“Like waking up and discovering you’re a different person.” He held up a round object. “You ready?”
“For what?”
“Cherry bomb.”
I glanced from him to Molly. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Her nose reacted first. The nostrils flared and her head jerked, then
Pud pulled me to my feet. “That was great,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have stood my ground like you did.”
After a few minutes, my lungs accepted air and my vision cleared somewhat. I almost convinced myself I’d been brave from choice; maybe I did stand my ground; maybe I had had time to jump. Bravery isn’t what you do so much as how you look back at what you did. I was so happy about surviving Molly, I tripped over barbwire under the snow and cut the living bejesus out of my hand.
So I walked into the living room with my fist above my head, clenching a hard-packed snowball. The blood trickled down my arm and off my elbow.
Maurey was still on the phone. She took one look at me and said, “I have to go, Lloyd, there’s another emergency.” She listened a few seconds and said, “I’ll call you back.”
After she hung up I said, “You didn’t have to stop on account of me.”
“I’m supposed to chat while you bleed on the floor?”
Maurey got up and led me into the kitchen, where she kept one of the most complete first-aid kits a nonprofessional ever owned. It filled an old army mule pannier. A lot of doctors must have dried out on the TM because Maurey was prepared for any emergency. She had me stand at the sink and run cold water over the cut. It was at the base of my thumb and hard to see, what with the flow of blood, but there seemed to be a penny-size skin flap over a deep, ragged hole.
“This’ll take stitches,” Maurey said.
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“I can handle it.”
She dug through the pannier and came up with a sealed Baggie containing a sponge and this frothy brown liquid. As she leaned over my hand, her hair fell across her line of vision and she brushed it back over her ear in my favorite Maurey gesture.
“Was that your sponsor on the phone?” I asked.
She nodded. “Lloyd. Have you had a tetanus shot lately?”
“Last year when a Vicksburg battery mount fell on my foot. Am I supposed to know Lloyd?”
“Yes, you dip.” The brown liquid was some kind of alcohol and it hurt like the dickens. I gritted my teeth as Maurey scrubbed and talked. “I’ve told you about Lloyd and Sharon Carbonneau at least twenty times. They own a sports paraphernalia shop in Denver.”
Even though the pain was tremendous, I resolved to follow the expected male code of toughness. “Sports paraphernalia?”
“Caps and coolers. You can make a killing off any piece of plastic with a Denver Broncos logo on the side.”
“‘Sponsor’ is an AA term, isn’t it?”
“Your sponsor is the person you turn to when you’re in trouble.”
“That makes you my sponsor.”
She gave one last squeeze of brown antiseptic. “Are you still in trouble, sugar booger?”
Was I in trouble, or was this despair the daily routine of going on? “Shannon’s moving out,” I said.
Holding my sterile hand palm up, Maurey led me back to the kitchen table. “I know.”
“She always tells you everything before me.”
Maurey found a preloaded syringe and broke off the seal. “Shannon’s worried. She thinks you’ll fall apart without her at home to fuss over.”
I stared at the syringe. Nobody had told me about a shot. “What did you advise?”
“I said, ‘Birds gotta fly.’ If you fall apart that’s your fault. She can’t spend her whole life being needy so you have something to do.”
When Shannon was little we had this ritual where I came in every night to tuck her into bed. The covers would be an awful mess and I would say, “What would you do without me?” and she would say, “Freeze in my sleep,” or something to that effect. But then one night I went into her room in my socked feet and found her reading
I couldn’t decide if the trick to make me feel needed was touching or manipulative. Either way, finding out the truth took some of the glow off night-night.
“This may sting,” Maurey said, and she stabbed me right in the cut.
“What a wienie,” she said.
“Wienie? Let me poke a hole in you and see how it feels.”
“Hank didn’t scream when I deadened his wrist.”
“Hank’s stoic. It runs in his genes.”
“Wieniehood runs in your genes. That’ll numb up in a minute.”
My pain threshold has never been up to cowboy standards. The Callahan nerves are more sensitive than theirs, I think. Some people can see or hear better than other people, it only follows that senses of touch vary also, and mine is highly developed.
“Doctors just give you all these medical supplies?”
“They leave things with me when they go away.”
Another plastic bag held a curved needle, like cobblers use on shoe soles, pre-threaded from a little bobbin of nylon thread. I said, “A doctor recovers from alcoholism and he’s so grateful he leaves behind a home clinic.”
Maurey held the needle between her thumb and index finger as she studied my cut. “Actually, this particular doctor committed suicide.”
She slid the needle into the flap and pulled it out of clean skin. It felt icky. No pain—just icky, like the ultimate in fingernails across a blackboard. “He couldn’t live with or without alcohol,” she went on, “so he hung himself in the barn.”
“And you kept his stuff.”
Maurey tied a complicated knot by dipping the needle through a loop and turning it sideways or something. I couldn’t follow the process. Afterward she snipped the thread and went back into my thumb for a second stitch.
Without looking up, she said, “Pud asked me to marry him.”
“Don’t jerk your hand while the needle’s in it.”
“You purposely waited until I was helpless to break the news.”
“I was going to tell you. He only asked last night.”
“I hope you said no.”
Maurey drew the thread through and tied the knot. She pretended to be concentrating so hard I knew she wasn’t concentrating at all. She could easily have sewn my fingers together.
“I said okay.”
“Okay? The kid asks you to marry him and all you can say is ‘Okay.’ Isn’t that a bit halfhearted?”
“Don’t be tacky with me, Sam.”
“But you already married one Talbot and he was a shit.”
