Page 57 of Finally Mine
“Side stitch?” she repeated on a wheeze.
“Come on,” he said, nudging her with the running shoe on his prosthesis. “Help me up, and I’ll tell you all the things you did wrong.”
“Like saying I wanted to learn to run?”
He gave her the basics while they worked their way through a series of stretches.Don’t swing your torso. Take smaller steps. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth.Harper looked like she was taking mental notes.
“Let’s take a little cool-down walk,” Aldo suggested, pointing toward the glimmering waters of the lakefront.
“Cool,” Harper said, mostly recovered from her disastrous run. “So how are you doing?” she asked.
He’d known she’d pry and couldn’t say why he felt comfortable talking to her. Maybe it was knowing that her life hadn’t always been all sunshine and rainbows. And that she knew pain, too. Maybe it was that he didn’t need anything from Harper but friendship.
“Good enough that I’m moving back to my place this weekend. The doc cleared it.” It was his first Back to Real Life goal that he’d tackled and achieved.
“Aren’t you going to miss your mom?” Harper teased.
“Me moving out is the only way we’ll both live.”
They picked their way down a short, rocky decline, and Aldo marveled that his muscles weren’t screaming too loudly this time.
“Are you sleeping better?” Harper asked. “Is the pain still keeping you up?”
Aldo gave a shrug and debated answering. “Sometimes it’s like my mind can’t tell the difference between what’s happening and what’s happened. It’s like this blur between history and present. And sometimes the only thing that clears it is pain.”
“Maybe that’s why you push your therapy so hard?” Harper mused.
“Maybe that’s why I push everything so hard.” He had a lot to prove. To himself first. He wouldn’t say he was in the same mental swamp he’d been in when he first came home. The PT helped, and getting back to his own home would help more. But he still wasn’t right in the head. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever get right again.
He thought of Gloria. Wondered if she’d ever be able to accept him like this. Would she want him like this? Or would she recognize the wounds beneath the surface?
“So what’s Gloria’s apartment like?” he prodded. It was torture, gleaning information about Gloria from Harper. It was a little game they played. She knew why he was asking, but he played it off as casual conversation. He’d known she had moved. Knew where. Had even taken a post-midnight walk down Main Street her first night there to see if her lights were on.
“It’s so perfect for her,” Harper said. “She’s already got everything unpacked and decorated, and you can just tell it makes her so happy. She’s right there in the middle of everything, too, which I think is good for her.”
Aldo grunted.
“Speaking of, when are you going to stop avoiding everyone?” Harper demanded. They stopped at the lake’s edge. The water made tiny, steady waves against the shore.
“I’m not avoiding everyone.” He was. He hadn’t been back to work yet. Hadn’t gone out to eat in town. Hell, the only time he left his mother’s house was for doctor appointments or late-night strolls—limps—when the walls were closing in on him.
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “No one is going to think you’re anything other than Aldo Moretta.”
It wasn’t true. But she couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to have to face the fact that you were less than you used to be. That you were always going to be less than. And that everyone else would see it, too.
“I really want to punch you in your face right now.” Harper’s words caught him off guard.
“What the hell, Harpsichord?”
“I can see you churning through this whole bullshit ‘woe is me’ garbage,” she said, her voice raising and cutting through the summer noises of kids playing and squirrels arguing, birds chirping.
“I don’t know how to make it stop. Okay? Happy?” He started to stalk off and was reasonably pleased when he was able to.
“Maybe you should talk to someone,” she called after him.
“Maybe you should mind your own damn business,” he said over his shoulder.
She snorted. “We both know that’s not going to happen.”
