I Broke My Arm And My Best Friend Showed Up With A Suitcase You Are Always Making Me Worry.
I Broke My Arm And My Best Friend Showed Up With A Suitcase You Are Always Making Me Worry.
I was trying to work the deadbolt with my left hand—which turned out to be a skill I had never actually learned in thirty-two years—when the lock finally gave and the door swung open on Nina Kavanaugh.
She was standing on my landing in yesterday’s gray sweatshirt with a rolling suitcase beside her, the big blue one she used for weddings and Christmas. Her eyes were red in the way they only get when she hasn’t slept at all. She looked at the cast first. It ran from my shoulder to my wrist with the elbow locked at a right angle, and it made me stand like a man permanently holding an invisible tray.
I said, “Nah, you don’t have to do this.” And I meant it kindly.
She looked up from the cast to my face and said, “You’re always making me worry.”
Then she took the handle of the suitcase, stepped past me into the apartment, and rolled it straight down the hall toward the spare room, as if the matter had been settled sometime around three in the morning. I stood there holding the open door with my good hand, and the hallway air came in cold around my bare feet.
The night before, I had climbed a stepladder to change the bulb in the hall fixture, and the second step from the top had folded sideways under me. I put my right arm out, which is what everyone does, and the emergency room doctor told me it was a clean break above the elbow, and that I should be glad it was clean.
Around eleven, I had texted Nina from the waiting area. I wrote that it was a small thing, that I’d broken my arm, that I was fine, and she should go to sleep. I had known her since our sophomore year at college, when she sat behind me in statistics and corrected my math out loud. And in all that time, I had apparently never learned that telling Nah to go to sleep was the surest way to keep her up.
By the time I got the door shut and followed her, she was already clearing the spare bed. My clean laundry was folded on the comforter in three towers, and she was moving them onto the dresser with the speed of someone who runs a veterinary front desk and has seen worse messes before nine in the morning. The exercise bike I never use had been rolled into the corner.
I leaned on the door frame and told her she couldn’t just decide this. She said someone had to, since I clearly wasn’t going to. I told her it was my apartment and my arm, and that I’d like to be consulted about who was moving into either one.
That made her stop with a stack of T-shirts in her hands. For a second, she looked less like a woman in charge and more like a woman who had driven over here on no sleep without asking herself what she would do if I said no.
The honest thing would have been to say I didn’t need her. And the honest thing was also that I couldn’t say it.
So I told her what I had found out since getting home. I could not button anything. I could not open the pill bottle the pharmacy had given me without holding it in my teeth. I had tried to put on jeans that morning and lost the fight so badly that I was still in the sweatpants I’d worn to the hospital. I couldn’t cut my food, and I had no idea how I was supposed to shower while keeping the cast dry.
Nah listened to the whole list without the slightest smile, which is how I knew she had been picturing worse.
We worked it out standing in that small room with the T-shirts between us. She could stay—for now, with the word *now* doing a lot of quiet work. I would tell her which help I wanted, and she would ask before she took anything over, including the things she was sure I’d get wrong. She thought about it and added a condition of her own: I would not lie to her about what hurt.
I said that seemed fair, and I put out my left hand. She shook it awkwardly with her right, and we both noticed that neither of us knew which hand to use anymore.
When I asked about her job, she said she had taken care of work in the tone she uses for things she doesn’t plan to discuss, and I let it go because her eyes were still red.
The first afternoon was a series of small negotiations. She wanted the coffee mugs on the bottom shelf so I wouldn’t have to reach. And instead of moving them, she stood in front of the cabinet and asked very formally whether she had permission to relocate the mugs. I told her permission was granted, but that I’d be filing a complaint. She moved the cereal, too, then turned and asked whether the cereal was covered under the original agreement.
It was the kind of joke we had traded for ten years, and it worked—mostly. I noticed she had to blink hard to read the label on my prescription. So I made her sit at the counter while I made coffee one-handed. It took me twice as long as it should have and left grounds on everything. And she drank the whole cup anyway without saying a word about the grounds.
Every time I walked down the hall, the suitcase was there in the doorway of the spare room. She hadn’t unpacked it yet, and its handle was still raised as if it might roll back out at any moment. I kept trying to find the funny angle on it, the way I’d find one for anything else in our lives. I could tease her about the cereal and the mugs and her bossy handshake, but the suitcase sat outside the reach of all that.
People don’t pack a bag like that for a favor. They pack it when they’ve been lying awake for hours doing math about how far away they are.
That night, she went to bed early and I lay in my room listening to her move on the other side of the wall. The wall in my apartment is thin enough that I could hear her plug in her phone and turn over twice. And then I heard nothing at all, which I hoped meant she had finally slept.
I’d had Nah in my apartment a hundred times. She’d fallen asleep on my couch during movies and eaten cold pizza out of my fridge. None of that had ever felt like this. Lying there, I realized we had agreed on the mugs, the cereal, and who got to decide things. We had not discussed the fact that tomorrow morning I would need a shower and still had no idea how to wash my own hair.
