Informed Consent - chapter 4 (with images) (Patreon)

The bra goes on first, then the shirt, then the shirt comes off again because the straps show at the collar. I try the gray one instead. The straps still show. Everything I own was cut for shoulders that don't exist anymore, and the new shirts from the store were cut for this, which is why I bought them, which is why wearing one to Sully's is the whole thing. I put the gray one back on and leave the straps showing.

I stand in front of the mirror by the door and take the whole thing in at once. Hair grown past a bad cut, a jaw with nothing on it, eyebrows I didn't choose, a shape under a shirt that was cut for it, all of it in the same frame. It will have to hold up in a room with five people in it. I pick up my keys and turn off the light and go.

Three times out so far - Lakewood on a Sunday, the Tattered Cover on Colfax one evening after work, and a diner in Englewood where I ate eggs by myself at eleven in the morning on a day off and read the paperback I bought and nobody in the building knew anything.

Monday through Friday I put on a scrub top a size up and hunch.

Everybody who's seen me out there is a stranger. The clinic is the one place I keep it shut, and the reason isn't shame. Sonia is running a reconciliation with my initials in it. As long as I'm a man with the flu who lost some weight, the numbers are just numbers.

Sully's is the first place I'm going to be Mara where somebody knows who I was.

In the bathroom I pick up the beard trimmer out of habit and run it over my jaw and it comes away clean. There's nothing left to take off. It's been clean for eight days and I keep checking anyway, like checking a pocket for keys that are in your hand. The hair on my chest has gone thin enough to see skin through. My eyebrows have wandered into a shape I didn't choose, higher at the arch, the tails gone sparse, and I stand there with my face two inches from the glass looking at them and don't do anything about them.

The hair on my head is the other thing. I evened it out myself last week over this sink with the kitchen scissors, because I have been getting it cut in the same chair on 38th for eleven years and I couldn't make myself walk in and sit in it. I did the front where I could see it and the back with the phone camera flipped around, which reverses everything, which I knew going in and did anyway. It came out uneven above the left ear. I found strands of it stuck to the tub for three days.

It's starting to grow past the mistakes. It sits differently when I turn my head. It's long enough now to look like a decision, which is all I need it to do tonight.

On the drive I practice. My name is Mara, I say to the windshield, and it sounds like a lie told by a child. I say it again at the light on Wadsworth. Again past the green chile place. By Arvada it sounds like something I could get tired of hearing myself say, which is the closest it's come to sounding true. The last one, at the turn onto Sully's street, comes out fine for three words and then climbs on the fourth, up out of my chest and into my throat, and I stop practicing.

The garage door is up and the light is on. I park behind Giorgio's truck out of nine years of nothing, and I stay in the car with the engine dead until the door next to me gets too cold to lean on.

Marty's laugh comes out of the garage first, then Kwame saying count it again. I walk up the driveway and stop in the strip of light at the edge of the door.

Sully looks up first. His face does the thing a face does at a stranger, a quick polite blank, and then recognition comes in over it and the blank cracks open.

"Holy shit," Sully says.

Marty swallows a burp. Giorgio looks over his shoulder. Kwame adjusts his hand. The creased nine of hearts goes from one side to the other.

"Mara," I say. It comes out at chart-review volume. "It's Mara."

Nobody moves.

"It's still me," I say, because the silence needs something put in it. "That's the name."

"Mara." Giorgio says it fast, like catching a glass before it tips. He comes around the table and his hand rises toward my shoulder the way it has a hundred Fridays and converts, mid-air, into a hug. One arm. Carefully brief. Nine years of fist bumps and I can tell he practiced this on the drive over, and I stand inside it and let it happen.

"You look good," he says into my hair. "Healthy."

"Huh," Marty says, still half-standing, like a man at a wedding who isn't sure about the song.

Kwame cuts the deck and squares it against the felt. "You owe six," he says. "From last week. You never squared it."

"I know."

