Going Home - Chapter 7

“So, who’s this girl that’s driving you again?” Mom asked for the thirtieth time that morning when I explained why I didn’t need a ride to the doctor’s.

“Her name’s Rosita. I don’t actually know her last name. She runs the taco place across from the high school.”

“I don’t think I know her, but I don’t go down there very much. I do remember Betty mentioning some foreign girl moving to town a few years ago.”

“She’s from Puerto Rico. It’s not exactly foreign. They’re US citizens.”

“But they don’t speak English, right? How do you two even communicate?”

It took everything in my power to keep me from rolling my eyes at her. My mom was a good person and I knew she didn’t really mean anything negative by that. Far from it, in fact. She just kind of lived in her own world here, always dealing with the same people and keeping to the same routine.

“No, they speak Spanish, but most people from there, especially the ones that move into the states, speak English, too. Hers is very good. I mean, how would she run a business here if she didn’t speak English.”

“I didn’t know, I was just asking. So how did you two meet each other?”

“I went into her place a while back when I was wandering town and we got to talking. I ran into her at the bus stop when I got back from New York and when she found out I had to go to the doctor today, she offered to give me a ride. We’re just friends.”

Mom gave me a look I’d seen before and said, “Well, I’m just glad you’re socializing again. You’ve been moping around here for weeks. You two have fun.”

“I think I have pretty good reasons for ‘moping around.’”

“I wasn’t judging, I was just observing,” she said in the least believable statement of all time.

I heard a car pull into the driveway and pushed myself out of the chair I’d been sitting in and pulled my crutches under my arms.

“I gotta go.”

“Will you be back tonight?” Mom asked.

“Yes, she’s just giving me a ride there and back, and then she’s got to go close her restaurant.”

“I just meant, if you two were going to go somewhere else, I wanted to know so I didn’t worry.”

“It’s not like that,” I said again. “I gotta go. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Okay. Well, good luck at the doctor’s.”

“Thanks,” I called over my shoulder as I popped the screen door open with my crutch and edged through.

Rosita was already out of her car and heading towards the porch when I made it out of the door, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid. I know my mother meant well, but tact wasn’t her strong suit and she clearly already thought there was more going on here than there was. I actually really liked Rosita, but she’d shown no interest in that kind of thing. Besides, even though I wasn’t particularly sad that Terri and I had split, since our marriage had died a long time ago, jumping into something else didn’t really seem like the best way to go.

Of course, I could never explain that to my mother.

“Are you in a hurry,” Rosita said, seeing me not pause as I reached her, hoping she’d get the hint and follow me back to her car.

“No, I just …” I started to say before my mother came through the screen door and interrupted me.

“You must be Rosita,” she said, coming down the steps and sticking out her hand.

“Yes,” Rosita said, shaking my mother’s hand while looking at me slightly confused.

Although I wanted to, I couldn’t exactly pull her away from my mother, at least not without hearing about it for the next five years, so I just shrugged and turned back to the pair of them, abandoning my attempted escape.

“Rosita, this is my mother, Mary Brewer. Mom, this is my friend Rosita.”

“Nice to meet you, although I think Henry might have lost some of his manners, because he didn’t mention your last name.”

This time I did roll my eyes as Mom gave me the least sly glance ever, as she proudly fished for information I hadn’t been able to give her.

“Delgado.”

“I see,” Mom said, before turning to me and making it even more obvious and embarrassing. “It’s Delgado.”

“Got it,” I said, starting to look for a hole to climb into.

“I really appreciate you taking Henry to the doctor’s. I’d offered to change my schedule, but he insisted he’d rather get a ride from you.”

I opened my mouth to protest, and then shut it, since it wouldn’t do any good. Mom had offered to cancel her schedule, but in a way that made it clear she both really didn’t want to and that she’d hold it over my head for the rest of my life if I did. Of course, this way she got to play the martyr card and still get to do what she wanted to do.

“I don’t mind. I haven’t had many chances to visit any of the nearby towns and I thought it would be nice to have a guide to show me around. Besides, I really want to find out what happened with the police at the high school yesterday.”