—
I woke up before her, which I took as proof that she had finally slept, and I decided to try the shower alone first. The discharge nurse had told me to tape a plastic bag over the cast. So I spent ten minutes wrestling a grocery bag and a roll of packing tape with my left hand and my teeth. The result looked like something a raccoon would build, but it held.
I stood in the tub with my right arm hanging outside the curtain and washed the rest of me left-handed, slowly and badly, though well enough to count. Brushing my teeth was easy, and deodorant only took two tries. I was feeling almost smug when I squeezed shampoo into my hair and realized I could not rinse it out. Every time I tipped my head back, water ran down my neck and toward the top of the cast where the bag met my shoulder.
I turned the water off and stood there dripping with shampoo drying into a stiff crown on my head.
Then I went to the bedroom to deal with the shirt, since a T-shirt was out of the question over that cast. I had laid out a flannel button-down the night before, thinking I’d be clever about it. I got my right arm in by draping the sleeve over the cast, which worked fine. The buttons were another matter. In four minutes, I got exactly one button closed, and it was in the wrong hole.
I looked at myself in the mirror, half-dressed and soapy, and understood that the agreement only worked if I actually used it.
Her door was open a few inches, and she was sitting on the bed in leggings and the gray sweatshirt, scrolling her phone like someone who had been awake for a while and was waiting to be needed. I knocked on the frame anyway. I told her I needed help with two things, and I wanted to ask before she saw me and started fixing things on her own.
She looked at the crooked shirt and the hair, and to her credit, she only bit her lip.
I said, “Can you help me rinse my hair? I made it as far as the shampoo.”
She set the phone down and asked how I wanted to do it, and whether I’d rather keep the shirt on or off.
Nobody had ever asked me that so seriously, and I found I had to think about it. My bathroom is narrow enough that two people can’t pass each other without one of them turning sideways. We settled on me kneeling on a folded towel beside the tub, leaning my head over the edge with the bagged arm propped on the closed toilet lid. Nah sat on the rim of the tub with a handheld shower head and tested the water on the inside of her wrist. When I asked what that was, she said it’s how they check the water for the dogs at the clinic.
I told her I expected the full grooming package, including the little bandana at the end. She said I was getting the budget package and I should be grateful she wasn’t using the flea shampoo.
Then the warm water ran over my head and her fingers went into my hair, and neither of us said anything else for a while.
I had known her hands for more than ten years. They had shoved me, slapped my shoulder, stolen fries off my plate, and once dug a splinter out of my thumb at a campsite with a sewing needle. They had never done anything slow before. She worked the shampoo loose from my scalp in small circles, and she cupped her palm against my forehead to keep the water out of my eyes without my asking.
I closed my eyes because it seemed safer than keeping them open. The only sounds were the water and the bathroom fan, and somewhere in there, the joke we had been holding just dissolved.
When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and had nothing funny in it. She said, “Tell me if it’s too hot.”
I said it was fine, though my voice came out lower than I meant it to.
After the last rinse, her hand rested on the back of my neck a moment longer than the job required, and then she reached for a towel. She dried my hair the way you’d dry a kid after a pool—brisk and impersonal, which I suspect was on purpose. Then she stood in front of me in the hallway and redid the flannel from the bottom up, starting with the button I had put in the wrong hole. She was close enough that I could see how tired she still was, with gray under her eyes and a crease from the pillowcase on one cheek.
I looked at the ceiling and counted buttons.
When she finished, she asked if the hair had been okay and said that if it was weird, we could find another way. I told her it wasn’t weird, which was not exactly the truth. Then I told her I could handle breakfast and the rest of the morning myself, and she should go back to bed for a couple of hours. She started to argue, then yawned in the middle of it and went.
Over the next week, we found a routine. She buttoned my shirts every morning, and I learned to do the cuffs myself by holding them against the counter. She shaved me once on the third day, with me sitting on the toilet lid and her holding my chin between two fingers while she worked around my jaw. She didn’t nick me once, but I bought an electric razor that afternoon. I told her it was so she wouldn’t have to do it, and that was partly true. The other part was that I couldn’t sit through it a second time and keep looking at the tile.
Her toothbrush ended up in the cup next to mine, and her hair ties began appearing on my kitchen counter. At night, her door stayed open a crack, and mine stayed closed, and the wall between us did the job we had both silently hired it for.
It was on the eighth night, after she had cut my chicken into neat squares and gone to bed, that I noticed a pattern in how I spoke to her. Almost every sentence I had said to her that week was either a request or a thank you. I had learned to say, “Can you help me with this?” without feeling like a failure, and that was real progress. But I had not once asked her to sit on the couch with me when there was nothing to button, cut, rinse, or open.
