“My ideas are always good. Now finish your cortado before it gets cold. Cold cortados are a crime against the bean and I won’t have it in my home.”
The conversation settles back into the easy rhythm that we’ve had since we were twenty-two, the one that absorbs hard conversations and keeps going.
But his words stay with me. The image he painted of me waking up one day with all the pieces gone. I know that version of myself. I’ve been that version before, with men who needed too much, and Dante was the one who picked up what was left. He’s not wrong to be scared. He’s not wrong about any of it.
The difference is Mickey. Who has never once asked me to come. Mickey doesn’t take pieces. Mickey doesn’t know how.
That’s the problem. He’s too proud to ask for anything, and I never know if he wants me or not.
But I don’t say that to Dante.
On Wednesday, I have dinner with my mother. She lives in Coral Gables in a tidy ranch house with a screened-in porch and a garden that she tends to with intensity. My Aunt Lori lives there too.
Mom is in the kitchen when I walk in. Blonde hair pulled back in a clip, eyes that are lighter than mine, an apron that says Kiss the Cook that Aunt Lori bought her as a joke andthat she wears without irony every single day. The whole house smells like chicken and cheese.
“Benjamin,” she says. She sets the casserole down and looks at me and the look is the full-body scan that all mothers do. “You’re too skinny.”
“I’m always skinny, Mom.”
“Skinnier than normal skinny. Sit down. I made chicken casserole. Lori made her banana pudding last night so you’re not leaving until you’ve had two helpings of everything.”
She fixes me a plate without asking what I want or how much. She decided the answers to those questions when I was eleven and has not revisited them since. The casserole is the one she’s been making my whole life. The one with the rotisserie chicken and the cream of mushroom and the crushed crackers on top. Comfort food. Food that doesn’t try to impress anyone and doesn’t need to.
Aunt Lori eats with us and talks about a neighbor’s dog that keeps digging under the fence. After she finishes, she kisses the top of my head and goes back outside to wage her ongoing war against aphids in the garden.
Mom clears the plates. She sits down across from me and takes off her reading glasses. When my mother takes her glasses off, she’s about to have a serious conversation. I’ve known this forever.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she says.
“About what?”
“Whatever it is you haven’t told me yet. You called me from the Panhandle and told me about the shooting. You toldme you were hurt. You told me the officer was in the hospital. But you’ve been home for days and you haven’t said his name once and that tells me there’s more.”
She’s had three weeks of phone calls from me where I gave her the headlines and kept the rest. I told her about the bar, the hallway, the hospital. I told her a cop stepped in front of me and took a bullet. I said I was fine and protected her from the details. Now her glasses are off and there’s nowhere to hide.
“His name is Mickey Weaver,” I say.
Her face changes. Not because of the name. Because of how I said it.
“He’s a cop with the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. He’s the officer, Mom.”
Her eyes go wide. “The one who stepped in front of you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve been visiting him. When you told me you were driving to Tallahassee, you were going to see him?”
“Yes. Every day that I could make it. I brought him pizza and coffee. I sat in his hospital room beside his bed and told myself it was guilt. That I owed him. That showing up was the least I could do.”
“Was it guilt?” she asks.
“At first maybe. And then it stopped being that. And then, he told me something about himself that changed everything and I —” I press my thumb against the bridge ofmy nose. “He’s gay, Mom. He came out at seventeen on a dock with his best friend. He became a cop anyway in a red county in the Panhandle. He stepped in front of a bullet for me. I was a stranger to him and he did that because that’s the kind of man Mickey Weaver is.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. “Is he good to you?”
“Yes. He’s good to me. He’s in a wheelchair in a rehab facility in Jacksonville. He can’t feel his legs and he’s a good man. When I went to Jacksonville to see him on my way home to Miami, he told me he missed me. Out loud. To my face. While we were sitting outside on a patio.”
Her mouth is trembling at the edges and she is trying very hard not to cry at the kitchen table. “Can I meet him?” she asks. “I need to see him.”
