15. Stop Wasting Them
Chapter fifteen
Stop Wasting Them
OWEN
The boot weighs four pounds and it is the best thing I have ever worn.
Dr. Osei frowned at my X-rays for a long minute this morning like they'd insulted him personally. "You heal like a man with somewhere to be."
"I do have somewhere to be."
"The cast comes off. The boot goes on. Weight as tolerated." He pointed a pen at me. "Tolerated does not mean ignored, Mr. Peterson."
Nellie stood behind him with her arms crossed, mouthing every word along with him like she'd written the script. She had.
Now it's Saturday evening and I'm walking down Juniper Lane on my own two feet. Sort of. One foot and one robot.
Nellie walks on my left, close enough to catch me, far enough to pretend she isn't ready to.
"You're favoring it," she says.
"It's a broken leg. Favoring it is the whole system."
"Slow down."
"You slow down."
"That's the comeback? A month in my house and that's what you learned?"
Mrs. Wasserman waves from her porch swing. Two houses down, a kid on a bike circles back twice to stare at the boot.
"Is that a robot leg?"
"Half robot," I tell him. "The knee's still original."
He rides off yelling it to another kid. Half robot. By church tomorrow it'll be the whole leg and a government experiment.
At the corner, Amos Kessler is set up in a lawn chair in his own front yard, oxygen line looped over his ears, watching the street like it's television.
His niece is on the porch behind him, shelling peas into a bowl, keeping one eye on him the way family does when they've moved in to do exactly that.
He sees me and lifts two fingers off the armrest. A salute.
I lift two back.
"Butterscotch is in my shirt pocket," I say as we pass.
"Owen."
"His niece checks his sugar twice a day. I asked."
Nellie shakes her head. But she's smiling at the sidewalk, and I put that smile there, and something in me comes off its hinges, quiet, like a door lifted clean off the pin.
Here's the thing I figure out somewhere between Amos's chair and the town green. I haven't thought about Chicago in three weeks. Not the department, not the apartment, not the flight of stairs I couldn't climb fast enough. Ninety days was supposed to be a countdown.
Somewhere in that little yellow cottage it turned into a calendar.
Willowbend stopped being before. It went and became now when I wasn't watching.
***
The green is lit up like somebody dared it.
String lights zigzag between the oaks. There's a banner sagging over Main that says FOUNDERS' DAY and under it, smaller, PEACH EVERYTHING.
They mean it. Peach pie, peach cobbler, peach salsa that Hank from the barbershop is defending to anyone who slows down.
A band on the flatbed stage is doing violence to a George Strait song and nobody minds.
Debbie Sue finds us in four minutes flat.
"There he is." She looks at the boot. "Can you dance in that thing?"
"No."
"Can you sway?"
"Debbie."
"Because the twins have a bet going and I need to know which one I'm paying."
Tater comes up behind her with a paper tray of fried peach pies, hands me one without asking. "He can lean. I've seen him lean on a truck for two hours straight. Man's a professional."
"I'm not dancing."
"Swaying," Debbie says. "Keep up."
Nellie takes the other pie off Tater's tray and doesn't say a word, and the two of them share a look over it that I'm not supposed to see. I see it.
The band swings into something slow. Debbie starts herding people onto the grass like a border collie in a sundress. Couples pair off. Somewhere near the pie table I catch a flash of red hair. Rue Hawthorne, standing very still, watching the dance floor the way I watch a building before I go in.
Nellie licks peach filling off her thumb. "You want to sit down?"
"No."
"Your leg."
"My leg is fine."
"You keep saying that like it's got a hearing coming up."
"Dance with me."
She stops with the pie halfway to her mouth. "You can't dance."
"I can stand. You do the rest."
"That's not how dancing works."
"Nellie." I hold out my hand. Palm up. Same as she did at the Wagon Wheel, that night at the table, when neither of us said anything about it. "Six days you drove me to therapy. You can stand on my foot for one song."
"Stand on your—"
"Good foot. Like a wedding. Like a kid at a wedding."
She looks at my hand. She looks at my face. Whatever war she's running in there, she loses it right in front of me.
"If you fall," she says, stepping out of her sandals right there in the grass, "I'm charting it as noncompliance."
"Chart away."
She steps up onto my left boot. The real one. Her arms come up around my neck and mine close around her waist and the whole world narrows to thirty inches of Texas summer.
She fits against me like the answer to a question I quit asking. All of her. There is not one inch of this woman I would send back.
We sway. Barely. The band plays and the lights burn and her forehead is level with my chin and she smells like peaches and antiseptic soap and I could stand here until the boot rusts.
"People are watching," she says into my collar.
"People have been watching since the fishhook."
"Since the auction."
"Since the fishhook. Dwayne talks."
She laughs. I feel it in my chest before I hear it, this small shaking thing she gives me, and I stop swaying.
And standing still with her weight on my boot, it lands on me that I'm happy. Plain as a bell. The old voice starts up right on schedule. You don't get this. You know what it costs.
