Laugh (5 page)

“Go.”

The apartment was quiet, lifeless, as soon as Mike closed the door behind him.

He palmed his phone, resisting calling into Lakeside for a shift, anytime this weekend.

Working at the hospital always made sense when nothing else did.

He’d call Lacey, but he didn’t know what to say and as they got closer to opening, he found himself avoiding her more and more, even as he tortured himself, in spurts, with what it was he should be doing.

Only to find out he had done the wrong thing, late, or that she had already done the right thing that he didn’t even know was necessary.

Sam stomped a path through the mess to shower, remembering too late he’d forgotten to do a load of towels.

Again.

Under the hot water, his muscles felt tight from his workout, and he was already thinking about how to fit in a run after he saw PJ and worked with Nina this afternoon.

When he was a kid, workouts used to help. He’d run around the track at the high school, take himself around the circuit in the weight room, and he’d feel something lift and open, and then he’d race through his shower and sit down with his homework, the focus almost like an absence of something, rather than something
he had gained.

It had worked through medical school, too, and residency. Instead of sleeping in the on-call room during twenty-fours, he’d head to the PT center and lose the noise in his head, and it would feel like a sweetness that made the fatigue bearable.

After he finished his family practice residency and worked in his neighborhood urgent care, the first couple of years were so easy. His book would fill over the day, one patient after the next, one problem at a time, the small team in the office compressing every encounter to intake, exam, treatment, then the chart.

His dad was around then, taking care of everything else, and if his family still thought he was kind of a hopeless asshole, it didn’t matter, because they were just family.

Not his to take care of in some kind of impossible and never-ending miasma of constantly moving targets.

He saw the same patients over and over at the local urgent care, where every visit was twice as expensive than if they had the insurance to cover a primary care provider. He realized that most of the work he did wasn’t reducing fractures or suturing lacerations or treating urgent infections; it was monitoring his neighbors’ blood pressure medications after they lost their health insurance when the bottom was falling out of the economy.

Lacey started floating at his urgent care. Noticed the same thing.

Lacey was the one who made his first ideas for a clinic into something big. Started talking about DHS grants. About studies that demonstrated effective care for populations where they were treated by their cohort.

He and Lacey were that cohort. A couple of neighborhood kids done good who studies said were the perfect candidates to take care of neighborhood people.

He started thinking, just a little, he could do more than one patient in front of him, one book at a time.

Wasn’t he already?

Maybe if his dad hadn’t gotten sick and his sister Sarah hurt in her accident, maybe if his little sister Des, the only one who understood him, hadn’t gone away when he depended on her to help him help everyone else.

He got ready to meet PJ, to go work with Nina, slammed his apartment door behind him.

He always felt better leaving his apartment, leaving that fucking visual representation of the state of his own brain.

He got in his car, drove slowly through his neighborhood, kids out in the street on their bikes or playing pickup, cars parked like they were hooked together at the bumper, on both sides of the street.

He found comfort in the way everyone waved from every postage-stamp-sized yard, crammed with plaster statues of Mary, cement geese dressed in seasonal costumes, kiddie pools.

And over all the houses, so close together nothing fit between them but gravel and chain-link fence, the bulky skyline of Lakefield, disorganized by dozens of architects over as many generations.

He’d felt a similar comfort with Nina, last Saturday.

All he had to do was turn a heavy tomato in his hand, check that it was red and shining from every angle, and snap it off its vine, nestle it in a box filled with good-smelling hay.

Let himself drift in the hum of tension between him and a beautiful woman, as rich as the sound of the insects singing in the grass.

Touching her felt like more of that focus, sharpened. Nina in the close quarters of her truck filled the entire space, made him small, made him feel nothing, nothing but the ache between his legs and affection and tenderness for her dark hair, the laugh crinkles at her temples.

He’d wanted to tell Mike more about her, but he knew as much as he joked about matchmaking, about couples, about the happiness he found, that he also had been the voice of caution way too many times before when Sam had fallen headlong into what he thought was love, only to find out again that it was all just him, his heart overspilling until he thought that what he felt was what the woman felt, too, when what he saw was just the hope he had for his own heart.

