Page 35 of Top Shelf
“You’re a very good boy,” the woman said behind me. “If my own son would listen half as much, maybe he could be half as successful as you.”
“You think I was successful?” I asked her, swiping my card, then stepping aside.
She gave me a slow up-and-down look, then nodded. “Yes I do.”
She wasn’t wrong. It was hard to accept some days, but going from professional sports, where I had won championships more than once, to becoming a physical therapist was definitely a mark of success.
Or something like it, anyway.
She stepped up to order—four different kinds of coffee and a mountain of pastries, which was surprising, though I wasn’t about to comment on it. She paid, and then we both stepped to the pickup counter.
“What do you do now?” she asked just as I was taking my phone out of my pocket.
“Oh. I went back to school after I retired.”
“Did you play for Boston?”
I shook my head. “No. San Jose to start, and New York until I retired. I did my residency here?—”
“Are you a doctor?” she asked quickly.
I snorted a laugh. I was a doctor of sorts, and since I wasn’t actually going to see this woman again, I shrugged. “I’m insports medicine. It ended up making more sense than going into another field. I spent two years in intensive physical therapy, and I wanted to give back.”
“You seem like such a good boy.”
I hadn’t been called a boy like that—from someone’s mom—in so, so long. It should have annoyed me, but it felt…nice.
Soft. Comforting.
“I do my best.”
“Your parents must be very proud.”
My parents had been dead several years, but that always screwed a conversation six ways to Sunday, so I smiled and shrugged. “I think I chose better than some guys who decide to rot after retirement. I think I’d lose it if I tried to do that.”
She tilted her head to the side, then gave me a decisive nod. “Tell me your name. I’m going to make sure my son studies you and sees what a person should do if they fall off their path.”
I flushed and told her who I was, hoping against hope that she’d forget by the time she got home. The last thing I needed to be for anyone was a role model. God help anyone who wanted to be like me.
The day was so busy,I’d forgotten to check my new patient’s chart until right before I was walking in to meet him. He’d already been triaged and assessed by the tech, and I pulled up his file as I stood just outside the closed patient room door.
I scanned his assessment first. Car accident six weeks prior, broken tibia, surgery to place four pins to stabilize the break, and a torn talofibular ligament, which had also been repaired through surgery.
And then I looked at his name, and it felt like the world was crumbling beneath my feet.
Ferris Kasim Redding.
Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was another athlete living in Boston with the first name of a John Hughes movie and an Urdu middle name.
And maybe cows would learn to talk and run for Congress.
I took a deep breath, then glanced around like maybe some omniscient god figure was waiting around the corner to yell, “Just kidding,” and laugh at the cosmic joke. But there was no one there to rescue me, and Cal didn’t work Fridays, which meant it was me.
It was just me.
And I couldn’t leave Ferris sitting in that room like a fucking chump, could I?
Though Icould. I could have an emergency and leave and tell whoever was at the front desk to reschedule him with literally anyone else, so long as they did it on my day off. Not that I had a day off while the office was open, so…
