like a buzzard. Ask."
"Fine." I wipe my hands. "But it's truth for truth. You get one back."
"Deal."
I should ask something safe. What I ask is, "Eleven schools in twelve years. That's my number. What's yours?"
He frowns. "That's not a question, that's a confession."
"It's both. Keep up."
So, I tell him. Short version, which is the only version I do.
My mama, who I loved, who fell in love the way other people fall down stairs.
Every new man got a new her. New hair, new church, new town, new Nellie, dragged along behind like a suitcase.
How I learned to pack a life in forty minutes.
How I got good at goodbye by never letting it be a surprise.
"You leave first," he says. Quiet. Not a jab this time. Holding it up to the light.
"It's tidier."
"That what you're doing here? Being tidy?"
"You had one question, Peterson. That's three."
He holds up his hands. Fair's fair.
"Your turn," I say. "Chicago."
The table goes still. His jaw works. I watch the walls try to go up, watch him fight them, and I keep my mouth shut and my face soft, because I have sat with a hundred people right at the edge of the thing they can't say, and the only medicine for it is time and quiet.
"I lost someone," he says finally. "In a fire."
The fries sit there. The neon buzzes.
"I was working that night. Across the city." He turns his glass a slow half-circle on the table. "I couldn't get there in time."
That's it. That's all of it. And I know, the way you know a chart's got pages missing, that it's the edited version. The waiting-room version. There's a whole floor underneath that sentence he's not showing me.
I don't push. You never pull a dressing before the wound's ready. You'll take healthy tissue with it.
Instead, I put my hand over his on the table.
I don't decide to. My hand does it on its own, the same traitor hand that held his one beat too long over a suture line five weeks ago.
He goes still. Looks at my hand like it's something that wandered in from outside.
Then he turns his palm up under mine, slow, and his fingers close, warm and careful, like I'm the one who might spook.
Neither of us mentions it. We talk about other things. Amos Kessler's dog. The engine that runs on prayer and baling wire. Charlene refills the tea twice, and both times we let go, and both times, after, we find our way back.
***
He walks me to my car. Because of course he does. Man probably walks little old ladies across streets they weren't fixing to cross.
The gravel crunches. The night's gone soft and warm, crickets sawing away in the ditch grass, and my car is right there, and I am walking as slow as a human being can walk without medically qualifying as stopped.
"This was—" I start.
"Don't say fine."
"I was going to say tolerable."
"High praise."
"Don't let it go to your head."
We're at my door. I should get the keys out. My keys stay in my bag. The wind pushes a piece of hair across my face and before I can get it, his hand is there, tucking it back behind my ear, and his fingers graze my jaw on the way down and every nerve I own reports for duty.
"Nellie."
"That's my name."
"I'm gonna need you to stop being funny for about ten seconds."
"That's a big ask."
But I've already stopped. My hand's found the front of his jacket, gripping it, and I don't remember telling it to.
He's close. He smells like clean cotton and woodsmoke and bad decisions.
His eyes drop to my mouth. Mine drop to his.
There is exactly one inch of Texas air left between us and it is losing ground fast, and rule three is somewhere in the parking lot yelling and I cannot hear a word she's saying, and—
His hip shrieks.
My purse shrieks.
Both at once, the exact same second, his pager and my phone going off in a two-part harmony from hell. We jerk apart like teenagers caught on a porch.
He's already reading his pager. I'm already reading my screen. ER group text, all caps, Debbie Sue: MASS CASUALTY ACTIVATION. MVA, MULTIPLE VEHICLES. ALL HANDS. COME NOW.
"Multi-vehicle," Owen says. His voice is different now. Flat. Fast. Radio voice. "They're toning out everybody."
"I have to go." I'm fumbling keys. He's five steps gone already, then turns, walks backward toward his truck, and for one second the man from the booth looks out at me from inside all that gear-up focus.
"This isn't over," he says. "Any of it."
"Go, Peterson."
He goes. Truck door, engine, gravel spitting. My hands are steady when I start the car, because that's the job, that's the switch, you flip it and your hands don't get a vote.
His window's down as he pulls past me, radio already squawking, and I catch the dispatch through the open glass, some other-county voice reading the scene address into the night.
"—multiple vehicles, entrapment reported, twelve hundred block of Juniper Lane—"
Juniper Lane.
My street.