After she fed him, he hadn’t even gotten her number, just when and where to meet her today, and all week, he’d felt things slowly slide apart, stack up, get impossible to hold on to.

With Nina, inside her unlikely and private farm, the clean and worn expanse of her truck, everything made sense. There was space around every moment, nothing to do but move his body through a series of tasks.

Decide if he would touch her, or not touch her.

Laugh.

He snagged a booth in the back by the pinball machine that still had the same graffiti carved into the laminate table that it’d had when he was in high school.

Then PJ came into the diner, his cello case strapped to his back, like always.

Sam watched him rake his hand through his dark curls, pulling off sunglasses to look for him.

Something loosened in Sam to see that PJ looked calm and expectant—so often, when PJ met up with his older brother, there was nothing but wariness. Hurt. Sam’s fault, probably.

Sam was just glad PJ would still meet with him.

Des had moved away in the spring.

Sarah, their other sister, he’d lost in another way. Since the spring, when he failed her, fought with her when she was down, she barely spoke to him.

Wouldn’t even fight with him now, and they all had always fought with him.

When PJ was a little kid and Sam was in college, angry and struggling, forced to help their dad out by babysitting his serious and blue-eyed much younger brother, it made him crazy that PJ looked so much like their mom and didn’t really remember her.

PJ carefully shrugged his cello case off his back and positioned the instrument into the booth first, as gentle as if he was seating an elderly woman.

PJ slid in after the cello and gave it a little pat on what looked like its shoulder.

“You should marry it, already.” Sam took a long drink of coffee.

PJ grinned, tossed his hair out of his face like some kind of fucking movie star. “She.”

“It’s a woman?”

“She sings between my legs, doesn’t she?”

Sam laughed, sort of horrified. “Jesus. Don’t talk like that. It freaks me out.”

“Why, because you’re so old?”

“No, because you don’t mean it.” PJ didn’t. His heart had been given away long ago, and it made Sam feel inadequate and admiring both.

But he’d never told PJ that.

“You hear from Des lately?”

PJ nodded at the server who was waiting to pour coffee. “Yeah. Got an email from her last night. She’s
having a blast and sent a bunch of pictures. Her and Hefin are getting ready to go to Beijing for some conference. If they stay there until the fall, I’ll meet up with them when I go play with the Beijing Symphony.”

Sam tried to ignore an unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach, the back of his neck. Like something was trying to get free. “She seem—happy?”

“ ’Course. You’ve seen her with Hefin. Plus, she’s never been anywhere.”

“Exactly. She
hasn’t
been anywhere. She doesn’t have a lot of life experience. Hefin’s older. He was married. Kind of nice for him to take a young girlfriend wherever he wants to go.”

“What the fuck, Sam?”

“What?”

“You’re making Des sound like an idiot. Plus, where the fuck have you been, anyway? I bet you don’t even have a passport. You haven’t done anything but go to school and push pills and you’ve done all that within twenty-five miles of the hospital room you were born in.”

Sam
didn’t
have a passport. And PJ could go fuck himself.

They both ignored each other, recently practiced in the art of avoiding a fight. Sam yanked out his phone, which worked like a cue for PJ to pull out an inch-thick score and a pencil.

Good.

Sam tapped his phone open. Lacey had reluctantly given it back to him last weekend after he finished with Nina and he could prove that Nina would let him come back the next week. Which was good, too, because Sam was far from done with Nina Paz. As promised, she’d fed him at her café, spicy sautéed greens that he had thought about with longing all week.

Then she really had taken him along to talk to a man in an eastside neighborhood who made and cured hard sausage and wanted a commission with Nina.

He had done nothing but stay quiet and sample the spicy
kulen.
Watched her draw a shy Hungarian sausage maker out of his shell until he was falling over himself to tell her everything, make her laugh.

He knew the feeling.

Lacey texted him.

You’re meeting Nina today?