I put a twenty in the box and take my fourteen in chips, and the transaction is so unchanged that it nearly undoes me. The Kowalski trophy is on the shelf, First Place 1994, the plate never removed. I take my seat, and Sully says, "Wait, take the good one," and switches chairs with me, and the good one is just the one that doesn't wobble, which was Marty's, and Marty says nothing about it.

"So we got…" Sully goes to the fridge and opens it and stands in the light. "I didn't know what you drink now. So."

The seltzers are on the middle shelf. A twelve-pack, lime, the kind with the white can.

"That's great," I say, and take one, because the other option is making him put them back. The can is cold enough to hurt my palm. I open it and take a sip as Sully sits back down.

The game restarts the way a truck restarts, with a lurch. Kwame deals. The cards have gotten wider. That's not it. My hands have gotten smaller, the reach from thumb to pinky shorter by enough that palming a card off the top, a trick I could do since college, is suddenly a stretch. I stack my chips in towers of ten. Twenty topples now.

"So is this…" Marty starts. He sets his phone face down by his chips, the screen cracked corner to corner since March. "Like. A medical thing."

"Yeah," I say.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. You good?"

"I'm good."

"Okay." He picks up his cards. "That's the main thing."

I fold seven-deuce. I play a pair of queens too cautiously and win a small pot. Giorgio says my name every time the action gets to me. "Mara. Mara, you're in. Mara?" The third time I almost tell him he can just say you. I don't, because the name in his mouth is doing something for him, some slow convincing, and taking it away would be cruel.

"Raise," I say, and my voice cracks on the word, splits upward like a kid's.

"Bless you," Marty says, and deals himself a look at his own cards.

I clear my throat. I take the voice down to where it's reliable, the register I use on anxious patients, the one that means we're going to go slow and it's going to be fine, and it holds. It holds because I'm holding it. There's about four words of room in it. Anything past four words and the end of the sentence starts climbing on its own, out of my chest and up into the back of my throat, and I can hear it going before it goes and there's nothing down there to stop it with.

So I stop using words. I check by tapping two fingers on the felt. I raise by pushing chips across the line and letting Kwame announce the number. I fold by turning my cards face down and sliding them an inch. Poker is a game you can play almost entirely with your hands, which I didn't know until tonight. Halfway through the first hour there's a lull that I'd ordinarily fill with the one about the fasting patient who showed up at seven in the morning holding a Big Gulp. It's a good story. It needs nine seconds of continuous talking and I let it go by.

"You're quiet," Sully says, dealing.

"I'm listening."

Two words, flat and correct. It costs a whole evening of not talking to make two words come out correct, and there's no way to say that at this table, so I pick up my cards.

Midway through the second orbit Sully goes for the food order, phone in hand. The place on Wadsworth, the one with the name nobody uses. "Usual, usual, usual," he says, pointing around the table, and then he gets to me and stalls, and Marty leans over with his cracked phone and starts reading me the menu.

"I know the menu, Marty."

"Right. Yeah. The burrito."

"The burrito."

"She gets the burrito," Sully says into the phone, like it wasn't his idea to ask.

Giorgio had already told him the burrito. I watch him not mention it.

The food comes and we eat standing at the tray table by the dartboard, no food on the felt, the only rule Sully enforces with his whole heart. For a minute nobody is being careful because their mouths are full.

It can't last, and it doesn't, and the thing that breaks it is the thing I knew was coming.

It starts well. Giorgio, raking a pot he didn't deserve, grins at me and says, "Jesus, fold faster, the cards can't hurt you." The old line. It does what it has always done, and I laugh on the same beat they do, and for a second the whole evening settles into its own shape.

Marty, encouraged, leans in. "Yeah, Mara, the flu take your…"

He stops.

The end of that sentence exists in the room. Everybody in the room has heard it before, in this room, aimed at me, a week ago. He doesn't finish it. He looks at his chips like they betrayed him.

"Bet's to you," Kwame says.

"My balls," I say. "The flu took my balls. You're allowed."

The laugh comes, grateful, too loud, Sully's head going back. It's a good laugh and it costs something, because after it the room gets more careful, not less. Marty goes quiet for two orbits of the dealer. Sully tells a story about a guy at work and edits it as he goes, taking out a word and putting in a softer word and stumbling on the seam, and when someone says don't be a pussy to Marty over a fold, reflex, nine years of reflex, Sully glances at me and says sorry.

