More Than Friends (17 page)

He studied Michael's face. It was totally impassive. "You knew I did time, didn't you?" He paused. "Can't keep a secret like that. People always find out. Better to tell them up front. They want to kick you out, they can, but it's less humiliating if they do it at the start." He scanned the room. The wall of cards had spread to the floor. People obviously cared about Michael. He envied the boy his friends. When he was Michael's age, he'd had but a handful. Most were years older and wouldn't have known how to write a get well card, much less think to send one.

He returned to Michael's face. He wasn't sure what to say, didn't know what the boy heard. He figured the sound of his voice was probably more important than his words, so he talked about what he knew.

"Some people get nervous when you tell them where you've been. They think you're going to whip out a gun and blow their brains out." He made a sound. "Shows how much they know. One stretch in prison was enough for me. I'd kill myself before I'd

do anything to put me back there."

His voice grew earnest. If Michael did hear, Grady wanted him to hear this. "That's why I know I wasn't breaking any law when I drove down your street. I've learned to be careful. Because of where I've been, cops watch me all the time. I keep my hands in clear view when I'm walking down the street. I pay the waitress even if the food is lousy. Light turns yellow, I stop."

He touched the boy's arm. Teke's son. Should have been his. He sighed. "Boy, I would've done that if I'd seen you. I'm real sorry, Michael. If I'd had any idea you were coming through those trees, I'd have stopped. I just didn't see you."

He waited for the boy to open his eyes and say, "That's okay. It was an accident. I'm not angry." But he didn't, and Grady had a terrifying sense of deja vu. Open your eyes, bastard. Open your eyes and hit me again. You're not dead. You're too hard to die. Open your eyes, goddammit.

He shot an alarmed look at the machines, thinking Michael might have died on him, too, but they were happily humming away. Shaken, he clutched the bedrail. He bowed his head and gathered his wits. He was raising his head again when he saw the giraffe. It stood in a corner of the room, looking worn. He guessed it to be a much loved relic of Michael's childhood and thought of his own.

"I would've bought your mom something like that, if I'd had the money. I knew her when she was a little girl, y'know. We grew up in Gullen together." He daydreamed his way back. "She was real pretty. First time I noticed her, she'd been bit by a dog-no, I noticed her before that. I used to see her in the schoolyard on the days they made me go. She stood out from the others with that dark hair of hers and that light skin and those scared eyes. But it was on the day she was bit by the dog that she had such a woeful look on her face that my heart broke right there. Her daddy was one mean son of a gun. Tough as rusted nails. He used to make her wait on him, then he'd knock her around when she didn't do things just right." He smiled. "She grew up nice."

The smile faded. He took a breath, let it out in a hoarse, "I loved her. We were going to spend our whole lives together." There was pain in remembering those dreams and knowing how awfully they'd been blown to bits. Still, fragments returned. "She wanted to have babies, that's all she wanted to do, have babies and me. But I wanted her to go to school before we had babies, because I hadn't been to school and I thought one of us should be educated if we wanted our kids to do better than us. Our kids were going to do good things. We used to talk about that a lot."

He slipped his hand into Michael's. He was her son, flesh of her flesh. Holding his hand was once removed from holding hers. It helped fill the hollowness he felt. "Then the jury said I was guilty. I knew I was going away for a long time and that from then on I was marked. I knew we'd never have the things we talked about. I knew I'd always drag her down. So I sent her away."

"You returned my letters."

His eyes flew to the door. Teke was leaning against its frame, holding a cup of coffee. He wondered how long she had been there.

"You didn't have to do that, Grady. They were just letters. You could have ignored them. But you deliberately returned them."

"No point in reading them. They'd only have hurt. Better to make the break."

"Not for me. It was devastating."

"It worked."

She studied her coffee, looking as though she were thinking of arguing. But she only sighed and took a sip, then asked, "What was it like, prison?"

"Hard," he answered. "Gray and cold."

"Were you scared when they first took you there?" He nodded. "I'd known tough men at the docks, but none were like the guys on the inside."

