“Do you want me to go find a microwave and heat it up for you?” I ask, reaching for his plate.
“No, it’s fine for me,” he says. “I didn’t want your pizza to get cold.”
I reach over and automatically adjust the blanket where it’s slipped off the edge of the bed. Doing things for him makes me feel a tiny bit better.
“Tell me about your wedding planner job,” he says. “Let’s talk about happier things. How many weddings have you done?”
“Forty-seven, if you can believe it. I’ve seen brides faint and grooms run. I once had a flower girl throw a tantrum so legendary that the videographer sold the footage to a reality show. And there was this one time where a mother-of-the-bride tried to change the seating chart forty minutes before the ceremony because she didn’t want to sit near her ex-husband’s new wife, and the new wife was the maid of honor.”
“How do you handle things like that?”
“I smile and make things happen. I move tables and seating charts and give the brides everything they want, and at the end of the night I drink heavily. And I do mean heavily. Mostly, I do a lot of handholding of the bride and their mothers. The job is half wedding planning and half therapist.”
He’s eating and watching me talk. I’m going too fast, my hands moving with the words, my body doing half the talking.
He eats, nods and listens. I tell him about Callie who wants burlap in a thirty-two-million-dollar house, and about my condo rental with the ugly shell-pink bathroom.
“What made you become a wedding planner?” he asks.
“I’m good at making things beautiful on a tight deadline. I love walking into a room and seeing what it could be instead of what it is. And I like the puzzle of it, fitting all the pieces inside a space and a budget and making them work. The moment right before the wedding starts, when everything is set and the light is right and you can feel the whole room holding its breath for the bride, that’s the part I love the most.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest is a rich woman who thinks the difference between a fan fold for the napkins and a bishop’s hat is worth forty-five minutes of my life.”
He laughs. Carefully, with his hand pressed to his side, but a genuine laugh that makes me want to hear it again. I smile back at him.
At eight o’clock a nurse knocks and tells me visiting hours are over. She says it with the firm politeness of a womanwho has already noticed me sneaking past her station earlier with a pizza box and might not let it happen again.
I stand up and close the box. There are two slices left.
“On my way out, I’ll ask at the nurse’s station if they can refrigerate this for you. How is breakfast here?”
“The worst you can imagine,” he says. “They serve fake scrambled eggs poured out of a carton. Pizza for breakfast will be perfect.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you before I go?”
“No, I’m good. Thank you for the pizza and the coffee. And for telling me what happened.”
“You’re welcome. What do you want for dinner tomorrow?”
“Benji, you don’t have to keep driving back and forth every day. That’s crazy.”
“I know I don’t have to. I’ve already had this conversation with Tex, my best friend Dante in Miami, and now with you. I’m not listening to any of you. See you tomorrow, Officer Weaver.”
I stop at the door, turn and give him an awkward wave bye. I swing by the nurse’s station and ask if they can refrigerate his pizza overnight. They take it from me, write his name on it and walk away without a single word as if I’m bothering them to ask.
When I reach my car, I sit for a minute. My hands are still shaking, the leftover tremor from crying and sitting in a room with the man I put in that bed.
Then I start the car and pull out of the lot. I have two hours of dark, empty highway ahead of me. Two hours is a long way to go, but tomorrow, I’ll be doing it all over again.
Chapter 9: Mickey
Every morning I try to move my legs. It’s become a ritual. The same way I used to start every day by reaching for my phone and checking dispatch reports before my feet hit the floor. Now I start every day lying in a hospital bed staring at my legs under a thin cotton blanket and sending a signal that goes nowhere.
The brain says move. The body says can’t hear you.
The blanket stays flat and my legs lie underneath it like they belong to someone else.