"For what."

He doesn't answer. He studies the felt.

"He…" Marty says, later, pointing at me with a chip, telling Giorgio about a hand I played last winter. "She. She check-raised you with nothing. With actual nothing." The correction comes out of him like a cough, and he apologizes with his eyebrows, and I say it's fine, and some of it is.

Kwame never slips. Kwame says "Mara" the one time he needs it and "you" the rest of the night, and counts my chips twice when he pays me, exact, same as ever, and the sameness of Kwame is the thing that almost gets me, standing there with the felt smell and the cold concrete, because it proves the floor of this room hasn't moved. Only the weather in it.

Around eleven I've had two seltzers and I have to pee, and I look at the door into the house, past the kitchen, the thin door of the half bath where the table can hear everything. I look at it and deal instead. I look at it again an hour later and deal again. There's a version of this conversation I'm not having tonight, with the door, with the four of them and me. I hold it. It's its own kind of losing hand.

Late, past midnight, I catch a pot I shouldn't be in. Kwame bets into me on the river and I call with a hand I won't describe because it embarrasses me, and his king-high is good all night except for this once. He stacks my chips into towers of twenty, counting twice, and slides them over.

"There she is," he says.

Cash-out is eleven dollars up, which is seventeen from the hole I started in, and Giorgio announces it like a tournament result. Sully takes the Kowalski trophy off the shelf and sets it on the felt in front of me, ceremonial, because I'm up for the month now, somehow, the month I learned to stack in tens. The plate still says R. Kowalski. Nobody has ever taken the plate off.

"Looks good on you," Sully says, and then hears it, and then doesn't take it back, and I decide to let it be the harmless version.

They clean up, bottles in the blue bin, my two cans on top. Marty hugs me too, at the end, a copy of Giorgio's copy, and says "this is cool, this is all cool" into the air above my head.

"Same time next week," Sully says, to the room, the way he has said it five hundred times. But he says it watching me, and there's a question folded into it for the first time ever.

"Yeah," I say. "Same time."

Giorgio walks me out because I'm parked behind him, same as always. The night is cold and clear and my keys feel small in my hand, or my hand feels big around them, I can't tell anymore which direction the change runs in any given moment. I unlock the car and he stands there with his hands in his pockets.

"Couple weeks," he says. "We're idiots. But we're trainable. Give us a couple weeks."

"Okay," I say.

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

He nods at the windshield, at nothing, working on the next sentence. What comes out is, "Drive safe, Mara."

He says it like a man trying out a new tool. He says it like it might break. I get in the car and start it and he's still standing in the driveway when I check the mirror, making sure I get out clean, same as every Friday, same as ever.

Sunday I stop for gas on Wadsworth because the light turned on the way home. The card reader on pump four is peeled and dead, so I go in, and the guy behind the counter takes my card without looking up from a clipboard.

"Pump four, sir."

He's looking at the card. MARCUS is printed on it in raised letters an inch from his thumb. He hands it back and says it again on the way out, have a good one sir, and I say thanks in one syllable and get out the door.

The pharmacy is two lights down and I go in for tweezers because Vicky took the good ones. The aisle is a wall of small metal objects on cardboard and I stand in front of it long enough that a woman with a basket asks me if I know whether they carry the flat ones, and I say I think they're down at the end, and she says thank you, and goes down to the end.

At the counter the tech looks up, says, "Ma'am, I can take you here," and pulls the divider chain off. That happens before I've said anything. Then I put down the tweezers and a pack of razors and a can of shave gel and she scans them and asks if I have a rewards number, and I say the ten digits out loud, and it's ten digits, it's a whole sentence of numbers, and somewhere around the seventh one the register goes up and stays up.

She doesn't react. What she does is stop calling me anything at all. She says the total, she says out of forty, she says have a good night, and there's a gap where the word was going to go that she fills with nothing, and it's the most careful thing anyone has done for me all week and I don't want it.