Teke shivered. She held the coffee cup in both hands. After a minute she took another sip. "Breakfast," she said sheepishly.

"Didn't you have anything before you left the house?"

"I was here all night. I thought of going to the cafeteria, but I couldn't see myself sitting down with all those people in white. Besides, I didn't want to leave Michael that long." She crossed to the bed and touched his cheek. "Hi, sweetheart. Has Grady been keeping you company?"

"Boring him, most like."

"No. Michael's the curious kind. Videography's his thing. He's apt to wake up and want to do a piece on prison life." Grady shrugged. "It's not real exciting. There's day after day of doing the same awful thing and feeling the same awful fear. Then you get out and the fear is just as bad."

"In what sense?" she asked, reminding him of the Teke of old, all questions about what he was doing.

He had always liked that. It made him feel important, like who he was and what he did mattered. So he said, "You're on your own once you're out. All of a sudden there's no one to tell you where to go when. There's no one providing your food and your clothes. You've got to do everything for yourself, only you haven't been doing it for so long that

you're not sure how. The stores are selling different kinds of foods from when you went in. The machines in the Laundromats work differently. Your clothes are funny. You think everyone's staring at you. You feel out of place and unwanted."

"Did you go back to Gullen?"

"For a bit. Didn't know where else to go."

She whispered, "I was sorry about your father, Grady. The church ladies wrote me that he'd died. I grieved for him more than I ever did for Homer. I wanted to come back for his funeral, but I couldn't. It would have been too painful."

Grady looked down. He knew about that pain. His father had been a hard man with a soft spot for his son. For years the county authorities had thought he was abusing Grady by keeping him out of school and forcing him to work at the docks, but the truth was that he loved having Grady with him. The feeling was mutual.

"Those first two years," Grady said, "he visited me the first Sunday of every month. It was hard on him. He used to see the others in that visiting room and get a frantic look on his face, like he didn't know how his son could be there, like he had to do something, to protect him somehow. Then one Sunday he wasn't there when he was supposed to be. I knew there'd be only one reason he'd miss. It took them three days to tell me he was dead."

"Oh, Grady."

"Just as well," Grady rationalized as he had dozens of times before.

"He was sick. His heart was getting weaker and weaker. If he'd been there when I'd come back, he'd have had to sit around watchin' me work, and he'd have hated that, too. It was the working side by side that he liked." He studied Michael. "Videography, huh? I don't know anything about videography."

"I do," said the nurse as she entered the room with a gurney and a trail of attendants. She looked at Teke. "All set?" Teke had a suddenly frightened look in her eye-the same kind of look she had worn as a little girl, which had so affected Grady--but she stepped aside so that they could transfer Michael. "They're taking him for a brain scan," she explained.

Grady went to her side. "What are they looking to find?"

"Patterns of brain waves that may or may not be normal." He watched the technicians deftly shift monitors, bottles, and tubes. He was wondering how long it took to do a brain scan and whether J.D. would be coming to wait with Teke.

Reading his mind, she said, "My husband isn't a good waiter. He'll talk with the doctors once they've had a chance to look at the results of the scan." Behind the fear in her eyes was a warning. "He comes in at lunchtime. That, and before and after work."

Grady nodded. While it wasn't exactly an invitation, it was an improvement on the you-shouldn'thavecome-here theme. He could live with that for now.

The scan said that Michael's brain was working fine, which made his coma all the more frustrating for Teke. She soared high one minute when he moved an arm or a leg or his mouth, fell low the next when he was as still as a corpse.

His care dominated her time; her day was taken up with working his good arm and leg, massaging his muscles, bathing him, combing his hair, and talking to him, lest he forget who he was. But there

were other times--times when J.D. glared at her, when Annie avoided meeting her eye and Sam gave her a wide berth, when the children--worse, John Stewart and Lucy--came, and there was a pretense of normalcy to uphold.