I whipped my head around to stare at Rosita, surprised she’d heard about that already.

“How’d you hear about that?” I asked.

Mom apparently had bigger concerns because she spoke over me, asking, “Something happened with the police? Did you get into trouble? Was there an accident?”

“I’m not in any trouble and there wasn’t an accident,” I said. “I was just walking around the high school killing time and I saw this guy holding a woman at knifepoint in the rear parking lot. I subdued him and called the police, who came and took him away. End of story.”

“You confronted a man with a knife?” Mom said, completely aghast. “Are you out of your mind? You could have gotten hurt!”

“I used to do this for a living, you know. I was fine.”

“I know you used to do this, but you weren’t on crutches then.”

“I was fine. The guy was coming down hard and was barely holding it together. I was more worried I might seriously hurt him and someone would decide to sue me. Orville said he knew the guy and he’s been in a lot of trouble in the past, so it should be fine. Besides, what else could I do, just turn, and walk away?”

Mom pursed her lips and I knew inside she wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t say it out loud without feeling guilty at church on Sunday.

“It might be a bit foolish, because you’re injured, but it’s still very brave. It shows you’re a good person.”

I just shrugged. I hadn’t been fishing for compliments and wasn’t even planning on bringing it up until Rosita spilled the beans.

“Okay, we gotta go if I don’t want to be late for my appointment,” I said edging towards Rosita’s car.

Mom was torn between grilling me on my encounter with a junkie and questioning Rosita some more, and ended up just frowning instead.

“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Brewer,” Rosita said when Mom didn’t add anything else.

Giving Mom a smile, Rosita turned and passed me to unlock her car, and open my door for me. Normally I’d have waved off the assistance, my dad’s stubborn pride having taken a firm hold of me from an early age, but her car was fairly low to the ground and I needed help holding my crutches while I braced one hand on the door and one hand on the roof of the car to lower myself in. Rosita handed me my crutches and hurried around to the driver’s side while I tried to find a comfortable way to hold them on my lap while buckling in.

Normally, I would have just put them across a back seat, except she had a tiny little car with a back seat I doubted any human being could actually sit in. I could probably Tetris my crutches back there if I really tried, but it would have required awkward twisting around and probably whacking the driver a few times while I made the attempt, so I opted to just make the best of it with them on my lap.

“So, how did you hear about what happened?”

“The high school is just across the street. Even in the back parking lot, it’s hard to miss two police cars and an ambulance flying down the street. Besides, Orville comes in most days for tacos. When he stopped by last night, I asked him what all the commotion was about, and he told me a drug addict tried to rob a woman, and that you stopped him and called the police.”

“He told you I did it?”

“Well, he said a guy that used to live here and recently moved back, and I asked if he meant you, and he said yes. So then he started telling me stories about when you two were younger.”

“Ohh,” I said, feeling a pit in my stomach, since I could only imagine the kinds of things he told her.

“It wasn’t anything bad. He said you two were friends in high school, although you didn’t really hang out with the same crowd because he was a little older than you, and because you were out of here as soon as you graduated.”

My heart crawled out of my throat, leaving only guilt behind, since Orville had to have done that deliberately. He was a smart guy and was in no way oblivious. He knew how we treated him and how we talked about him when he wasn’t around. He’d given me a solid bye, by not outing who I used to be to Rosita; although I was a little at a loss as to why he would have done it.

Worse than feeling guilty about how I treated him when we were younger was lying to Rosita about it now. The weird thing was, although I never straight up lied to Terri, I had no problem just avoiding telling her things or letting her believe things that I knew weren’t true simply because I didn’t want to get into a fight.

“He was being charitable,” I heard myself say, apparently unable to fight whatever inner conscience had just reared its ugly head. “We were kind of awful to him when we were kids. I hate to admit it, but I was a serious jerk when I was a teenager.”

“All teenagers are jerks. Being self-absorbed and mean is kind of what adolescence is all about.”

“True, but I took it to the next level. I was the stereotypical jerk you see as the bad guy in all those chick-flicks about high school.”

“Really? I find that hard to believe. You don’t seem like that kind of guy at all.”

