Dan snickered at this.
“Anyway… I don’t know. Eric and I were just friendly. I never thought of him that way. But I was back in town working, and he was back subbing at the high school, and we started seeing each other, and I got pregnant. It wasn’t till then that I, you know, sort of figured out I wanted to have a family with him.” She swallowed. “And I was in love with him.”
“How’d it start?” he asked immediately. So they could blow by what she’d just said. She looked at him, probably wondering if he really wanted to hear this.
“When Rick Brinklan died, they had a parade for him.” Dan stared at the condensation on his water glass. “Everyone was back for it. Our families ended up by each other when the coffin came through. Dad’s friends with Marty Brinklan, and I hadn’t seen him that upset since Mom’s cancer. Afterward, Eric and I went for a drink and had a good talk—Eric’s just a really…” She hesitated. He could feel her gaze the way you feel a fire if you put your face too close. “Decent guy. It’s funny, in high school I thought his eyes were too close together, but it’s the stuff like that you end up falling in love with.”
“That’s good,” Dan said. “You sound happy.”
Maybe her smile was rueful. “I am.”
The conversation stuttered. He’d feared it since he first saw her. That his jaw would clamp, and the heft of whatever he felt for her would hold it closed like a counterweight. One of Hailey’s skills was changing the subject, though.
“You know what I can’t wait for? When Emma gets old enough that I can start getting her into Calvin and Hobbes. Hence the tiger outfit. I’ll tell her she went as Hobbes.”
“You ever read them still?”
“Are you kidding? I have all the books on a shelf by my toilet.”
He barked a laugh.
“Only— Okay, here’s the thing.” She leaned in to reveal the embarrassing. “Calvin and Hobbes changes when you get older, especially after you have your own kid. I think because it’s this really…” She paused, searching for the right words. “This specific, acute rendering of childhood and everything that childhood’s about. Just all the hope and friendship and wonder of being a kid, but also some of the sadness and the loneliness. You know?”
Of course he did.
“So sometimes I’ll read it, and I’ll just…” She laughed brightly. “I’ll start crying. It’s silly as hell, but I’ll get to the strip where Calvin’s railing against the condominiums being built in the woods where he plays or the one where he’s putting himself in the transmogrifier, and it doesn’t really matter the subject, I’ll just be moved by it. You know? And then I’m sitting on the toilet, holding Calvin and Hobbes, getting all teary…”
They were both laughing, and then her hand shot out and grabbed Dan’s.
“No! No! And I can’t let anyone ever know that! Promise to take it to the grave.”
“What about the raccoon story line?”
She pulled at her cheeks until the pinks of her eye sockets shone wetly. “Oh God the raccoon! When Calvin’s talking about death and he tells Hobbes, ‘But don’t you go anywhere.’ That’s like rip-my-heart-out, leave-me-sobbing-in-the-corner Calvin and Hobbes.”
It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It’s why he dreaded the moment when they’d have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways—because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.
Their waitress had what looked like blood spots on her apron and an uneasy-making bruise on her arm that he saw when she set down their plates. Hailey voiced her displeasure at splurging on a burger while he forked at a salad. Vicky’s menu didn’t offer many options for vegetarians. She cut her burger in half, and asked him what his days were like. “Tell me about your life while you eat your dainty little salad.”
He told her of Chesapeake Energy; visiting the rigs; the difference between horizontal and non-horizontal wells; his boss, a jocular, high-spirited former Pitt baseball star turned engineer, who called him “D.E.”; his apartment, a one-bedroom in a two-story unit on the west side of Titusville, overlooking Oil Creek (and the less scenic Morrison Builders Supply).
“Maybe I’ll come visit sometime.”
“Not a lot to do in Titusville. Nearest movie theater’s about a half-hour drive.”
She gave that twitch of a smile, hard to read now, and bit off a gnarly chunk of beef.
“Seeing anyone?” she asked, mouth full.
“Not right now, no.”
“Seen anyone lately?”
He felt the old frustration, born when Lisa told him about Curtis Moretti, now curdling in the light of her husband, her child, her new life.
And like that, he let it go. Like he’d always done.
“I don’t have a lot of time for dating. I’m always helping out with Rudy.”
“Your mom told me, yeah.” She poked at her fries. Her face gleamed with grease and compassion. “How do you help out?”
He didn’t give her the whole story. Just the aftermath and Rudy’s injuries. His mother, Yunely, worked at the Titusville Quality Inn as a housekeeper. She didn’t speak much English and needed a lot of help dealing with Rudy’s injuries, talking to doctors, and navigating the VA. When Dan arrived back stateside, he visited Rudy at the polytrauma unit in Richmond, Virginia. The doctors told Yunely no way, no how would he make it. He had severe burns and had been shot in the head, just above the right ear. The bullet had torn across his frontal lobe and exited the other side. That the medics had kept him alive at all was something of a miracle. But Yunely refused to take him off life support. Dan had enough high school Spanish that he didn’t need the hospital translator to understand Dios encontrará la manera. God will find a way.
Burns had seared away most of the flesh on his chest and left arm. To prevent life-threatening infection, the medics had needed to close those wounds right away, washing away charred flesh with light streams of warm water and then beginning grafts immediately. The burns on the right side of his face required a much more difficult procedure. The doctors cut a strip of skin from his shoulder, peeled it back, and let it grow onto the ruined part of his face. This odd pink bridge looked like a giant tongue lapping at his cheek. It would be fourteen more surgeries until the skin took. The grafts contracted into thick scars and pulled at the tissue around his nostrils and right eye. Like pinched plastic.
Yet the burns were not why the doctors didn’t hold out much hope. The bullet had done severe trauma to his brain. They gave the technical explanation, but this meant as little to Dan as it did to Yunely. Parenchymal hemorrhage and edema. The only thing he really understood was that they’d removed a large piece of his skull to allow his brain to swell. All Rudy had was skin between mind and world.
He thought Yunely was just being a mother. Dan knew his own mom would have to be dragged away by about fifty cops before she let the doctors take him off life support. Yunely and Rudy’s father had come from Nicaragua to join family in Pittsburgh and to escape the rampaging of the Contras. She had an immigrant’s tirelessness, the quiet ability to accept and assimilate whatever new obstacle descended. He thought it would be his job to convince her to let Rudy go—at least that’s why he told himself he was in Richmond. Then he finally saw Rudy. His good eye, the one that had escaped the burn and wasn’t buried in a stretched plastiscape of skin grafts, landed on Dan and widened. Rudy couldn’t move, but he made a sound deep in his throat, a grunt of recognition, Dan was sure. He took Rudy’s limp palm and held it. Beneath the carnage of his face he could see what Yunely saw, that Rudy was very much alive inside.