One breath. Two.
Then I look down at the string lights caught in her hair, and I set it down. On purpose. First time in two years. It can sit in the grass till morning.
She tips her head back. "Owen?"
I look at her mouth. She catches me doing it. Neither of us moves for one second, two, and then her fingers curl into the back of my neck and that's the last vote counted.
I kiss her.
On the green, under the string lights, in front of God and the pie table and every gossip in three counties.
Slow. No hurry in it at all. Her toes press down on my foot and her breath catches against my mouth and somebody two tables over whoops, and then it spreads, scattered clapping, Debbie Sue's whistle sharp over all of it.
Nellie pulls back an inch. Her eyes are wide.
"They're clapping," she whispers.
"Small town."
"Owen, the whole—"
I kiss her again. She quits arguing.
***
I don't know which of us moves first. That's the honest report.
One minute we're on the grass and the next her hand is in mine and we're behind the bandstand where the lights don't reach, and she's got two fists in my shirt and her back against the plywood and I've got one hand braced over her head.
"This is a terrible idea," she says against my jaw.
"Terrible."
"You're injured."
"Not where it counts."
She bites my bottom lip for that one. I deserve it. I chase her mouth back down and she opens for me and the kiss goes from slow to something with teeth in it.
Her hands find the hem of my shirt. Slide under. Flat and warm on my stomach, and my whole body pulls tight like a line under load.
"Nellie."
"Shut up." Her palms move higher. "I've been changing your bandages for five weeks. I've earned this."
I get my mouth on her throat and she makes a sound that the band, thank God, covers. Her head tips back against the plywood. My hand finds the curve of her hip, the give of her waist, then the bare skin of her thigh where the dress runs out.
I slide up under the hem. Slow. Giving her the whole trip to stop me.
She doesn't stop me. She says my name against my ear, ragged, nails biting into my shoulder, and my fingers find lace and the heat of her through it, and we are one bad decision from doing this at a town festival with half the county eating pie forty feet away.
The bandstand wall creaks.
We both freeze.
The band plays on. Nobody comes.
She looks up at me in the dark. And she doesn't pull my hand away.
She presses it closer.
"Owen."
"Tell me to stop."
"Don't."
The lace slides aside. She's soaked. Drenched, and I haven't done anything yet but kiss her against a bandstand, and knowing that does something ugly and wonderful to my chest.
"Owen." A warning. Or permission. With her it's usually both.
I learn her right there in the dark with the band covering everything. Slow. Patient. Two fingers and she takes them with a sound she bites off against my jacket, and she is tight and hot and moving before I move, hips chasing my hand like she's furious at me for the pace.
She is. She grabs my wrist and tries to set her own rhythm.
I don't let her.
"Uh-uh." Low, against her ear. "You had your way for six weeks. This one's mine."
Her forehead drops to my shoulder. Her thighs are shaking. I curl my fingers and find the spot that makes her whole body stutter, and I stay on it, steady, thumb working her in slow circles while she clenches down on my hand so hard I feel my own pulse.
"There," she breathes. "Right—"
I stay right there.
She comes apart quiet. She has to. Both fists in my shirt, her body pulling tight and then shaking, squeezing my fingers in waves I feel all the way up my arm, my name pressed into my collarbone where nobody can hear it but me.
I work her through it, slower, softer, and don't quit until she grabs my wrist herself and holds it still.
I ease out of her. She makes a small lost sound about it that I plan to think about for the rest of my life.
Out front, the song ends. Applause. Another one starts.
"Okay," she says. Not to me. To herself. "Okay."
"Okay," she says. Not to me. To herself. "Okay."
Her hand drops to my belt.
I catch it. Lace my fingers through hers and hold it there against my chest.
"Not here," I say. "Not up against plywood."
"Owen Peterson." Her laugh comes out wrecked. "You have terrible timing."
She's breathing hard. So am I.
Her hair's a wreck from my hands and her lips are swollen from my mouth and she is the best thing I have ever seen in low light.
"Owen." Different voice now. Quieter.
"I know."
"We can't keep—" She stops. Sets her forehead against my chest, right over the hammering. Her fists are still in my shirt. Holding on or holding off, I can't tell. Maybe she can't either.
When she talks again it comes out like a prayer she's stopped believing in. Her fingers are still trembling where they grip my shirt.
"Eight weeks. I leave in eight weeks, Owen.
The contract's up and there's a placement board with my name on it and this—" Her fingers tighten.
"This has an expiration date. It was always going to have one. So whatever that was out there, whatever this is back here, it ends in eight weeks.” “Six weeks. "
The band winds down. Out on the green the crowd claps for the song, for the night, for everything they can't see behind this stage.
I take her face in both hands and tip it up so she has to look at me. Her eyes are shining and scared and daring me all at once, and I know exactly what a smarter man would say. A smarter man would let her have the rule. A smarter man never made it out of Chicago.
"Then stop wasting them."