I thought I would just turn on a streaming service and veg out for a while. If I wanted food, I could make my way into the kitchen and reheat some of the pizza we had gotten the other day, but for now, I just wanted to rest and watch something mindless.
When I turned on the tablet, I realized I hadn’t done anything on it since the day after the accident. At some point, while I was on some pretty heavy painkillers, Dee must have brought it to me, and I used the search engine to find some videos. It was still showing the results.
They were all amputees. Some of them were showing off their prosthetic legs or arms; others were vlogging. Some were doing both. There were inspirational stories about people competing in the Paralympics and a story about a professional wrestler who hid that he lost his foot in a motorcycle accident by always wearing his wrestling boots.
I clicked on them one after the other, slowly sinking down the rabbit hole of videos as an idea began to form in my mind. Part of what I missed about school, and what I missed about the career I wanted was telling the stories of people overcoming hardships. Players who fought back from injury and won MVP awards. Players who people wrote off that came back to win championships.
Why not me, in my own way?
A germ of an idea was percolating in my mind as I clicked from one video to the next, and slowly, the melancholy feeling that settled over me at Wendy’s house began to disappear.
4
GERRY
My adoptive parents knew I was a bit of a mess when they found me talking to my cat all the time. It had been the impetus of a conversation we had when I was a teen, wondering if everything was okay with me. It was of course. I just found myself able to talk to animals since they didn’t talk back, and they never judged.
Now that I was living alone in a house that was probably too big for one person and a cat, I found myself talking to him even more than normal. Captain Clovis didn’t seem to mind the extra attention, so long as treats came at their allotted time and I didn’t chase after him when he decided, in true cat fashion, that he felt like doing something else for a period of time. He would abruptly leave, as if he were late for an appointment, then saunter into another room, lazily lying down for a while before making his way back to my lap.
I spent the entire weekend tooling around the house, chatting it up with Captain Clovis and distracting myself with action movies or trying to get good at pool. The table I had in the game room, which had seen decidedly fewer games since Finn had a child and wasn’t coming over to watch baseball or play video games as much anymore.
Monday came, and like usual, there wasn’t much for me to do at the office. Mondays were primarily spent by the crew getting to work on whatever I set up for them on Friday, and I wasn’t generally needed much until Tuesday. Still, I went into the office, checked-in, and then left after lunch, getting home just in time to catch the one o’clock first pitch of a Cubs game.
I had settled into the recliner, reluctantly content to watch the game and chat at the cat again before ordering something to eat, when a knock at the door startled me. I got up and crossed the room, catching a glimpse out of the window to see the car parked in front of the house. My spirits lifted when I saw it was Finn’s truck, and when I opened the door, I was even more surprised and happy to see Wendy standing there with their baby Hope in her arms.
“Come in, come in,” I said, ushering them inside. “Bonjour, my friends, come in.”
Wendy came in first, Finn behind her with Olly. Olly had been to my place before and knew exactly where he wanted to go. Finn waved at me as he chased the little boy into the game room, and I could hear the sound of the pool table being played with almost immediately. I didn’t mind. In fact, I loved it. I would rather have to reupholster the top and know someone other than myself got to enjoy it for a few minutes rather than have it sit there like a relic.
“We thought we would come pay you a visit, if you didn’t mind,” Wendy said, rocking the baby back and forth. She was awake and looking around the room curiously.
“Not at all,” I said. “I wasn’t doing anything important. How did you know I would be home?”