“Friday can’t get here soon enough,” he says. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
Friday comes fast. I pack a bag that takes me forty-five minutes because I try on six outfits and reject all of them.
“You’re packing like you’re going to a photo shoot,” Dante says from the doorway of my room. “It’s a bar in the Panhandle. You’re going to smell like smoke and grease in twenty minutes.”
“I want to look good.”
“You look good in a trash bag. You’re annoyingly attractive and it’s one of the top three reasons I find you exhausting. Just pick a shirt and go.”
“The white linen or the blue?”
“The white. And unbutton the top two. You’re going to see a man, not interview for a job.”
The flight is ninety minutes of me staring out the window and vibrating with a frequency that the woman besideme can probably feel through the armrest. Once the plane lands, I’m in the rental car, and on my way in twenty minutes.
When I arrive at the bar, I park the rental next to Tex’s truck. I grab my bag and go inside. The bar is mid-afternoon quiet. A few regulars at the far end. Classic rock low on the speakers. The smell of hickory, beer and deep-fried air that my lungs have learned to accept as the scent of people I love.
Sheila is behind the bar. Her hair pinned up, reading glasses on the chain, towel over her shoulder. She’s pouring a draft with one hand and she looks up when the door lets the light in and sees me.
“There’s my baby,” she says.
My baby.
Possessive. Claimed. The “my” changes everything because the “my” means I belong to her now. I’m in the group of people that Sheila has decided are hers.
She finishes the pour, delivers it without looking, wipes her hands on the towel, and comes around the end of the bar. Sheila does not come around the bar where the customers sit. Ever. The fact that she’s walking toward me on my side of the bar makes the tears spill over and I don’t even try to stop them.
She takes my face in both hands. “Look at you,” she says. “All healed up. Pretty as a picture.”
“Hi, Sheila,” I manage.
She pulls me down and kisses my forehead. One firm press of her lips against my skin. Then she holds me at arm’s length and inspects me.
“You’re too thin,” she says. “I’ll send food up.”
“Sheila, I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask your opinion. Go on up. Mickey’s been rolling past this bar every twenty minutes checking the clock. I told him if he rolled past one more time I was putting a speed bump in the hallway.”
She gives my cheek one pat — equal parts love and get moving.
“Go,” she says. “Your man is waiting on you.”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and walk toward the back of the bar before I dissolve completely. I take the stairs because I’m in a hurry. I step inside and the light hits me first. Gold, warm, late-afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows and filling the space.
Mickey is there.
He’s in the wheelchair at the kitchen counter, wearing a blue shirt that fits him perfectly. His face lights up so bright when he spots me.
“Hi, handsome,” I say.
“Get over here,” he calls out.
I drop the bag and run to him. I’m across the room in five seconds and he’s already put the armrests down like he knew exactly what was going to happen the second I walked through the door. His hands are on my waist and he pulls me down onto his lap in one motion. I land against him and his mouth is on mine before I’m even settled.
This kiss is different from the bathroom kisses. There’s no clock ticking. No nurse coming in forty-five minutes. But the urgency is still there because phone calls and texts and lying in my bed replaying every sound he made are in this kiss. I can feel all of it in the way his hands grip my hips and the way he pulls me closer like the distance between us is still too much even though there isn’t any left.
I pull back, my forehead against his.