In the car I sit with the bag in my lap and understand that at some point in the last twenty minutes I started running the odds. Before I got to the counter. The way I clock a vein through skin without deciding to: this one's going to go easy, this one's going to roll. Sir at the gas station off a card, ma'am at the counter off my face, nothing at all off my voice, all inside an hour, all of it correct information about where I am. Nobody was rude and nobody looked twice, at either answer, because either answer is available now and both of them are in the room at once. I pay cash at the gas station from here on. It takes me the eleven minutes home to work that out.

At the apartment I put the bag on the edge of the tub and get in the shower and shave my legs for the first time. The hair is already going, thinner than it was in March, coming off with no resistance at all, and it takes less time than I budgeted. Ankle to knee, then above the knee, then the underarms, which are a different geometry and take longer. The water goes cold at the end. I get out and my legs are cool and strange against each other and I stand on the mat feeling that.

Then the tweezers, in the mirror, over the sink. The eyebrows have been reshaping themselves since the fever broke and I've watched them do it like weather. I take out five hairs under the left arch, where the line is going ragged, and it hurts more than I expect, and the skin comes up pink. Then I stop, because I'm five hairs into a decision I don't know the end of. I don't have a picture of the face I'm making.

I put the tweezers in the drawer that has the rusted nail clippers in it. In the notebook, in the nightstand, in the column that says notes, I write: legs, first time. Brows, left, 5.

Monday. The email from Sonia is timestamped 6:14 AM. Quick question, the subject line says. No exclamation point. No question mark inside. The body reads: Stop by my office when you have a minute today. Nothing urgent.

Nothing urgent from Sonia means bring a story.

I read it twice on my phone in the parking lot, the engine off and the morning light flat across the windshield. The seat is exactly where I've always kept it. My feet don't reach the pedals the way they used to. I haven't moved it up yet.

Inside, the clinic is already running. Appurva has the coffeemaker going in the break room and is standing over it with a protein bar in her teeth, scrolling through the schedule on the wall monitor. The break room coffee has been on the plate since seven and the smell carries out to the front desk.

"You look tired," she says.

"I look different. Everyone keeps saying so."

"It's the same thing." She pulls the bar out of her mouth. "Your face is doing something. You lost more weight."

In some places I've gained it, and I could tell her where. The scrub top a size up hides it. I don't correct her.

The morning schedule is a wall. I work through it. Mrs. Calloway at nine-forty, thyroid panel, veins like rope. The tourniquet roll is cold out of the drawer and the alcohol wipes dry on my fingers between sticks. Mr. Hendricks at ten-ten, fasting, angry about it, tells me his blood sugar is fine and doesn't believe me when I say I'm just the one drawing it. He's six-two and he needs a hand getting up out of the draw chair. I give him my arm like always and my shoulder drops before it holds and I have to brace my hip against the armrest, the way I've watched Appurva do a hundred times and never had to do myself. He thanks me. He notices nothing. I label, I spin, I hand off.

At eleven the corridor to the lab is empty and I walk down it. The centrifuge runs behind the wall, a low note under the quiet.

Sonia's door is open. The monitor faces out, and she's typing, two fingers, the chain swinging against her jaw.

"You emailed," I say.

She looks up and takes her glasses off. Lets them hang. "Yes, come in."

I settle just inside the doorway.

"I've pulled three things since we talked," she says. She opens a folder on her desk and pulls out a print-out of the reconciliation report, the red line still in it. "Waste log first. If a tech hemolyzes a tube and rejects it, the tube goes into the biohazard stream and the stream gets logged by weight and station at close." She scans down with her pen. "Nothing from your station that Thursday after three-forty."

"Sometimes we bundle."

"Sometimes you do." She pulls out a print-out of the courier manifest. "Forty pickups, forty arrivals, no loss report filed that week or the week after. Couriers file. It's how they keep their contract."

The centrifuge spins down through the wall, a long descending whine.

"And the terminals." A third print-out. Two lines of timestamps, one highlighted. "Your badge cleared the door at 5:52. The rejection was entered at 6:04 from station three, which is yours, on a session that had been closed and was opened again for ninety seconds and closed again."

