Walk on Water (7 page)

“Don’t you ever get angry, Luke?” I finally asked timidly.

He continued to stroke my hand.

“On average,” he said. “Ninety-two times a day.”

I was turning to liquid, right here in the café, next to the window, for all the world to see.

“But?” I followed because I knew there would be one.

“I move on,” he answered. “That’s all.”

“You always do.”

His smile changed, becoming ironic.

“Not always, Rachel,” he corrected me.

When was that I thought to myself. Then Christina flashed into my mind. Christina in billows of white as I always recalled her. Beautiful, sparkling, perfect. Beside him. Going with him, leaving me behind. Had she left him behind? Had she broken up his family when he needed them most? Forcing him back to Dallas to his mother and father?

Luke had said that he had returned for a career promotion, and I believed him, but I was also convinced that it must have something to do with his divorce too. We rarely talked about our marriages. It was perhaps too soon after our reunion to talk too much about our others, the
better halves
who had left us. Besides all I really wanted was for it to be just
us
anyway. So I kept quiet about my Christina thoughts.

“I learned my lesson,” Luke said with my hand still in his. “Sometimes the most righteous indignation can still get you the wrong results.”

In college one of his fraternity brothers had nicknamed him
Cool-hand Luke
, using the movie title to describe the balanced style that had never failed him.

When the waitress returned with our drinks, Luke let go of my hand and sat back. As she set the two ice-teas on the table, I clasped my hands together tightly under the table. What I was feeling right now, it wasn’t like that between Luke and me anymore. Thankfully by the time the waitress addressed me I was able to order the grilled chicken salad calmly. Luke ordered the same.

“Hold the bacon and the egg,” he added, passing his menu to the waitress.

“Got it,” she said.

I would have asked for the same thing, but it would have made me look like I was copying Luke so I said nothing. Was that what worked about us? That opposites attracted? He was so totally unflappable and I was so not.
Leather and lace.
But he hadn’t spent a lifetime having to prove something.

“I just want things to be easier for you, Luke,” I decided to explain myself once the waitress was gone. “That’s all. I didn’t mean to embarrass you or anything.”

“Don’t make me one of your causes, Rachel,” he replied. “It’s not a good look.”

“That’s not what I mean, Luke.”

“I know,” he smiled again, this time warmly. “I got this. And it’s nobody problem. You’ll just have to trust me this time.”

.

SEVEN

D
espite his wheelchair, I was, like always, intimidated by Luke’s fitness. It was probably more out of necessity than vanity now, his upper body forced to compensate for his legs, but regardless I was determined not to look like his fat friend, and faithful asexual sidekick. I was working out that much harder in
Jazzercise
class since the reunion, and I had started hitting the weights too. I supposed Luke had always been good for my heart medically speaking; too bad he had been just as effective at breaking it into pieces.

Corrine noticed my maniac pace at the health club we belonged to and was very suspicious.

“Okay, so who is he?” she eventually demanded to know one night after
Jazzercise
class.

“Who is who?” I asked back, playing dumb.

“Mr. Inspiration.”

“What?” I played it off. “Just kicking it up a notch.”

“A notch that means you’re definitely planning on getting naked with somebody.”

An image of Luke filled my head and everywhere else.

“You have a dirty mind, Corrine” I laughed, heading towards the abs equipment.

Hopefully I could work off the feeling. There was nothing like total exhaustion to at least let me fall asleep. I had tried a little
self-work
before, but it had been more
work
than anything else. And now with Luke in real-time it was pretty much just tedious.

“Nothing dirty about it as long as you shower after,” Corrine quipped following me. “So tell me, sister dear,” she insisted hovering over me as I worked towards the set target of fifty fast reps. “Who put the pep in your step?”

“Pep?” I said catching my breath. “I’m pooped.”

“You’re horny,” replied Corrine.

And hopeless, I thought, and stupidly happy over it anyway.

“Always checking your cell, tied up on the weekends,” Corrine listed her evidence. “‘I gotta take this call, Corrine.’ A woman knows when her best friend is kicking her to the curb and it usually means a new man.”

Or an old one.

It was time to fess-up, or at least make real the man of my alcohol-infused stories of unrequited love. I would have to do it carefully, so that Corrine wouldn’t feel sorry for me for wanting a second chance at what had never been mine in the first place. Now she would know his name. She might even
Google
him. Then she really would feel sorry for me. Fairytale princesses were not forty-somethings who had to wax-off their facial hair.

I still hadn’t told Mommy about the
reunion
either, which felt very not right. Fortunately she had only asked me once if I had heard from Luke since running into Mrs. Sterling at the mall. Lying, I had told her no. “Humph,” she had said disdainfully. “Maybe you’ll get a Christmas card this year.”

Mommy had been skeptical of my friendship with Luke from the start. Yes, he had been nice to me and to her, but Luke wasn’t my
type
, she had never let me forget. Because in her eyes I wasn’t his. “Section-8 and high society don’t mix,” she had warned. “Betty Sterling won’t stand for it.”

When I was still in high school, a HUD program had helped Mommy buy us a nice two-bedroom house with a backyard big enough for her vegetable garden, yet that was how Mommy had always understood us, as
Section-8
people, and the Sterlings, regardless of Mr. Sterling’s roots, were
high society
. If Mommy knew that it was Mrs. Sterling, herself, who had reconnected me to Luke, then she would conclude that Mrs. Sterling had only done so because her golden boy had lost some of his shine, that he had fallen down to me, not that I might have climbed up to him. For a supposedly classless society we certainly clung to our social order.

