The Mothers(40)

He understood sickness better than anything else. Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren’t.

He still saw Aubrey around Upper Room. He’d been worried at first that she wouldn’t talk to him now that he was out of rehab, that maybe their friendship had been restricted to that space. But she always seemed glad to see him. She never came by the house, although he hinted that that would be okay. But on Sunday mornings, she sat beside him, not in the front pew where he’d sat with his parents as a boy, but in a back pew near the aisle so he could stretch out his bad leg. Each Sunday, when his father laid hands on the sick, she glanced at him, and each Sunday, he looked away, studying the fringes on the rug. One week, she leaned in toward his ear.

“Do you want to go up?” she asked. “I’ll go with you.”

How could anyone believe healing was that easy, only a matter of asking for it? What about those who remained sick? Did they just not ask hard enough? But she reached for his hand, her fingers wedged against his purity scar. Their palms kissed and he felt, for the first time, that he could be whole.

—

ON A BRISK MAY NIGHT, Luke pushed through the concession stand crowd with his plastic cup of overpriced stadium beer. CJ trampled after him, carrying a cup of beer that sloshed against his hand. He didn’t like baseball but he’d agreed to the Padres game because they rarely hung out now that they no longer worked together. CJ had wanted to check out a football game—in the springtime, you could always find an arena game or even a spring practice—but Luke told him he wanted to watch baseball. He didn’t, really, but he couldn’t put himself through more football. He’d already given football too much. He would find something new to love.

During the seventh-inning stretch, the crowd began to sing as an animated Friar Fred danced on the scoreboard. CJ moved his lips, the way Luke mouthed along to church hymns. When they sat, CJ took a sip of his tepid beer before setting it back on the ground.

“I gotta get out of fuckin’ Fat Charlie’s, man,” CJ said.

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. Anything else. Maybe join up.”

“Marines?”

“Shit, maybe. What else I know how to do?”

He couldn’t imagine CJ in camp or huffing through the desert with a gun strapped to his back. Could CJ even pass the fitness test? He was strong enough, sure, but you had to run three miles and he had never seen CJ run thirty yards.

“What if they send you out somewhere?” Luke said.

CJ shrugged. “At least it’s something. I gotta be on my shit like you. You got a future. What I got?”

An old black vendor climbed the metal stairs, hollering, “Peanuts! Who wants a big bag of salty nuts?” The crowd laughed and Luke sipped his beer, wiping his mouth with a grease-splotched napkin. He wasn’t used to anyone else envying his life. He lived at home and collected fifty dollars each week from his father that felt more like an allowance than a paycheck. He leaned on a cane when he had to walk a long distance and at the stadium, he’d been patted down and wanded three times after the metal rod in his leg had set off the detectors. But he was building something, at least. He was starting his physical therapy classes in the fall. He spent his weekends with a girl who calmed him, who pieced him together. A pretty brunette in a retro Tony Gwynn jersey passed and he wondered if he could bring Aubrey to a game. She’d look cute in his cap, and maybe they’d get caught on the Kiss Cam and she would lean toward him, not embarrassed by the cheers of the crowd. He would hope for the Padres to hit a home run just to see her face when fireworks shot across the sky.

At the top of the eighth, a small black boy in an Angels jersey three times too big for him hopped on the seat, yelling for the cotton candy man. The vendor didn’t notice, starting down the aluminum steps.

“Ay man!” Luke stood, wincing at the sudden movement. “Right here!”

He pointed at the boy. The vendor stopped and the boy stumbled down the row, climbing over legs as he waved his dollars in the air. The man stooped with the carousel of pink and blue swaths of cotton candy and the boy jumped, pointing to the baby blue. He wiggled impatiently as the vendor gave him his change, then he smiled, triumphant, holding the cotton candy in his hands. Everyone ushered the boy down the row, hands against his back so he didn’t trip. Luke’s finger brushed against the smooth inside of his thin arm as he passed.

“Tell me a secret,” Aubrey said later.

Luke stretched out on his bed. His room was warm from the late spring heat but he couldn’t open a window or Aubrey would be cold. She was always cold and he liked that about her, how he felt responsible for warming her. She was curled against his chest and he bent to kiss her forehead. His parents were gone for the evening but he knew she hadn’t come over to do more than cuddle. When they’d first started dating, he’d tried to find times to spend with her alone. He knew she was waiting to have sex but she wouldn’t want to wait forever. Just a matter of time, he figured, until she felt ready. But months later, they still hadn’t had sex yet. Often, when Aubrey visited, they didn’t even go near his bedroom, eating dinner with his parents instead or sitting together on the porch swing. Maybe it was weird for her, hooking up in her pastor’s house, so he started visiting her at her sister’s house instead, even though he felt awkward in a house full of women. He stepped inside a bathroom with a counter covered in girly products—bottles of all shapes and sizes, moisturizers, facial cream, serum, leave-in conditioner—and washed his hands with pink soap that left his skin feeling soft and smelling like powder. It made him feel unmanly, so he started washing his hands with the orange dishwashing soap in the kitchen instead.