Another Man's Moccasins

It had been like this for the last week. We’d reached a plateau, and she was satisfied with the progress she’d made. I wasn’t. The physical therapist at University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia had warned me that this might happen. It wasn’t that my daughter was weak or lazy; it was far worse than that—she was bored.

“Two more?”

"I heard you....” She plucked at her shorts and avoided my eyes. “Your voice; it carries.”

I placed an elbow on my knee, chin on fist, sat farther back on the sit-up bench, and glanced around. We weren’t alone. There was a kid in a Durant Quarterback Club T-shirt who was trying to bulk up his 145-pound frame at one of the Universal machines. I’m not sure why he was up here—there were no televisions, and it wasn’t as fancy as the main gym downstairs. I understood all the machines up here—you didn’t have to plug any of them in—but I wondered about him; it could be that he was here because of Cady.

“Two more.”

“Piss off.”

The kid snickered, and I looked at him. I glanced back at my daughter. This was good; anger sometimes got her to finish up, even if it cost me the luxury of conversation for the rest of the evening. It didn’t matter tonight; she had a dinner date and then had to be home for an important phone call. I had zip. I had all the time in the world.

She had cut her auburn hair short to match the spot where they had made the U-shaped incision that had allowed her swelling brain to survive. Only a small scar was visible at the hairline. She was beautiful, and the pain in the ass was that she knew it.

It got her pretty much whatever she wanted. Beauty was life’s E-ZPass. I was lucky I got to ride on the shoulder.

"Two more?”

She picked up her water bottle and squeezed out a gulp, leveling the cool eyes back on me. We sat there looking at each other, both of us dressed in gray. She stretched a finger out and pulled the band of my T-shirt down, grazing a fingernail on my exposed collarbone. “That one?”

Just because she was beautiful didn’t mean she wasn’t smart. Diversion was another of her tactics. I had enough scars to divert the entire First Division. She had known this scar and had seen it on numerous occasions. Her question was a symptom of the memory loss that Dr. Rissman had mentioned.

She continued to poke my shoulder with the finger. “That one.”

“Two more.”

“That one?”

Cady never gave up.

It was a family trait, and in our tiny family, stories were the coinage of choice, a bartering in the aesthetic of information and the athletics of emotion, so I answered her. “Tet.”

She set her water bottle down on the rubber-padded floor. "When? ”

“Before you were born.”

She lowered her head and looked at me through her lashes, one cheek pulled up in a half smile. “Things happened before I was born?”

“Well, nothing really important.”

She took a deep breath, gripped the sides of the bench, and put all her effort into straightening the lever action of thirty pounds at her legs. Slowly, the weights lifted to the limit of the movement and then, just as slowly, dropped back. After a moment, she caught her breath. “Marine inspector, right?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

"Why Marines? ”

“It was Vietnam, and I was gonna be drafted, so it was a choice.” I was consistently amazed at what her damaged brain chose to remember.

“What was Vietnam like?”

“Confusing, but I got to meet Martha Raye.”

Unsatisfied with my response, she continued to study my scar. “You don’t have any tattoos.”

“No.” I sighed, just to let her know that her tactics weren’t working.

“I have a tattoo.”

“You have two.” I cleared my throat in an attempt to end the conversation. She pulled up the cap sleeve of her Philadelphia City Sports T-shirt, exposing the faded, Cheyenne turtle totem on her shoulder. She was probably unaware that she’d been having treatments to have it removed; it had been the ex-boyfriend’s idea, all before the accident. “The other one’s on your butt, but we don’t have to look for it now.”

The kid snickered again. I turned and stared at him with a little more emphasis this time.

“Bear was in Vietnam with you, right?”

She was smiling as I turned back to her. All the women in my life smiled when they talked about Henry Standing Bear. It was a bit annoying, but Henry was my best and lifelong friend, so I got over it. He owned the Red Pony, a bar on the edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, only a mile from my cabin, and he was the one who was taking Cady to dinner. I wasn’t invited. He and my daughter were in cahoots. They had pretty much been in cahoots since she had been born.

“Henry was in-country, Special Operations Group; we didn’t serve together.”

"What was he like back then?”

I thought about it. “He’s mellowed, a little.” It was a frightening thought. “Two more?”

Her gray eyes flashed. “One more.”

I smiled. “One more.”