“We see a lot more of her outside of her kitchen too,” she said, “now that Keith’s here.”
“Nothing quite like it,” Dennis said. “Look at you. You’re way more involved than you used to be too.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” she said with a laugh.
“Maybe, but it keeps you more alive,” he muttered.
“Sure enough.” She smiled and took her plate outside. She was definitely hungry, and now she didn’t know what she should say to Lance because he couldn’t do live performances weekly for quite a while. He certainly wouldn’t want to play in the wheelchair, but maybe he could do it partly in a chair and partly in a wheelchair. But that pride of his. She could understand it though, because she wasn’t sure she would be any different if she was in the same physical shape.
Keeping her thoughts to herself, she went through the next few days until he finally noticed and asked, “What are you so pensive about?”
“Not a whole lot,” she said. “I went in and talked to the two clubs in town.”
He stopped and stared at her. “Wow,” he said. “You do remember the fact that I probably won’t be ready for a couple months, right?”
“You also said I could,” she reminded him.
He nodded. “But I don’t want to feel pressured or pushed into it,” he said. “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready.”
She settled back and nodded slowly. “Of course not,” she replied, “but you did say that I could talk to them.”
Feeling irritable and obviously not quite ready to make that kind of decision, he nodded but left soon afterward.
She sat here, drinking her coffee, wondering if she had been just too eager on his behalf. It was a fault of hers that she had encountered before. She tended to see a way forward, and then she would jump at it, getting things to move in the direction she thought they should. But maybe she hadn’t listened to him enough. Maybe she had done this because she wanted to see him do well, without considering if he was ready to, yet. And, even if he was ready to do well, that didn’t mean he was ready to go in that direction. She groaned, trying to remember the original conversation but struggling.
“Sounds like you mucked it up again,” she said irritably to herself. And, for the next couple days, she and Lance kind of danced around each other, both ignoring this particular conversation. When it came time for his Saturday four o’clock performance, she made sure she was there to listen to the music. She also searched to see if the bar guy was here, but she saw no sign of him. Disappointed, though she really didn’t know why, she sat back and just listened to the music. The crowd was just as riotous as last time, if not even more enthusiastic.
This time, instead of going to dinner with him, she stepped outside and just sat on the deck at her own table. The music still throbbed through her veins, and it felt wonderful. He was very talented, with a gift that he should share with the world. A world that would be blessed to receive it. But somehow he had to both get strong enough to do it and then actually want to do it, which was a whole different story. She’d met all kinds of people who had the talent to do something but just weren’t interested in doing it.
Like going to school with all the top brainiacs, and one was a girl who Jessica knew belonged to the Mensa group. Her IQ was just off the wall. But all she wanted to do was nails, and she became a salon manicurist.
At the time Jessica had been horrified, but the woman looked at her and said, “That’s just your perception. If you didn’t know I was in Mensa, then you wouldn’t care,” she said. “So now you’re judging me for not doing what you think I should do.”
That had stuck with Jessica throughout the years. As she sat here, in the peace and quiet, listening to all the boisterous activity behind her, she was quietly happy.
When Lance reached out to her twenty minutes later, he said, “There’s ice cream, if you want one?”
She turned to look at him in surprise. He had a big ice cream cone in his hand. She laughed. “I ate plenty of dinner,” she said. “No room for more.”
“You didn’t join me for dinner. How come?”
“Oh,” she said, “you looked like you were doing just fine.”
“Is that the only time you come looking for me?” he asked curiously. “When you think I need a friend?”
“Not at all,” she said, getting a little defensive. “I just thought tonight I’d like some time alone, and you had lots of friends around you, and you looked to be happy.”
“I can be happy and alone, and I can be happy and have friends,” he said. “It was nice tonight, and they all seem to appreciate the music. But they didn’t seem to appreciate me before the music, so it feels weird.”
She chuckled. “I can see that, but I don’t think we can blame them too much. People often don’t know what they want or like until they hear it, and then they’re quite surprised at how much they enjoyed it.”
“Maybe,” he said.
Then she realized that he’d traded the wheelchair for crutches. She slowly dropped her legs from the railing and turned to face him. “How is that going?” she said mildly, a head nod at his crutches.
“Slowly,” he said, reaching for a chair and sitting down a little hard. “Very slowly.”
“Any progress is good though,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said, “but, at the same time, it’s change, and I guess I haven’t been all that comfortable with change.”
“I think you’ve done really well since you’ve arrived,” she said impulsively.
He burst out laughing. “Like I said before, you’re a great cheerleader.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t mean what I say,”
