The doctor didn’t get around to having a look at me until after eleven the next morning. Cindy had already called three times for an update. Good thing it was a Saturday; she didn’t have to go to work or take the girls anywhere.
After the doc released me I sent Cindy a text, cause I wasn’t ready yet to get into a conversation with her. I knew that was waiting for me at home once the girls were busy playing or watching TV. I got dressed and went downstairs and signed some papers, then I went outside and sat on a bench overlooking the parking lot. All I could think about was how much that night in the hospital was going to cost me. Three, four thousand minimum, that was my guess. Shit, they charge you fifty dollars every time they step inside the room.
So Cindy pulls up in the truck, and the girls aren’t with her, so I know I’m in for it. No way she’d leave the girls with anybody on a weekend unless she has serious business to attend to. I climb in and shut the door and sit there watching the telephone poles go by.
We’re nearly halfway home before she swings us off the road and into a Food Lion parking lot. She eases into the first empty slot and shuts off the engine. She sniffs a couple of times, and it finally dawns on me she’s crying. It hurts to look at her sitting there hunched up over the steering wheel.
“I didn’t do anything with that girl,” I tell her.
“You did something,” she says.
And there it was again, another chance to come clean and tell her about the money. Looking back, I can see these moments clear as day. But when you’re actually inside one of them, and there’s this heavy fog over everything you do and say and think, it’s not so easy to make an intelligent decision. I’d already disappointed her once. How would she react to finding out her husband was a thief? I felt hollow and broken and more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. The rest of the truth could only make matters worse.
So I told her, “I swear to God I didn’t.”
“That man threatened one of our babies!”
“I’ve been thinking about that. And I think all he wanted was to scare you. You and me both.”
“Well he did a pretty damn good job of it, didn’t he?”
“He’s not going to touch them, I know he won’t. How stupid would that be if he did? The playground monitor saw him, the vice principal knows he was there. You put it all on record.”
“So maybe he’s too stupid to think about that. Then what?”
“He’s not stupid, Cindy. He’s calculating. Pops told me about how the three of them shook down a college kid by charging him with rape.”
“Oh my God, Russell.”
“It won’t happen with us, I promise you. There’s no evidence. Not a shred. Things are different these days, what with DNA and forensics and all that stuff. Plus, if they try the same scam again, their history will come back to haunt them. We’ll take them to court.”
“With what? How are we supposed to pay a lawyer? I don’t even know how we’re going to pay your hospital bill!”
“I took care of that already.” I don’t know why I said it, Spence. Because I love her, I guess. And because I’d already caused her enough worry.
“What do you mean you took care of it? How?”
“Your insurance covered about a third of it. The rest was covered by some program for low-income families. With me being out of work and all.”
At first she seemed pleased by this news. Then she broke down and started crying for real. “Damn it, Russell. What’s next for us—food stamps? I will not live like that again!”
“You won’t have to, babe. I promise. If I don’t get that job at Lowe’s, I’ll find something else. I’ll flip burgers if I have to. You and the girls are my life. You know that.”
Finally she pinched the tears from her eyes and rubbed her cheeks dry. “I forgot to ask you how the interview went yesterday.”
“Good,” I told her. “Real good. He said I’d hear from him sometime next week.”
The thing is, I’d already heard from the guy who interviewed me. He took a long look at my résumé and said, “You know, Russell, I like to hire our vets whenever I can. Male and female. The thing about you is, with this college degree, you’re always going to be looking for something better. And you should have something better. So if I do what I want and hire you now, a month or so down the road, I’m going to have to fill the same position again.”
Which leaves me where, Spence? Getting screwed by the elephant, that’s where.
That first day back from the hospital, Cindy wanted me to spend the entire day on the couch, nursing my wounds like some kind of invalid. But I couldn’t sit still, no matter how much my body was hurting, not even with a couple of sweet little girls crawling into my lap every ten minutes. The more love they poured over me, the more I ached to set things right. But every possible correction I could think of felt less like a correction and more like trying to cancel out a negative with another negative.
That’s supposed to work in math, but I never could understand the logic behind it. Mostly all I had to know at the crushing plant was simple arithmetic. A hundred and twenty tons of this material and four hundred tons of that. Add them together and that’s how much inventory we had in the yard. Subtract it from the number of tons on the purchase order, and we either had enough inventory or needed to order more. But there was no way sixty negative tons times a hundred negative tons was ever going to produce six thousand tons of anything. It doesn’t work that way in real life. It can’t. All you’re going to end up with is a lot more of a bad thing.
All I knew for certain was that sitting around watching cartoons with my girls made me feel like a horde of ants was crawling through my veins. So when Cindy wasn’t looking, I slipped out into the garage.
My bike, which was still in the bed of the pickup, was banged up pretty good. The crankcase was dripping oil onto the truck bed, the handlebars were twisted out of alignment, and the front fender was bent up against the tire. The whole left side was caked with dirt and covered with scratches.
I put up the garage door and was pulling out the ramp when I felt Cindy standing there watching me. “And what do you think you’re doing?” she said.
“Trying not to go crazy from sitting still all the time.”
“Well you’re not ever going to ride that thing again.”
“You going to drive me to Lowe’s every day? Pick me up every night?”
It was the closest thing we’d ever had to a fight, Spence. I hated myself for the way I sounded.
Finally she said, “Well you can’t unload it by yourself.”
“I’ve done it dozens of times before.”
“Not with bruised ribs you haven’t. Where do you want me, top or bottom?”
How do you deal with a woman like that, brother? How do you do anything but love a woman like that? I honestly had tears in my eyes just looking at her.
“Stand down there and steady it for me.” I said. “The tricky part is when I have to jump down without letting go of it.”
I felt like my ribs were being pulled out of my side, but we finally eased the bike down and got it parked in the driveway. It hurt like hell holding in all my moans and groans the whole time.