“No.” He’d meantnot as good as when you were here,the effortless drivel he fed good-looking chicks, but he only managed the first sound. The fuck, he was fucked up.
She looked as confused as he felt.
The nurse filled the silence by asking Grace if she’d like to wash his hair. The lie-in-bed-for-a-bath situation was weird enough with a nurse washing him, but having Grace take over after someone shoved the plastic basin in her face was ridiculous.
Men had endured worse than having soft, small hands brush across their foreheads and temples, he supposed. Concentration parted her lips enough that he could see a hint of her teeth and tongue, so he closed his eyes. Mistake, because with his eyes shut, her fingers, the washcloth and the water she squeezed onto his hair were the only sensations anchoring him. Painkillers had dulled his aches, and the hazy edges of his brain were blurred further by her fingers tracing the rim of his ear.
During night ops, if he didn’t have night vision gear, his other senses would open wide until he could almost sense the flutter of insect wings in the air or smell his enemy’s sweat. Grace didn’t smell like an enemy. Behind the protection of his eyelids, he could sort her scents into coffee, rosemary, maybe from herbal shampoo, and that fragrance he could only describe as warm female skin.
She stopped washing and started massaging a neck muscle behind his ear that had stiffened with days of pain. Her fingers became the center of his world. His spine sank into the mattress and he allowed his head to loll to the side. She might not knowwhere to look or what to say, but she didn’t mind touching him. Small mercies, or maybe small tortures.
“Why you…here?” That might be the smoothest sentence he’d managed yet. His brain fog must be clearing. Or, God forbid, his meds were almost worn off.
“Because no matter why you lied about an engagement, or how rude you’ve tried to be to me, you’re from my hometown and your mother is a nice lady.”
She was honest. He could be too. “Don’t know…Mamá.”
“There are, what, less than seven hundred people in Salito? Of course I knew your mother.”
“Tamale lay—” white students had sometimes called him the Tamale Kid, like a riff off that karate movie, “—dee.”
Through his inept conversation, she focused on her task with the precision of emergency ordnance disposal, first sponging his neck, then blotting with a towel. The line across her forehead might have been a sign that she’d had to wait for him to speak, or it might have been concentration on her task. “Everybody knows her. So? Everybody knows my parents too.”
If she didn’t recognize the difference between how kids treated the daughter of people who owned an actual store, with a cash register and advertisements printed in the football programs, and how they treated the son of a Mexican lady selling food from a cooler, her university degrees were overpriced.
Then she moved her washcloth to his shoulder, where his tattoo proclaimed his allegiances. Her finger, not the fabric, traced the wordsDe Oppresso Liberunfurling above the skull, flag and rattlesnake. “What’s this mean?”
“Free.” He couldn’t attemptoppressed,so he watched her tongue lick her lips and settled for “motto.”Work the magic,he ordered his biceps, and it obliged by jumping rock hard and ready. From her wide eyes, he guessed scientist-girl didn’t encounter many guns like that.
She stretched her fingers to try to circle his arm, which experience told him women’s hands couldn’t achieve. The flaming skull was known on the team for its bonus effect on women. “And ODA 5131?”
“Team.” Her hands made the bars on the side of the bed and the tubes and fluorescent lights disappear. He felt like a man an attractive woman could touch, maybe even want someday when he was out of these wraps. He raised his free hand. She might—
“Buenas días, mijo.” His mother’s voice sounded tired, and she sagged in the doorway before she let loose a paragraph of Spanish asking how long Grace had been there, had he eaten breakfast and whether he’d talked with his sister, and could he call his sister so she could talk to the doctors and then tell his mother what they said.
His head throbbed. Now he had to listen and struggle to speak in two languages. Shit.
Ten minutes later he admitted that watching his mother and Grace try to communicate was better than daytime talk shows. Grace’s left hand held a cup shape while she imitated the whirring swoosh noise of an espresso machine. “¿Uno? Dos? Con lee-ches?”
“Lay-chay,” he prodded her with the pronunciation of the Spanish word for milk.
Grace whipped around and caught his grin, and tossed it back with her own laugh. “Do those fingers in the air mean you want a double shot, or two percent milk, or two lattes so you can double-fist?” She leaned close enough that he caught a whiff of her sweet scent again. “My sister the teacher likes to say you get what you get and you don’t get upset.”
“Di-a-di-a—” His fingers mimed a finger-prick test, then a syringe, as he tried to convey that his mother had diabetes so she could buy fruit in the cafeteria instead of pastries. “Bee—”
A loud thump jerked Grace upright.
His mother had collapsed into a chair. She hadn’t fallen, but her skin was gray, she had one hand on her chest and both eyes closed.
“Go!” He scrambled to the call button while Grace sprinted from the room, yelling for a nurse. Using his arms and hips he flopped to the foot of his bed, but he couldn’t touch his mother. Her chair was too far. “¡Mamá!”
She didn’t answer, but her chest moved enough that he felt able to take a matching breath as he yanked out his drip. He had to reach her, so he gritted his teeth against his leg pain and rolled to the gap between the bed bars and the footboard. If he went out face first, like a push-up, he could hand-walk out of it and try to land only on his remaining knee.
Two nurses double-timed into the room and pressure cuffed his mother before he could manage more than his fingertips on the floor. At least they ignored how he was hung up on the edge of the mattress, instead assisting his mother into a wheelchair. Grace was the one who wrapped her arms under his armpits and helped him work backward into place.
He pointed from her to his mother. “Go, go.” Too much like yesterday—I don’t mean leave for good!
“I’ll go with her.” Her grip was tight and reassuring. “Wait here, I’ll be back.”