“I guess I grew up. When I think back to how I treated Orville though, I feel really guilty about it. Especially after talking to him yesterday. He seems like a nice guy and he really has his head screwed on tight.”

“His head …?” she asked, her face scrunching up in confusion.

“It just means he’s got things together and is sensible.”

“Ohh. His head screwed on tight. I like it. And yes, he does. Orville and Tommy were friendly and he and his wife have been really nice to me since I moved here.”

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“Yes. His wife works in law enforcement too. She answers the emergency phone lines.”

“Sarah?” I asked, recalling the woman’s name Orville mentioned. “Huh! Good for him.”

We chatted the rest of the way to the hospital. She told me more about her brother, mostly stories from when they’d been kids, and I talked about being a cop in New York and playing ball in college. Like the first night we met, I was amazed by how easy it was to talk to her and how much I wanted to get to know everything about her. Maybe she felt the same way, because I noticed after a while that each of us kept trying to turn the conversation around and try and get the other to start telling stories instead.

The thing that impressed me most was how self-resilient she was. Her brother had done what a lot of people from underprivileged communities did, going straight from high school to the military, usually with ideas of getting a GI grant so they could afford some level of college. That hadn’t been an option for her. Although the military would have taken her, her mother was very old-fashioned and made it clear that wasn’t an option for her. While that probably wouldn’t have stopped me, since there were a lot of things my mother had declared I shouldn’t do that I went and did anyway, it had apparently been enough for her.

It was pretty foreign to me, but we grew up in very different cultures from each other. Instead, she managed to find enough scholarships to go to a small college in Florida on a full ride, which considering how she described her high school, was pretty spectacular. She got a business degree and went back to Puerto Rico, working jobs and saving up money so she could one day open up her own business. The fact that she’d managed that, while grieving the loss of her brother, was amazing to me. Terri and I had had a two-income family, with both of us making okay money, and we’d barely been scraping by; while Rosita had put together enough money to move from Puerto Rico to West Virginia, buy out the coffee shop, and convert it into a restaurant. All the while, she was making a whole lot less money than I had by myself, not even counting Terri’s income.

It was hard not to be impressed.

When we got there, she gave me her phone number, dropped me off at the hospital, and then headed off to look around town, which was small, but significantly bigger than Buxton. Our plan was to meet up afterward, wander around town and grab an early dinner before heading back to Buxton.

I found the doctor I’d been referred to and made my way up to his office on the second floor. The fact that I only had to wait about ten minutes, which was just about when my appointment had been scheduled for, was a far change from how any doctor’s visit in New York had gone. It hadn’t been unusual to find myself waiting forty-five minutes after my appointment was supposed to start before actually getting in to see the doctor.

The hospital might be small, less well equipped, and a long drive, but it definitely had some things to offer over its big-city equivalent.

The nurse led me through to a consulting room and directed me into a chair next to an examination bed, which I was thankful for. The bed, with its faux leather covering and paper sleeve on top would have required a bit of work to get onto with my leg the way it was. The chair might have been made of uncomfortable molded plastic, but it was at least easier to get into.

After a few minutes, a doctor wearing small round glasses and a stethoscope around his neck came into the room.

“Mr. Brewer, how are you today?”

“Good. Leg’s a bit stiff, but it hurts less to walk on.”

“That isn’t unusual after a surgery like yours, especially since you’d already had surgery on that area before. Have you been doing the exercises they showed you?”

“I tried, but it was hard without putting too much weight on my knee. I didn’t want to screw something up and have to go under the knife again.”

“Unless you were jumping with your entire body weight and bending it the wrong way, you wouldn’t have broken the plate. It’s not actually on the knee, so the joint doesn’t have an effect on it, and from the x-rays, the screws look really solid. The only thing you really had to watch out for was ripping stitches, either on the skin or the ones inside the muscle, but the incision points would be well on their way to healing by now.”

“Then why does it hurt when I walk on it too much?”

“At first it was the incision points. The nerves around those areas would have been in rough shape and would take time to heal themselves. Now though, it’s probably scar tissue building up and pulling on the surrounding muscle, which is why you need to be doing your exercises. I’m surprised you skipped doing them. I would have thought since you had a similar surgery, even if under different circumstances, you would have understood the importance of physical therapy.”