Lying there with my arm propped on two pillows, I couldn’t tell whether that was because I didn’t need to ask, or because I was afraid of what her answer would mean.
The next morning, I started taking things back. I didn’t make a speech about it. I just unloaded the dishwasher one plate at a time before she was up. And I figured out that I could wipe the counters if I didn’t care how long it took. I learned to open the pill bottle by pinning it between my knees, which was slower than my teeth, but more dignified.
When Nah came into the kitchen and reached for the coffee filters, they were already in the machine. She looked at the clean counter and then at me and asked whether I had been sneaking around doing chores. I told her I had a lot of free time and very low standards.
She laughed, but she also stood there for a second with her hands empty, like someone who had walked into a room and forgotten why.
Later that day, I noticed she had started reporting her whereabouts to me. She’d say she was running to the pharmacy and would be back in forty minutes, or that she was going to take a walk around the block and had her phone on. On the third report, I stopped her in the hallway. I told her she didn’t owe me an itinerary, and that if she wanted to disappear for an afternoon, I would survive it. I said the worst thing that could happen was that I’d eat cereal out of the box.
She said that was exactly what she was worried about. Then she went out for two hours without telling me where and came back with her hair damp from the drizzle and a bag of oranges she didn’t explain.
I was more pleased about those two hours than I had any right to be.
—
That evening, I asked her to dinner.
I had thought about how to phrase it most of the afternoon, which is not something I normally do with Nah, since I have asked her to get food probably a thousand times. The problem was that every sentence I had said to her lately came with a task attached. So I kept it plain. I told her there was a little Italian place six blocks over that I’d been meaning to try, and that I wanted to take her. I said there was nothing to pick up on the way, no prescription, and no reason except that I wanted her company.
She was sitting on the arm of the couch, and she looked at me for long enough that I almost made a joke to cover it. Then she said okay and went to change.
She came out in a dark green sweater I had never seen before and small gold earrings. I didn’t comment on the earrings, and she didn’t comment on the fact that I had made her button my good shirt instead of the flannel.
We walked, since I couldn’t drive, and the rain had stopped. The sidewalks were still wet and the streetlights were coming on, and she walked on my right side without being asked so nobody would knock into the cast.
The restaurant was small and warm, with paper over the tablecloths and a basket of crayons on every table. When the waiter came, I ordered the gnocchi. Nina asked why I hadn’t gotten the veal, which I’d been eyeing on the menu, and I told her the gnocchi didn’t need to be cut. She understood exactly what I meant, and for a moment she looked down at the paper tablecloth instead of at me.
We talked the way we always talk, mostly. She told me about a woman who had brought a parrot to the clinic because it had learned to imitate the microwave and she was convinced it was sick. I told her about the worst guest I’d ever had on the reservations line—a man who wanted a room facing the ocean in Denver. She drew a parrot on the tablecloth with a crayon, and I drew a terrible ocean next to it with my left hand. It looked like a pile of blue spaghetti, and she laughed so hard she had to put her napkin over her face.
It was all familiar, and none of it was quite the same.
I kept noticing her. I noticed the earrings when she tucked her hair back and the way she leaned in when she was making a point. Twice I caught her looking at me when I wasn’t talking, and both times she looked away first. We had eaten a hundred meals across from each other. This was the first one where I was aware of the table between us.
On the walk home, she took my left arm for the last two blocks, where the sidewalk was broken and still slick. She did it casually, the way she might have done it any time in the last ten years, and I let her. Neither of us said much. Something had settled over the evening that our usual talk couldn’t quite reach, and I didn’t want to break it with the wrong sentence.
I remember the sound of our footsteps and the smell of wet leaves. And I remember thinking that I should say something before we got back to the apartment. I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next week wishing I had.
At my door, she took the keys from my coat pocket—because the deadbolt was still beyond me—and let us in. She hung up her jacket and stood in the hallway between our two rooms with her arms folded loosely, waiting, maybe not even for anything in particular.
I started to tell her that tonight hadn’t been about my arm. I got as far as “Tonight wasn’t—” and then I stopped. She was standing in my hallway because I couldn’t button my own shirt. Tomorrow morning, she would still be the one doing it. Whatever I said next, she would hear it from a man she was currently taking care of. And I couldn’t figure out how she was supposed to say no to that man if no was what she wanted to say.
So I finished the sentence badly. I said, “Tonight wasn’t bad at all.” And thanked her for coming.
She looked at me a moment longer. Then she said, “You asked me to dinner, Marcus. You don’t have to thank me like I changed a bandage.”
She said it lightly, but she didn’t smile when she said it, and she went into her room and closed the door most of the way.
I stood in the hall feeling like I had stepped carefully around something and landed somewhere worse. I had meant to protect her choice. From her side of the wall, I suspected it just looked like I had taken her to dinner and then declined to say why.
I lay awake for a while afterward, listening to her not sleep.