"I stay late."

"You said that last time."

"It was a busy day."

"You had six on the board and you were clear by four." She puts her glasses back on. "I pulled that, too."

I don't have the next sentence. The room is small and there's a whole industry of things I could say and every one of them would put the tube somewhere she's already looked.

"I want to be plain about what this isn't," she says. "The assay ran on three. Yuen has her numbers, the patient has his results, nothing was delayed, nothing was repeated, nobody so much as got a second stick out of it. There's no harm at the end of this and no phone call to make and nothing at all for me to fix." She looks at the folder instead of at me. "When a tube goes missing there's a person at the end of it who needs it. This has a fourth tube drawn on an order for three, and a record made after close for a tube that never existed anywhere but on paper, and no one at the end of it. It isn't a problem. It's just a number that won't sit down."

There's a question sitting in the room with us and she doesn't pick it up. She's had a month to pick it up. Four tubes. Why would anybody draw a fourth one.

"The March count closes at the end of the month," she says. "I sign it. I've signed it every month for six years and I've never signed a line I couldn't explain, and if I don't sign it, the question moves to a desk that isn't mine." She squares the print-outs and slides them back in the folder. "That's all. I wanted you to know where I'd looked."

She starts typing again, two fingers, fast, and doesn't wait for me to reach the door.

"Marcus," she says to the screen. "If there's a version of this I haven't thought of, this is the week for it."

I stand in the corridor for a second after the door clicks shut. The lab techs are behind glass at the far end, bent over a centrifuge. Nobody is looking at me. I walk back to my station.

Appurva is restocking gloves two stations over. "You okay? You keep doing this thing with your phone where you hold it like it owes you money."

"It's nothing."

"Sonia asked me about your Voss draw," she says, and shoves a box of nitrile into the drawer.

I look up.

"She asked if I ever draw more tubes than the order calls for. I said no. Nobody does that." She closes the drawer with her hip. "Why would you draw blood you don't need?"

"Why would you," I say.

"You want to grab food after? The new place on Colfax with the dumplings."

"I can't tonight."

"You never can anymore." She says it without weight and moves on, and the moving on is the part that registers. Three weeks ago she would have pushed. Now she lets it go, and I watch her let it go, and she'll ask me less next time.

At four I go to the bathroom. The staff bathroom, single occupancy, the one with the door that locks. I sit to pee and I catch myself checking my phone while I do it, one hand holding the phone, the other pulling the paper, and the multitasking is so ordinary it takes me a second to realize I never used to do this. I never used to sit down in this bathroom at all.

The discharge when I wipe is different. Clear, and it strings, and I stare at it on my fingers. If this is what it is, bleeding follows in about two weeks.

I look at myself in the mirror while I wash my hands. The jaw is softer. The eyebrows are doing something I didn't choose. The scrub top hangs loose but the shape under it isn't the shape it was. If Sonia looked at me long enough, if she stood me next to a photo from six weeks ago, she'd see it. She'd see the thing the numbers are pointing at.

I dry my hands. The paper towel dispenser is empty again. I wipe my hands on my scrubs.

At five I clock out and walk to the car and sit in the parking lot with the engine running. The email is still on my phone. Stop by my office when you have a minute today. Nothing urgent. I read it one more time and then I put the phone face down on the seat and back out of the space.

Vicky texts at six. Come by Thursday, I need the Crock-Pot back. The message has no greeting and no punctuation at the end, which is how she's been texting since she left. I type ok and send it and put the phone down.

The Crock-Pot is hers. I bought it for her birthday two years ago and she never used it and now she wants it. It's sitting on the counter next to the fridge, still in the box, the lid sealed with the original tape. I should have taken it out of the box at some point in the last two years. I didn't. Now it's hers again, sealed and unused, going back to the person it was always for.

I make coffee and pour it in the Austin mug, the price sticker still on the bottom, the chip to the left of the handle, where it ends up in the rack. I drink it standing at the counter and think about the folder squared against her blotter, and how she said this is the week for it, which is a door held open by someone who has already checked what's on the other side.