“I had a team of doctors paid for by the NFL, or at least their insurance carrier, and I lived near where the surgery was done. I do remember doing physical therapy for a while starting a few days after that surgery, but it had always been done at a rehab center with a physical therapist and nurses around. This time I haven’t even seen a doctor or anyone else about it since I got out of the hospital.”

“I see. Let’s take a look at it, shall we?”

I pulled my pants leg up and he looked over the bullet wound and the incision points, both of which had closed up. They’d used absorbable stitches for most of it, which I’d been annoyed at when I’d first heard about it, since it didn’t seem like it would be strong enough to hold me moving around, and I didn’t want to have to go back and get new stitches. Once I saw the incision points, it became clearer that it should be okay. As opposed to my first leg surgery, the incisions here were a lot smaller. They hadn’t explained it, but I guess technology had progressed and they were able to use cameras and special tools to do the surgery through small incisions instead of cutting open a wide swath.

He proceeded to go through a whole range of motion tests, turning my leg this way and that. It hurt a little, although not as much as when I put weight on it, but he seemed to be satisfied with whatever results he was seeing, at least based on the ‘huh’ and ‘uh-huh’ noise he kept making.

“Okay, that looks pretty good,” he said when he finished putting me through my paces. “Your incision points are healing up nicely and I’m not seeing any signs of secondary infection. My biggest concern right now is your limited movement. I want to make it clear how important your physical therapy is. The reason your leg has been hurting is because of scar tissue build-up. As the incision points and the wound from the bullet itself heal, the muscle forms scar tissue along the lines where it joins itself together. Too much of this scar tissue can inhibit mobility and cause pain when the muscle is used. We can limit scar tissue build-up by keeping those muscles in light but regular use as it heals. The more you use it, the more you break up the scar tissue and prevent new tissue from forming. You’ve probably already got a fair amount formed up, but it’s possible to work some of that out and keep any more from forming.”

“I’ve been out walking most days.”

“Walking is good, and it has probably helped a lot, especially in keeping scar tissue building that would affect mobility, but walking doesn’t use all of the muscles in the area and those it does use are in specific ways. The point of these exercises is to work the full range of the muscle, to help it repair itself with as little scarring as possible.”

“Okay, I’ll do the exercises. What about the crutches. How much longer do I need to be on them? I can actually put weight on my leg when I try; it just hurts a little bit.”

“That was mostly to keep you off the leg while the incision points and the bullet wound began to close up. At this point, you should be good to stop using them, although you’re probably going to find you need a single crutch or maybe a cane to help take some of the pressure off when it begins to hurt too badly. If you do your physical therapy every day, that should subside and you should be able to ditch the cane in a month or two. If you follow the complete rehab schedule you were given, you should also find yourself slowly being able to do more strenuous activities like running. If you don’t, you’re going to get too much build-up for physical therapy alone to give you back your mobility. If that happens, you’ll have to have another surgery to remove scar tissue, so make sure you’re doing your exercises.”

“If I do it, I’ll be able to run again?”

“Yes. You won’t be breaking any records and competitive sports are completely off the table, but yes, you should be able to run without pain in a few months. Again, only if you do your physical therapy.”

“What about the stitches?”

Although they’d used absorbable stitches, the ones on the outside of the skin had been the non-absorbable kind, apparently because it was stronger and more able to hold up without tearing.

“I can take those out today. It’ll be sore for a few days and you need to keep the area clean and dry, but that’ll pass pretty quickly.”

All in all, the appointment went better than I’d thought. I guess he was right about the physical therapy, since all the moving and adjusting he did to my leg, it actually felt less stiff as I left. The area around where the stitches had come out was itchy as hell and did hurt a little as I put weight on it, so he was probably right about the crutches as well.

I really was looking forward to getting off the crutches and being able to walk like a normal human being before I started going for jobs at some of the school districts I’d applied to. My trip here and then back to New York had made me a firm believer that flying while on crutches was a massive pain, and I didn’t really want to be on them when I started taking flights out for interviews.