There had been savings once. A modest account, a plan to move to a place with a yard, a promise of a vacation by the ocean. Then hospital expenses, time off work, a move to cheaper rent, and a succession of decisions that were reasonable one at a time and disastrous when they accumulated.
George scraped the eggs onto two plates. His right knee pulsed in the heat from the stove. Three surgeries, two titanium pins, and a patchwork of damaged cartilage had left the joint prone to swelling. The worst days were humid days, and Oak Haven in late summer seemed composed entirely of humidity.
“You put make Dad laugh on that list,” he said.
“You weren’t supposed to read it.”
“It’s written in purple marker the size of highway signs.”
“That’s private purple marker.”
“My mistake.”
She tried to hide a grin. It reached the same side of her mouth Elena’s had, and for a second the apartment hurt him in a way his knee never could.
“Get your shoes,” he said. “We’re going.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She was moving before the last syllable, racing to the closet with the kind of joy that made thirty-two dollars seem like both a fortune and an embarrassment.
George looked once more at the pink paper. Monday. The landlord, Richard Davis, had used that word at the office and again in a voicemail, emphasizing it with the satisfaction of a man who possessed a deadline somebody else could not escape.
George turned the refrigerator magnet around so the lobster faced the paper. Then he went to find his keys.
For a few hours, he told himself, the notice could wait.
He did not yet know what those few hours would cost him.
Chapter Two: A Man Who Knew How to Carry Weight
Before the knee, George had known himself by what he could carry.
An eighty-pound pack over loose rock. A wounded friend across an uneven courtyard. Equipment cases and water and ammunition and the accumulated physical burden of people who depended on each other not to stop. During four deployments, he had learned that exhaustion could become a background noise, as familiar as a vehicle engine. You noticed it only when the engine switched off.
The injury happened on a road outside a small village in Helmand Province, in the half-light before dawn. George rarely described it. When Sadie asked, he said there had been an explosion and he had been hurt. When strangers asked, he said the knee was bad. There were more complete versions, but they did not belong in casual conversation.
The official record described multiple penetrating injuries to the right leg, a fracture complicated by soft-tissue damage, and a lengthy rehabilitation. It did not describe the terrible quiet after the blast or the effort it had taken to remain awake while a corpsman named Luis Ortega pressed a hand against his leg and kept telling him the same ordinary thing: Look at me, George. Stay with me. Look at me.
George had stayed. His friend Nolan Carter had survived that day too, and later found a crooked piece of hickory on his family’s property. He worked it with hand tools, sanded the grip, fitted a rubber tip, and mailed it with a note: If you won’t ask anyone to lend you an arm, at least take a stick.
George had laughed when he read the note. He had called Nolan to complain about the craftsmanship. He had kept the cane ever since.
But carrying weight was one thing. Admitting there was weight you could no longer lift was another.
That morning at Miller’s Hardware, he had pretended not to hear Paul Miller ask whether he needed help moving a shipment of garden soil. He had taken the load himself, one bag at a time, because the youngest employee was already on the register and because George had spent too many years being thanked for his service by people who then looked disappointed when he asked for accommodations.
Paul was sixty-five, narrow through the shoulders, with a silver mustache and spectacles attached to his shirt by a cord. He had owned the store long enough to know the difference between a slow week and a bad year. He had also learned not to ask his employees whether they were okay in front of customers.
Near closing time, Paul had caught George leaning against the end of a lumber rack, waiting for a burst of pain to pass.
“You ought to see somebody about that leg.”
“I have.”
“Somebody this decade.”
“You’re a funny man.”
Paul looked at him over his glasses. “You can work the returns counter next week if the dock’s too rough.”
“Dock’s fine.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
George had taken a broom from the wall and started sweeping. Paul had watched him for a second, then left the subject alone. There was a private code among men like them: offer once, do not humiliate by offering twice. It was a code that had kept both of them proud and had never been especially effective at keeping either of them healthy.