But hopefully it would be different with Corrine, and besides I was absolutely desperate to tell somebody. Things needed to be analyzed. I needed a safe place to let off some steam. It wasn’t easy to deliberately lie to your mother. The one enormous drawback of being in love with your best friend was that you couldn’t talk to him about it. Could Luke really my best friend again? Maybe I really did need a dose of Corrine’s blunt reality.

“Okay, okay,” I sighed, moving to the next piece of equipment. “Buy me a juice and I’ll tell you the latest.”

“A juice?” replied Corrine. “Girl, I bet this story deserves a margarita.”

That was probably true, but it was a weeknight so I told Corrine she’d just have to settle for a
Snapple
.

The music in the juice-bar was the same as what filled the rest of the health club, and it was designed to get the heart racing and the blood pumping. The subject of Luke made me excited enough and I wanted to be calm when I told Corrine about him, so we ended up sitting in her car.

“Wow, paralyzed,” said Corrine. “And his mom didn’t tell you?”

“He says she doesn’t like to talk about it,” I explained.

“He didn’t tell you either.”

“We didn’t talk very long that first time. We just set a time and place to meet.”

“He should have prepared you for it.”

“What was he supposed to say, Corrine? ‘By the way I was in a car wreck and I’m crippled.’?”

“After twenty years, you’d expect some highlights,” countered Corrine. “Of which that would be one, yeah. You sure he wasn’t testing you? You know, to see if you’d freak out or something.”

“Luke’s not like that. He doesn’t care what people think.”

“Twenty years, Rae, remember? Everybody changes.”

“Not Luke.”

“So y’all been going out ever since?” she asked, sipping her peach-mango flavored, diet
Snapple
.

“Yes. But not going out, not really. I mean, not like regular going out.”

“Going out is going out,” she frowned.

“We’re just hanging out,” I clarified. “The way we used to do, back in college.”

“When you were in love with him, you mean?”

“That was a long time ago, Corrine.”

“And according to you he hasn’t changed. So have you?”

“We were just friends back then,” I said and sipped my diet
Ocean Spray Cranapple
. “We still are.”

“Well at least he was your
first
,” she reminded me thoughtfully. “You have something to remember. It’s kind of romantic, I must admit.”

Except
firsts
didn’t matter so much to Luke. How stupid of me to still be hoping that he could be my
last.
But Corrine didn’t need to know that.

“Even if he can’t…” she continued. “You know…”

“Who says he can’t?” I asked sharply.

Corrine made another face.

“You mean the little blue pill?” she asked. “Oh well. I guess it’s getting to be about that time for a lot of us. And they can always do that artificial-insemination-in-vitro-fertilization thing if you wanted to have a baby.”

“Let’s change the subject,” I replied.

.

EIGHT

S
ighing, I shifted restlessly in my seat on the pew, drawing a reproachful glance from Mommy who sat beside me. It was Sunday morning—well afternoon now, and Reverend Milton had launched into another one of his
sermonettes
before at long last getting to the benediction. He often did this, so we were all used to it, even the little children. It was never time to go until the last song had been sung.

I was dying to check my cell phone for messages. Through the soft leather of my clutch bag the hard plastic form of the flip-phone tempted me like Eden’s serpent. I had respectfully shut it off before service, but now I was obsessing, wondering whether or not there might be a message waiting to come to me with the phone’s ON button, a message from Luke.

Of course I didn’t really expect there to be one—not from him. We didn’t talk on Sundays. He didn’t call me. I didn’t call him either. My Sundays were spent with Mommy. They began in the morning when I drove over to Mommy’s house to pick her up and drive her to Sunday School. They lasted right through the morning worship service, and then a Sunday lunch at a restaurant usually of Mommy’s choosing. They finished up with us watching
Sixty Minutes
together when a football game didn’t delay the broadcast.

Since Mommy had been a teenage mother, we were close enough in age to make us good companions, and the older I got this seemed to become increasingly true. Sometimes we seemed more like sisters than mother and daughter.

Luke must have his own family time too. Perhaps they even went to church sometimes. The older people got the more they recognized their own mortality. Maybe religion was still more
social
with the Sterlings than anything else, but it might have become a
social
relationship they took more seriously, since Luke had had to face his own mortality so much sooner than anyone could have expected.

I fingered the form of the cell phone. Luke could be thinking of me, perhaps even missing me a little. He liked my company, and regrettably or not, my world was beginning to revolve around him again. Mommy, Corrine, work, other friends, the health club, even T-T and Agatha, all kind of had to fit in around the time I was spending with him. Corrine had nailed it that night at the gym, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it to her. I wasn’t admitting it to anybody. And especially not to Mommy or Luke. Making a fool of myself was a private affair.

I had mastered my own art of diffident deportment. I would not forget that completely revealing myself to him had turned out badly. By coming on too strong I had seemed desperate. Asking for more than he could give me had driven him away. I had lost my best friend because I had been greedy. If Mommy was right about a man wanting to feel needed, then there must be a delicate balance between need and greed, and this time I was determined to strike that balance and hold fast. Okay, so I was always readily available, but it was up to him to make the request. Not crowding him must count for something.