Chapter Six

Jessica Minvielle sat at the dinner table across from the vacant space where her brother used to make faces at her and generally cause trouble. But he’d grown up, and failing to make it as professional football player, had gone into coaching like their dad at a small college in the Midwest where he hoped to shine and rise in his career, higher than his father. How she wished he still occupied that space, ready to lob a spoonful of mashed potatoes at her as soon as their parents looked away. In their rivalry for attention, she often won. Now, she’d willingly let him have center stage all to himself. Anything to divert their parents’ one-hundred percent scrutiny from her.

She needn’t worry about getting fat. Her mom taught health as well as gym. Tonight’s menu consisted of large grilled-chicken salads with slices of whole grain bread on the side. Probably watermelon for dessert. Her dad, a big block of a man with the start of a middle-aged gut, would eat every bit, then sneak into the kitchen later and make a sandwich from the leftover chicken, adding mayo and more salt. He had high blood pressure, a hazard for coaches, but figured his pills should take care of that for him. Still, her mom tried, as she was doing now with Jessie.

“Once school starts, I can drop you off for rehab at eight since I don’t have a homeroom, though it might be eleven before I can pick you up during the lunch break and make something for you to eat. I’ll be home by three-thirty, but once basketball season starts, I’ll have to stay later for the practices. Are you sure you’re okay with that? Maybe we should hire an aide to stay with you during the afternoon. Or I could give up coaching. We don’t need the extra money with our children grown.” Dale Minvielle raked her hand, fingernails unpolished, through cropped blonde hair. Tall, trim, athletic, the picture perfect of health for women her age, she wanted everyone to be so. Now she had a crippled daughter she didn’t quite know how to manage. Doing five more laps or running up the bleachers wouldn’t help Jessie’s condition.

“Mom, I can still make a sandwich and grab a piece of fruit for lunch. You love coaching. Don’t give it up for me. I’ll be perfectly fine in the afternoons alone.”

Depressed, bored, but fine. Amazing how friends stopped coming around after the initial outburst of sympathy. They simply forgot about her. Who wanted a girl in a wheelchair to ruin their fun? No more Jell-O shots for Jessie or bikinis on the beach during a weekend at Gulf Shores.

“Dale, let her try,” her dad said. “You never know if you don’t try. Obstacles can be overcome with the right attitude.” Jessie knew that speech from the locker room. He ruined the rah-rah spirit of his words by picking a piece of baby spinach from his teeth. His hair might have receded to the point that he kept it shaved close to the scalp to deny balding, but he still owned a great smile when he wasn’t raging at a referee.

Jessie inherited that smile, her mom said, along with the curvaceous body of the Minvielle women that made her daughter more fit for cheerleading than gymnastics after her figure developed. Only growing to five-seven, basketball had passed her daughter by except for recreation, but Jessie tried hard apply her gymnastic skills to cheering, more hazardous than most people thought, and to excel at her job as a trainer, both gone now.

Her mom shot a glance at her dad that could have killed if she’d had laser beams for eyes, but she said, “Okay, we’ll see how things go. So about your rehab schedule. Sorry you’ll have to hang around there for an extra hour and go in early.”

“Hey, I can get some of my players to take her in and bring her home like doing public service,” her dad suggested, his smile now locked in place.

“Will they know how to deal with her wheelchair? Who knows what kind of cars they have,” Dale countered.

“Trucks, mostly, I think. Put the chair in the back, lift Jessie into the front seat, and there you go.”

“Not such a good idea, Mo.”

Morris Minvielle, Mo for short or Meaux if people wanted to go Cajun with his name, seemed perplexed. More accustomed to the crowd shouting, “We want some Mo,” than any opposition to his ideas, he questioned, “Why not?”

“They might drop her or—or take advantage of her. She can’t run away if they try anything.”

“Not my boys!”

They’d been arguing so much more since her accident, mostly about how to proceed with a handicapped child, as if she didn’t have ears or a voice and sat there in a wheelchair like a piece of the furniture.

“Stop!” Jessie clanged her fork against her glass of unsweetened iced tea to get their attention. “I know someone who can give me a lift and is completely trustworthy. Teddy Billodeaux. He’s already offered.”

