Cardinal Numbers: Stories Read Online Free Page B

really love you,
    Holly
    Bright but backward, much too old to have a crush on her teacher. Or possibly I’m misled by embarrassment, lured into evasion. Might this be a defect of the “interesting woman”? I drop the card in my bag, knowing I won’t write back.
    I catch a chill at Thriftway just from shuffling through the frozen entrees. Indecision is always dangerous. So I stick firmly to inedibles: a set of jumper cables, wood glue, mouthwash, aluminum-foil loaf pans, a plastic helicopter, Self magazine. In the checkout line, watching a short, placid man watching me, I realize the rubber band is still in my mouth.
    IT’S Friday and I go to see Corey. The temperature has sharply dropped, turning yesterday’s slush into mean ice troughs, making the drive difficult. But I never miss a Friday. I sway and spin up into the hills, past long black driveways and houses built, in a simpler period, to be above the soot.
    Corey’s father comes out across the porch and puts his arms around me. He’s all overbearing bone at first, then something gives inside and it seems the only thing holding him up is his chin hooked over my shoulder.
    “Everything smooth?” I ask.
    “Tolerable.”
    He takes my gloves, tugs at my coat, but I won’t let him have it.
    “I don’t warm up till April.”
    He smooths his mustache, which is yellowing like ivory. “Go on ahead. He’s heard the door.” His eyes ascend so slowly, as if counting each carpeted stair.
    Corey’s room overlooks the back garden, but the spot he prefers for his chair is away from the window, under a wedge of white ceiling where the roof slants around a dormer. He pretends to be surprised.
    “Na aun. Aun!”
    I lift the bill of his Pirates cap, tickle his lashes with mine.
    “Loom spox,” he whispers slyly.
    The damage came not from the accident but from surgery afterward, a futile try to reattach his right arm, severed by the guardrail. An anesthetist’s blunder, loss of oxygen to the brain, permanence. Corey’s father might have sued, but the blunt mechanics of the process made him turn away.
    “I’ve made a lot of money, some of it in not very pleasant ways,” he said. “But, goddamn, I won’t squeeze my boy like he is for profit.”
    Corey can walk just fine, even dance, but he’d rather sit, his one arm gone above the elbow, the other one withered, useless mostly, nerves crushed when his Kawasaki came back down out of the air.
    “Potos,” he says, nodding at the chocolate apple as I break it into sections. “Owow potos.”
    It’s hard to know how much he remembers or now understands. The doctor says to think of it like a stroke, certain sectors of the brain cut off. But which ones? I think Corey cries at magazines because he can’t take pictures anymore, but I’m not sure. He adores music sometimes, or it can send him into a rage. Sometimes he’ll turn his back to me if I speak, but not today. I feed him chocolate in small bits to make it last and describe a John Garfield movie, the new prison going up at the north end of Rock City Road, about Barbara’s party and why I don’t want to go. Quizzically, he watches my lips. And, as always, when I take him out of his pants, he’s all ready. What I always say: This is something he can’t do for himself. But, of course, it’s at least as much for me, a small stolen serenity, all his veins and capillaries. And so I think of the big house over us, of joists and beams and lath. Corey looks gravely at what he has put in my hand. I make a fist around it, stand at the window. Catbirds swoop to millet in the feeder. There is a jagged trench in the snow where Corey’s father has shoveled, thrown salt, given up.
    TODAY the sun is bright and kids are playing hockey in the street. I spend an hour putting on toenail polish, as if planning to appear somewhere in sandals. Barbara calls, very tense about her party. I turn up the radio, pretending someone else is here, promise to call back later. Then I make a