Chapter 4 #2
"The knee is fine. The graft is fine, the surgeon did good work, and you can't hurt it doing what I'm going to ask.
What's wrong with you is that your thigh has quit, and it quit because nobody's made it fire since November, and every day you walk on it like that you're teaching your hip to do the leg's job.
That's the thing that ends people. Not the tear. The habits after."
"So I'm messed up."
"You're ten weeks behind. That's different.
" She held his eye. "Second true thing. If you work with me three days a week and do your homework the other four, I think you're running by the end of February and playing in the fall.
Running. Not cutting, not a field, not contact.
That's the honest number, and if anybody's given you a better one, they were being nice to you. "
His mother made a small sound.
"Third true thing." Laura put her hand flat on the table. "It's going to hurt, and it's going to be boring, and boring is worse. Now get up here."
He got up there.
She started him on quad sets. Nothing. The most basic thing there is — lie flat, press the back of the knee down, tighten the thigh.
He could not do it. He lay there for a minute and a half and the muscle did not move, and she watched a sixteen-year-old boy's face come apart over an exercise a healthy person does without noticing.
"Hey," she said. "Look at me. That's the good news."
"How is that the good—"
"Because it means nothing's been asked of it." She put her fingers on the muscle, up high, at the inside. "Don't push the knee down. Squeeze right here. Squeeze where my fingers are. Pull your kneecap up toward your hip. Now."
Nothing. Nothing. And then — the smallest possible flicker under her fingers, a twitch, a quarter of a second.
"There," Laura said.
"That wasn't anything."
"That was the whole thing," she said. "Again."
By the end of the session he was holding it for three seconds at a time, ten in a row, and sweating like he'd run stairs, and cussing at her under his breath in a way that made his mother say his name sharply from the chair.
"He can cuss," Laura said. "He's earned it."
At the door his mother stopped and got her wallet out, and Laura watched her decide how to ask what it cost.
"Forty a visit," Laura said. "Twenty if that's hard. And if it's still hard, you bring me something out of your garden in the summer and we'll call it square, and I don't want to hear another word about it."
The woman stood there a second.
"They said you was ruined," she said. Not unkindly. Almost as a question.
"I know what they said."
Brady came four times the first week. He came on a Saturday when she wasn't open, and she opened.
By the end of the month he could straight-leg raise without the lag. By the first week of February he had a quad again — she measured both thighs with a tape and wrote the numbers on the wall by the door in pencil, and made him watch her do it, because the numbers were the point.
Nine and a half centimeters of difference in January. Six by the first week of February.
Word got around, the way it does in a town of 2,900, and it did not get around because of who her husband was. It got around because Donna Combs's boy was walking right.
That was the thing she had not expected, and it turned out to be the whole difference.
For a decade, every room she walked into in Nashville had already decided what she was before she opened her mouth.
She was the wife. People were kind to her the way you're kind to a nice piece of furniture that came with the house.
She had sat at tables where men explained football to her, gently, while her husband was across the room with his shoulder wrapped in the tape she had shown the trainer how to lay.
Nobody on Depot Street cared who she was married to. They cared whether their back was better on Friday.
The first time somebody argued with her — Roy, about whether he could go back to lifting, loudly, in front of the whole room — she almost laughed out loud in his face with pure happiness. Nobody had disagreed with her about anything that mattered in four years.
"You're going to hurt yourself," she told him.
"I been lifting since I was nineteen."
"And you've got the shoulder of a man who's been lifting wrong since he was nineteen. Sit down."
He sat down. And he came back Tuesday.
By the second week of February she had eleven patients a week and a notebook with names in it, and she had started turning the sign on the door to OPEN at seven because a man named Wayne wanted to come before his shift.
She was tired all the time. It was the good kind. She came home at seven and ate standing up and fell asleep by ten, and the rock stayed against the back door and the green folder stayed in the drawer, and for six weeks nothing came.
On the second Thursday in February she stayed late to finish the billing, which she did badly, on paper.
The light was going. Depot Street was empty. She had her coat half on when she stopped in the middle of the floor of her own clinic — twenty-two hundred square feet, north windows going gray, two tables and a stool and her name on the glass in her own handwriting.
She stood there and did the accounting, and it came out like this:
She had not thought about Jake all day.
Not once. Not when she woke up, not in the hours with her hands on people, not at lunch, not driving. He had been gone out of her head all day, and she had noticed it now only because the room had gone quiet.
Laura stood in the dark clinic and waited to feel good about that.
What came instead was grief, plain and enormous, arriving out of nowhere with her keys in her hand — because she understood exactly what it meant. It meant it was possible. It meant a day could go by. It meant that whatever this was, it was not something she was waiting out.
She had spent ten years being one half of a thing, and it turned out she could be a whole other thing entirely, and be good at it, and be tired at seven, and be fine.
She locked up and stood a second on the sidewalk with her hand flat on the cold glass.
Then she went home, and there was a car she did not know parked at the top of Quarry Road with its lights off.