Chapter 8: Dressing the Cast

She sat on the dock until the sun cleared the poplars, and nothing else came back to her.

She repeated the same two words, in a minute, until they stopped sounding like words.

I drove her home and didn't push.

Two weeks went the way work goes, with begonias and invoices and the Saturday crowds stepping around me.

Greer never mentioned the dock again, and I never asked.

On the fourteenth night she came in with a tray and sat me at the potting bench under the one bare bulb.

"June says the pin sites need cleaning," she said. "Twice a week. You've been doing it with one hand."

"I'm managing."

"You're getting it infected."

She had a bowl of warm water, gauze, tape and a little brown bottle.

I put my right arm on the bench, cast from elbow to knuckle, and the tips of two pinned fingers sticking out of the end.

She pulled up a stool and took the hand in both of hers.

Her fingers were rough from soil.

Her left thumb ran along the underside of my wrist, looking for the pin.

I held very still.

"There's one here," she said. "It's gone red."

"I know."

"Hold it."

She cleaned around it with the gauze, slow and exact, and I watched the top of her head.

A strand of strawberry hair had come loose from the tie and hung beside her cheek.

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