Page 69 of Wingmen

His mom getting the call that Uncle Sal had broken his hip. A trip to Miami to visit him. Then a few months of recovery, which seemed to be going fine. No one knew he’d never finished the painkillers he’d been given right after surgery. No one knew he’d started taking them again. They didn’t find out until later, when he tried to buy them on the street.

Elliot was at a billet family’s house in Michigan when he got the call that Sal had overdosed.

He put the bottle back on the sink. He felt sick.

Dustin was at the stove with his back to the door as Elliot came out of the bedroom in a pair of sweats and Dustin’s Rush shirt from the basketball game. He sat at the kitchen island and stared at the plate that had been set out for him.

“I think I’m getting better at this?” Dustin was pushing eggs around with a spatula in the pan. “They’re still sticking, but…I think you just have to keep it moving?” He looked over his shoulder. “Do you want coffee?”

Elliot shook his head. He stared at the plate as Dustin deposited an omelet onto it. He stared at it as Dustin set a knife and fork on either side of it. He picked up the fork as Dustin came around the island and sat beside him.

“How is it?” said Dustin, when they’d eaten maybe three bites in silence.

“It’s good.”

“Actually good?”

Elliot looked at him. His face was so transparently eager for approval it made Elliot’s chest burn. He nodded and went back to his plate. “Actually good.”

He felt Dustin watching as he took another bite in silence. “Something wrong? You can tell me if it’s not good. I can handle it.”

Elliot wondered if that was even true. The Great Bendito probably needed to be the best, even at making eggs.

They finished and Dustin took the plates to the sink. Elliot watched him washing up and thought about all the ways he was probably misunderstanding the situation. Dustin wasn’t Uncle Sal. Those pills might be sitting on the sink for any reason. Maybe he found them while he was cleaning and got them out to throw them away.

Eventually, he said, “Hey…”

Dustin looked up.

Elliot shifted, tucking his hands in his pockets. He watched Dustin scrubbing the plate, and said, in what he hoped was a casual voice, “So there’s a bottle on the sink in the bathroom…”

Dustin looked down and kept scrubbing. After a moment, he said, “What about it?”

“Just wondered what it was.”

Dustin turned on the tap to rinse the plate. “Just painkillers.”

Elliot watched him tilt the plate under the water, set it in a rack beside the sink, and pick up the next one. “Is your knee getting worse?”

“I don’t think so. Just not getting better as fast as it should be.”

“So did they tell you to take those?”

Dustin didn’t answer right away, watching the water as it ran over the plate. “The doctors? No. They have me on ibuprofen.”

“Okay. Because those are – pretty strong, aren’t they?”

The last of the suds rinsed away, and Dustin looked up as he set the plate in the rack. “That’s what they tell me.”

He turned around to pull a paper towel off the roll and stood with his back to Elliot, looking down at his hands as he dried them, and as he finished, he took a deep breath, then looked up and tossed the balled-up paper towel basketball-style at a trash can in the corner.

“Okay.” He turned to Elliot, leaning on the counter behind him. “I had to take one last night because I ran out of the other stuff.” He said this firmly, like he hoped Elliot could see that he was leveling with him. Then he went to his pocket for his phone. “Which reminds me. I need to pick up some more of that.”

The phone wasn’t in his pocket. He looked around the room for it and went to the coffee table. Elliot watched him pick it up and enter something into it. “So you just took one,” he said, as Dustin put the phone back on the coffee table.

“Correct.”

“And you’re not gonna take any more.”