“Teddy from high school, the one with the crutches?” her mother asked.

“The guy who calls our games, that Teddy?” her dad said.

“Yes to both. Also one of our class valedictorians, and a man with a degree in communications. He has a van all set up for wheelchair transport, and no one knows more about that than he does.”

“Maybe we can get the Handicab that goes around to the assisted living places to come for you.” Her mother would not give up!

Just what Jessie wanted, to ride the Handicab with the elderly who would most likely treat her sweetly and talk her ears off. “No! I want to ride with Teddy.”

“That’s imposing on him,” Dale decided.

“Seems like a nice guy. He sure isn’t going to molest her with all the hardware he has to carry around. Let her try this for a while.” Dad, as usual in her corner. “We can chip in for gas money.”

“If you don’t care about your daughter’s safety…”

“I’ll be safe with Teddy. He is the nicest guy, really. I’m going to call him right now and set this up.” Jessie reversed her wheelchair and turned away from the dinner table. As she left the room, her mom called out, “But we have watermelon for dessert.” Anything to stop her forward progress.

****

Mrs. Minvielle lurked in the window when Teddy turned into the driveway of the rambling ranch style home, easy enough to get around in a wheelchair. She didn’t come out to say hello. Jessie waited in the open garage and wheeled to greet him. He came around the van on his crutches to open the vehicle’s doors.

“Want to ride up front with me, or we can use the lift to put you in the back, strap your chair down, and off we go?”

“Up front, please, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Okay, here we go.” He braced himself against the side of the van, got his arms under her, and slid her into the front seat. “Buckle up.” He put her chair in the back next to his and off they went.

Jessie suppressed the desire to shoot her mother the bird. At a red light, they stopped next to a car in the turn lane. One of girls she’d cheered with in college sat in the driver’s seat.

“Tap your horn for me, Teddy.”

He did. She waved madly and put on that dazzling smile all cheerleaders were supposed to wear along with their sexy clothes and shaking pom-poms. Her former friend waved back, then focused on the light as if praying for it to turn green. Jessie enjoyed the moment, feeling nearly normal with her chair nowhere in sight and making one who had deserted her since the accident squirm. Then, back to reality as they arrived at the rehab facility, back to her wheelchair and the grueling exercises, but not nearly as grueling as what Teddy accomplished.

As she lay on an exercise table having her legs massaged and stretched, she watched him sweat through his routine. Her therapist had her working on her upper body strength by the time he struggled down the path between the parallel bars and back again. His blond hair flopped across his forehead in a boyish way, but his arm muscles were those of a man in very good condition. In fact, Teddy Billodeaux was cute and kind of sexy. Why had she never noticed that before? Easy. The handicapped were often overlooked. Still, she remembered most from high school his cheerful smile and blue eyes, sunny as a summer’s day. Pausing before beginning his step work, he looked her way and offered that same smile, encouraging her no end.

They finished about the same time, and Jessie suggested going to the juice bar again to sit and talk. He turned her down, the first guy to do so. That proved she’d lost her appeal to men, and it hurt more than she expected. “I guess you have other things to do.”

For a communications expert, Teddy seemed to struggle with his words. “I have another obligation, and frankly, I prefer to shower at home.”

Jessie wondered what might happen if she offered to take a shower with him, if she suggested she sit in his lap on the stool, and they soap each other up and down every cleft and crevice of their bodies. He’d blush in that boyish way he had and turn her down flat she supposed, so she merely replied, “Me, too.”

Without saying much else, he delivered her home. Now, her mom made an appearance, waving her arms like a referee calling a foul. “Don’t get down. I know it’s hard for you,” she called, and Teddy reddened. Dale rushed to the van and extracted the wheelchair, helping her daughter back into the prison of its seat. She thanked Teddy for the ride, tried to press a twenty on him for gas, which he refused, and finally made a gesture that said she’d given in to her daughter.

“In case I’m not home, you should have this.” Mrs. Minvielle presented him with a garage door opener. “Jessie can manage once the door is up.”

“Yes, I certainly can.”

“See you Friday, Jess.”

“Absolutely.”