“I will. I’ll tell him.”
I hang up and hand the phone back to Tex. Tex puts his hand on my arm. Doesn’t squeeze. Doesn’t pat. Just puts it there. The weight and warmth of my best friend telling me what he can’t say out loud.
I’m here. I’m not going anywhere either.
A minute passes. Maybe more.
“What about the guy from the hallway,” I say. “The blonde guy. The one they were beating on. Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s okay,” Tex says. “Busted up quite a bit. Bruised ribs, split lip. But he’s okay. He was in the waiting room all night.”
“Here?”
“For four hours. Wouldn’t leave until you came out of surgery.”
A stranger sat in a hospital waiting room for four hours. That’s not what strangers do.
“Why?” I ask.
Tex shrugs. But it’s not really a shrug. It’s Tex deciding how much to say. “I think he feels responsible for what happened.”
“Why? Did he start the fight?”
“No, all four of them jumped him because they didn’t like the way he looked. Sheila told him three times it might be best to leave the bar before those guys went after him. He didn’t leave. Guess that’s why he feels responsible.”
It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of four drunk men who decided to beat up a stranger because he was different from them. That’s whose fault it is. I’m a cop. I know how fault works. The guy on the floor didn’t pull the trigger. The guy on the floor didn’t bring the gun. The guy on the floor was just a victim.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Benji.”
A name to go with the eyes. Terrified, looking up at me from the floor, beautiful in a way I had no business noticing and noticed anyway. Only for a split-second but I noticed.
“There’s something else,” Tex says. “The doctors want to transfer you to a hospital in Tallahassee. They’ve got a spinal injury unit. Better equipment, better people. They want to move you in the morning once you’re stable.”
“By helicopter?” I ask.
“No, you’ll go by ground transport.”
Tallahassee. Two hours from home. Two hours from my mother who can’t come to a hospital fifteen minutes away.
“Mickey,” Tex says. “Stop spiraling. It’ll be okay. Your Mom can handle this. I’ll look after Mama Weaver and Walter for you.”
“She can’t come, Tex. If I’m in Tallahassee, she can’t come.”
He’s quiet. He knows my mom’s situation as well as I do. Twenty years of friendship means you take care of each other’s family like your own.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
“Dad needs her. She can’t leave him.”
“We’ll figure it out. Sheila knows people. Your mom’s church has that group, the caregivers’ circle or whatever it’s called. We’ll find somebody who can sit with your dad long enough for her to come see you.”
“Dad doesn’t do well with strangers. You know that.”
“I know. We’ll figure it out.”
He says it a third time because Tex believes that saying a thing enough times with enough certainty makes it true. And sometimes he’s right. He said “the bar will hold through the hurricane” and it held through twice. He said “Stormy’s staying” and Stormy stayed. But this isn’t a hurricane and it isn’t a terrified guy on the side of the road. This is my mother trapped in a house with a man who doesn’t know her name half the time, and me trapped in a hospital two hours away,and no amount of Tex saying “we’ll figure it out” changes the map.