"Upset about Michael" became the catch-all to excuse bad moods and incommunicative ness but Teke knew it wouldn't work forever. At some point the girls were going to wonder why their parents avoided each other, why Annie wasn't talking to Teke, why the foursome had split. Of that foursome, she missed Annie the most. She missed their phone conversations each night, their shopping trips, their lunches when one or another of them needed a lift. Annie had always steadied her through life's shakes, and, Lord knew, life was shaky now. Teke needed steadying. That was why she hoped Grady would visit again--but for every minute of hoping, she spent another one in self-reproach. Grady was her past. There was no room for him in her present, certainly no room for the pain he had once caused. She couldn't live through that again. She wouldn't survive. Still, she felt something small lighten up inside her when, within minutes of J.D."s lunchtime departure, Grady walked in carrying a paper sack that smelled of something greasy and hot.

"Pastrami with cheese and peppers," he said, and handed it to her.

"Five to one you haven't eaten."

He was right. She took the bag and held it a minute, thinking that she should hand it right back, but that she was very much in the mood for greasy and hot. Shooting him a fast, "Thanks, I'm starved," she sank onto a chair, unwrapped the sandwich, and took a large bite. Grady went to Michael's side. "How are you, pal?" He tipped his head to read the T-shirt of the day. "Michael Maxwell's Gym. Super-Jocks Only." To Teke he said, "Is he one?" She nodded. "A basketball buddy brought that in. Tryouts are coming up. It's going to be tough if he can't make them." She took another bite of the sandwich, but it wasn't as good as the first.

"I watched your husband leave. He looked upset."

"He's not very pleased with me," which was putting it mildly. He had been in a stew, railing on about the doctors' failure to wake Michael, Teke's failure to wake Michael, Teke's hair, her clothes, the bags under her eyes. "Things are beginning to pile up at home. He doesn't understand why I can't divide my time more evenly."

"Can't you hire someone to help?"

"I already have someone, but she only comes once a week. I don't think she has time for more, and I can't be there to train someone new. Besides, the girls can help with the cooking and the laundry. So can J.D. But he won't."

She took another bite of the sandwich and felt an intense annoyance. It wasn't that J.D. was suddenly refusing to do things, just that she was suddenly realizing how very little he had ever done. She hadn't thought to mind before. The house was her domain; she took pride in keeping order there. But she could have used his help now and, if not his help, certainly his understanding.

"How about this guy?" Grady asked Michael. "Does he help around the house?"

"Not much. But that's my fault. I spoil him. Oh, I tell myself not to do it. No thirteen-year-old girl today is going to grow up to want a husband who can't do for himself. Still, I spoil him. He's such a good kid, and if he isn't busy with school, he's playing ball or using the video cam It's not like he's loi

taring on the street corner with a cigarette dangling from his mouth."

"I would have loved a spoiling when I was a kid," Grady mused. "I used to do whatever had to be done. We both did."

Teke picked out a strip of green pepper. Eating it, she thought back to those times. "There wasn't much easy about our lives. Maybe that's why I spoil my kids. I want them to know what carefree means." She thought of all Grady had said the day before. His description of prison haunted her, and while she told herself that it was none of her business, that she was better off not knowing, that in sending her away Grady had forfeited his rights to her concern, she found that she was curious about his life. So she said, "Tell me about after you got out of prison. You went back to Gullen and felt stared at and strange. Did you work at the docks?"

He shook his head. "Someone else was in charge there. He didn't want me." He was silent for a while, looking at Michael through faraway eyes. "My parole officer was just as glad. He thought I should do something different. He got me into boat-building school." Teke smiled. That sounded like something she could see Grady doing. He loved boats and was good with his hands. Definitely boat-building school.

"It was nice," he confirmed. "Nice people. But hard work. I'd gotten my high school equivalency in prison. Took a few college courses, too. But the others were way ahead of me."

His high school equivalency. Teke was impressed. "What happened then?"

"My favorite teacher was a canoe buff. He was into making wood-and-canvas canoes and got me hooked. There was a simplicity to the work--and a beauty to the finished product--that appealed to me much more than learning about sophisticated aerodynamics and high-tech finishings. Every free minute I had, I was helping him." Teke could see the pleasure he took in the memory. It warmed her. "Go on."