“Where does it hurt?” Aura asks.
Cecil touches his breast just below the collarbone. “Here.”
He’s been home two days now, sorting junk mail, and the task has kinked an indispensable muscle in Cecil’s chest. He’d arranged for a few things to be forwarded to him in the hospital: the bills, his Orange Pride alumni newsletter, Sports Illustrated. The important stuff. But yesterday, after some nurse forklifted Cecil down from the cripple cart his insurance company made him ride home in, they ended up having to put considerable effort into prying open his front door, what with the weeks-deep drift of paper piled below his mail slot.
Aura walks around his rig and wraps him up from behind in a kind of chokehold, pressing her palm upon the offending spasm.
“Here?”
Cecil hisses.
Aura has her answer. The fingers of her left hand play along the ridges of Cecil’s spine, wander to the hollow below his shoulder blade, gently prod at a golf-ball–sized knot there.
“Think of pain like a stick of dynamite,” she whispers. “A fuse has been burning for a little while before the thing blows. The real source of your problem . . .” Aura’s prodding grows more aggressive, the hand on his breast bearing down, until a circuit of grief arcs from the bother above Cecil’s heart clear through to the tic in his back, “. . . is here.”
Cecil doesn’t want Aura to see him flinch but he does it anyway.
She eases up, her fingers by turns feather-light and a merciless firm. He can feel her breath blowing hot in his ear as she rubs out the knot.
“You’re all catawampus,” says Aura. “In the front, your chest and arms are overdeveloped. This pulls everything forward and stresses the superficial muscles in your back. The weak link is your infraspinatus muscle . . .” another rough embrace, another shot of pain thrilling through him, “. . . right here.”
Cecil groans.
“What’s so superficial about my, inter-fera-spin-whatsit?”
She laughs beneath her breath and releases her hold on him.
“Not a thing that can’t be fixed. We’ll get you back in balance, strengthen your deltoids, your lats, your traps. And Cecil,” she’s standing over him now in her hospital scrubs, wiry arms akimbo, “you’ll need to stop it with the cigarettes. I won’t waste my time coming here if you keep lighting up behind my back. You smell . . .” Aura fakes a frown, a brown hand batting back the surrounding air, “like a roadhouse. Where’s your stash?”
Cecil adjusts his good leg—the other one’s still braced—and rolls to his window to study what remains of his basketball hoop. A slow skein of geese winging silently south under a soggy sky.
“Do you still play?” he asks.
“I do,” Aura says. Then, almost as an afterthought, “It’s a way to forget.”
“It’s the opposite for me. I haven’t held the ball in a coon’s age.” Cecil shakes his head. “Makes me remember.”
“Tell you what.” Aura moves to the window and stands beside his rig, staring out at the driveway. “Let’s shoot for it.”
“For what?”
“For Cecil Porter quitting smoking. Cecil wins, Aura stops henpecking. Aura wins, Cecil goes cold turkey.”
“It’s the little end of the horn either way. And cold turkey’s no good for me.”
“Then we’ll work something else out. But you’ll quit.”
“Assuming I lose.”
Aura laughs.
“Oh, you’ll lose alright.”
“Someone doesn’t mind strutting her okra.”
“You’ll be wanting some time to train.”
His sly smile.
“Not too long, if we’re shooting free throws.”
“Free throws it is. Why’d you stop practicing?”
The smile slides from his face.
“Do you have brothers?”
“One.” She eyes him sideways. “One little brother.”
“A little brother’s tricky. Tricky to know. I can remember feeling responsible for mine, even after this,” Cecil gestures at his legs. “Then Ben, this is my little brother . . .”
“Not so little.”
“So you’ve met him then.”
“This is the great big one who arranged your private room?” she asks. “I’ve heard the other nurses chatting about him.”
“Funny because all I see is the chubby little nosepicker Ben used to be. A kid, who’s always trying to care for me. Or always trying to want to. But the big lunker’s too blind to see things as they are. Which is that he’s the one has his priorities mixed up. Which is that he’s the one needs help. Not me.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“It’s not so simple.”
“Someone told me once it takes two men to make one brother.”
“I like that.”
“Yours might require a few more, big as he is. Though I always wondered why they don’t say the same thing about making a sister.”
In all his born days Cecil hasn’t spoken to a black woman like this—at length, and with such emotion—and the experience leaves him feeling impoverished. As if Aura has accepted, maybe even taken, something that wants giving back. “You’re about to tell me to stop being a hater and such,” he says. “Forgive and forget. That kind of thing.”
“Not at all.” Aura’s own faraway grin. “Hate away.”