"Oh, come on. You know, pickleball. The game you get when you screw with the genetic code of tennis, ping-pong, and badminton." She nodded as if this should make sense to me. "And cornhole is the hipster cousin of horseshoes, quite frankly. If I had a slab of plywood, I would definitely drill a hole in it and then ritualistically toss some beanbags into that hole. For sure. That is good, old-fashioned entertainment right there."
"I think I heard my sister saying she's having some cornhole games set up at her wedding reception next weekend." I glanced out the window, hoping I'd find an explanation as to why we were still trapped in the airplane despite being parked at the gate.
"See? You'll need to be in top cornholing shape," Zelda replied. "And I don't know your sister but I'm positive she wouldn't want you and your jacked-up shoulder situation ruining her photos. By next weekend, you're going to have a teeter-totter thing going on, one shoulder higher than the other. Sorry, Lurch, but your sister isn't allowing that." She shook her head. "What do you say? Why don't we call that doctor now?"
Finally, the aircraft doors gusted open and the passengers around us surged to their feet. Zelda shrugged her backpack on and waited in the aisle for me to join her. I followed but made the error of trying to swing my laptop bag over my injured shoulder. The pain nearly buckled my knees. Zelda observed all of this and tried to take the bag from me but I brushed off her advances and shifted it to the other arm as if I wasn't choking back a horrible cocktail of vomit, tears, and wounded animal whimpers.
We walked up the jetway and through the busy terminal in silence. When we reached the escalator to the baggage claim, I gestured for her to go ahead of me.
"It's funny that this is your chivalry," she said, paused at the entrance. "Of all the ways for you to show any gendered deference, you choose the ladies-first route here."
I had fifteen different things to say to her. Most of them contradictory and too opaque to form into clear thoughts. Most of them lurked around the reality that I didn't know how to interact with Zelda. She didn't fit into a tidy LinkedIn headline. She wasn't the standard formula of adjective, job title, career goal. And she was unlike anyone else in my life. I didn't know anyone who existed the way she did, all blue-streaked hair and moon tattoos and math tricks. And the rest of it too—her willingness to let me get away with shit as long as she could point it out in the process. Her refusal to take no for an answer. Her addictive warmth. I didn't know what to do with her.
All I could say was, "Zelda, people are waiting behind you."
She stepped onto the escalator. I followed.
* * *
If I wasthe kind of man who measured masculinity by shows of strength, that masculinity would've been shredded after a visit to the nearest urgent care clinic with Zelda.
It'd started long before this point but it went downhill when I tried to grab my luggage from baggage claim. I was certain I'd heard bone scraping against bone when reaching for the handle and pulling the suitcase off the belt. It sounded awful and felt a thousand times worse, but I didn't have to tell Zelda any of that. No, crying out and dropping the item on my foot was plenty of an announcement.
She was good enough to gather me up, busted shoulder, sore foot, nasty mood and all, and cart us and the sum of our luggage out of the terminal. She poured me into a car and pointed the driver in the direction of the clinic while I grumbled about my terrible day.
Then, I hadn't objected when she followed me into the exam room. I should have. I should've instructed her to stay in the waiting room but I didn't. I told myself I allowed her to join because I wasn't thinking clearly. I wasn't myself. The whiskey—what a terrible idea—and my shoulder and the entirety of this day. And I let myself believe that.
I believed it when Zelda helped me out of my shirt and while she chattered on about nonsensical things between the doctor's exam and X-ray. She only stopped talking about whatever it was for brief moments. There was never enough silence for me to take stock of these events. It was probably better that way. I'd experienced enough reality for one day.
"Oh, this is going to be fine," Zelda said as the door closed behind the doctor. He'd gone to collect the supplies necessary to reduce my shoulder without worsening the hairline fracture to my collarbone, which was a technical way of saying he intended to manipulate my bones back into their proper places in a manner that sounded remarkably medieval.
"We must've heard different things because I heard 'intense pain and pressure,'" I replied.
"'Intense butbriefpressure and pain."
"Yeah. That makes it so much better," I answered. "The only way this could be more intense would be if this guy rips my fucking arm off."
Zelda sat back in the chair beside the exam table, crossed her legs and folded her arms over her torso. "Riddle me this, boss. How did you sit through that entire flight with a bone halfway out of the socket? Because you were as pleasant as a peach, or, you know, as pleasant as you get. Not until we landed did I realize things were amiss in Ashville."
I ran my palm over my chest, suddenly aware I was half naked with a relative stranger by my side. The morning was a distant, misshapen memory. I couldn't remember where I was supposed to be this evening or what I'd meant to accomplish today. It wasn't this. It wasn't hiring an archaeologist as an auditing assistant and it wasn't dislocating bones. And I was annoyed about all that, annoyed about losing the day—and my watch. Annoyed about reverting back to some helpless infant version of myself. Annoyed about the entire disaster. "Whiskey," I answered. "A large volume of it."
She hummed in response, bounced her leg, and then, "Does that happen often?"
I glanced over at Zelda and found her worrying a spot on her jeans with her fingernail. "Which part?"
She didn't look away from her jeans. "All of it. Any of it. Whatever."
I continued watching as she worked her nail against the fabric. As far as I could tell, there was nothing there but she had a way of seeing things everyone else missed. Maybe it was that she saw the things no one wanted seen. Or some of both.
"No. Not often," I said.
Zelda bobbed her head a bit. "What does often mean to you?"
"It means there's usually only beer in my fridge when my brother buys it," I answered. "It means an expensive bottle of Scotch has been in my office for at least two years, since whenever I wrapped up the Hudson-Bolton audit, and it's only half empty."
"No more self-medicating, okay? I don't like being around that kind of behavior and it's not how I'm going to run this office. I won't have any of the Don Draper routine from you."
I leaned back on my good arm, peered at her. "Why do I have the impression I've hired the Mary Poppins of tax and audit?"