Yes. At the diner with PJ
,
first.

How is he?

Sam looked at PJ, who had looked up from his score and was staring at him.
Pissed at me.

“Is that Lacey?” PJ asked quietly.

Sam nodded.
Should go
, he typed.
Check in later.

Tell Paul hi. Behave yrself with Nina.

“Lacey said to say hi to
Paul.
” Sam tried to catch PJ’s eye, but PJ had a weird look on his face and was staring into his coffee.

“Is that what she said? Did she actually use my name?” PJ suddenly looked pained, like he had revealed too much to Sam.

Sam wanted to reach across the table and grip PJ’s arm, make him look into his eyes—the way he did when PJ was a little boy and wouldn’t confess to a mess in the bathroom or stealing extra cookies.

He wanted PJ to remember that Sam was his older fucking brother.

“Are you still hung up on her?” Sam felt his mood go a little black. “She was your
babysitter.
”

PJ looked up then, and his face was blank, but his big blue eyes, their mom’s eyes, were hard. “You know what, asshole? It’s been real.”

PJ stood up, and hitched his cello out of the booth. He swung it onto his back and dug into his front pocket and threw a five on the table. Walked away.

Sam pulled out his phone. Slid it on. Stared at it until it blinked to black on its own.

* * *

“Just, grab it. Wait, not by the—There you go. Got it!” Nina laughed, and Sam straightened up slowly, gripping the chicken as firmly as he dared.

“I’ve got it.” Sam held out the chicken, feeling oddly tender toward it as its tiny heart beat triple time against his palm.

Nina grinned, her hands on her hips, her shiny braids curling around her breasts, and Sam realized he would do anything to keep that grin on her face. “You sure do. You’ve got that chicken but good.”

“Now what?” The chicken had kind of melted in Sam’s hands, resigned, and its trust had made him feel weirdly affectionate toward it.

He wanted to pet it, smooth back the black-and-white feathers along its back he had ruffled. But he didn’t dare let go of it. Chickens, it turned out, were really fucking hard to catch.

Nina bent over and in one try scooped up a chicken racing by her legs.

“Okay, we bring these ladies over here”—Nina walked over to a drop-down table built out of the chicken coop—“and while you keep one hand around her legs, use the other hand to follow some of her larger feathers down to the base. Kate’s worried her girls have lice, so the easiest thing to look for is a white cluster of lice eggs where the feather inserts into the skin.”

Sam watched Nina hold the chicken away from her face when it flapped after she let its body go. Then
the chicken resettled, and Nina showed Sam how she pulled back the feathers and checked. He moved in next to her at the table, and the feel of her bare arm against his made him melt just like the chicken clucking in his hands.

He checked his chicken carefully, relaxed by the objective, methodical nature of the work, not unlike a physical exam.

“You’re a good chicken doctor.” Nina let her chicken go, and moved around Sam to grab another.

He looked at her, at her quick and pretty smile at him before she tended her chicken. She was wearing a white, sort of see-through cotton blouse thing today. It was small. It was driving him crazy. “Maybe I’ll give up people and only take on chicken patients from now on.”

He watched her laugh and let her chicken go, effortlessly grabbing another. His chicken had settled in for the duration, making some kind of cooing noise, and Sam realized he had started to pet it.

“I think she likes you.”

Sam leaned against the table. Looked at Nina, how the outside curl of her eyelashes pointed to the wingtip of her eyebrow. He wanted to rest his mouth against the soft inch of temple they framed. She glanced up from her chicken and met his look; he watched as she recognized it. “Yeah? I think I kind of like her.”

Nina bumped his hip with hers and looked away.

Sam gently set his chicken down by the coop ramp, where it shook out its wings and started pecking the ground. Washing his hands by the outdoor spigot decorated with a soap-on-a-rope redolent with lavender, he had a moment when he felt nothing but the sun on his neck, the cool water sluicing over his forearms.

He leaned back against the table, shaking his hands dry, refusing to analyze why he thought Nina checking a chicken for lice was sexy.