The phone buzzes. Giorgio. Friday. Sully asked me to ask you, which means he wants you there and can't say it.

I text back: In.

Then I plug the phone in and take out my wallet and slide the slip loose from behind my license. Carbonless yellow, gone soft at the folds. One tube. My initials at the bottom in my own hand. The order called for three.

There is a sink four feet away with a disposal in it and a stove behind me with a burner that lights on the second click. I stand in the kitchen holding a piece of paper that exists in no system anywhere, that no one has ever asked me for, that proves a thing nobody can otherwise prove.

I fold it back along its own folds and slide it in behind the license, up against the receipt with MARA in the rewards line, and put the wallet on the counter next to the sealed box.

Tuesday, and it isn't a game night. Sully texts the four of us that he's got a brisket on and it'll be done whenever it's done, which is Sully for come over. Four days since I stood in that strip of light and said my name into a garage.

In the morning my hair goes behind my ear and stays there. That's new. It's been getting close for days, and this morning it goes back and hooks and holds, and I stand in the bathroom turning my head to feel it hold. Then it's a problem, because it stays on that side and not the other, and I part it the other way and it lies down and does that too, and I look at both and I have no idea which one is right. There's no correct answer coming from anywhere. Vicky used to stand in this exact spot with a dryer and a round brush for eleven minutes and I never wondered what she was deciding. I put it behind the ear because that's the one my hand did first.

There's something else, a low ache off to the right, deep, one side only, four or five hours and then gone. I know the word for it before I know the feeling. Mittelschmerz. I've said that word out loud to patients in a room with a diagram on the wall.

Which means there's an egg. Which means the machine is running the whole program, ovulation and all, not just the parts you can see.

Vicky's shoes are the other thing. My heels come up out of them on the way down to the car and I take the last three stairs flat-footed.

At Sully's the seltzers are in the fridge before I get there and nobody stands in the light of it. Giorgio hands me a can at the door, already open, because he does that.

I've been holding it since the second one. Now it's eleven-forty and my bladder has been sending signals for an hour and I've been answering them the way I answer Sonia's emails, later, later.

Kwame is at the tray table with a paper plate, eating standing up. Marty is telling the salmon story again, and it's drifted since March: the sister has become the date and the woman from the app has become an afterthought he barely mentions. Giorgio is watching me instead of his cards. He does that now. Checks in with his eyes every few minutes like I'm a patient he shouldn't have left alone.

I put my plate down.

"Getting up," I say, and push the chair back. The voice does what I ask it to. It's been doing that most of the night, which is what a week buys, but I'm tired now and tired is when it stops asking permission.

Nobody looks up. That should make it easier.

The half bath is inside, past the kitchen, at the end of a short hallway with a framed poster of a bronco on the wall that's been there since before I met any of them. The door is thin. I know this because I've stood at the table and heard everything that happens in there for nine years. Sully's girlfriend before last used to run the faucet. I used to think it was modesty.

I go in and turn the lock. The lock is a push-button, no deadbolt, and the door doesn't sit right in the frame anymore because Sully's house settles a little every spring. I can hear Marty through the wall saying she took her salmon home in a box, the salmon, I'm not even mad.

The toilet seat is up. Of course it's up. I put it down. The plastic hinge is loose and it slides left when I set my weight on it, so I shift right to compensate. My jeans are the new ones, the women's pair from the store, and the button sits lower than I'm used to, right at the hip bone. I get them down and sit.

The stream starts immediately, faster than it used to. There's no hand in it, nothing to point, nothing to meter, and it's finished before I've decided how I feel about the sound. The sound turns out to be nothing, a low even hiss under the water, quieter than I braced for, and the thing I was actually afraid of was never the noise at all. 

Marty's story stops. I hear it stop. A pause, then Sully says something I can't make out, then laughter, the normal kind, the kind that fills a gap.

I fold a square of toilet paper and dab. The roll is the cheap kind Sully buys, the kind where the squares come apart at angles. I fold again, dab again, drop it in. I stand and pull up the jeans and button them and the button sits at the hip bone and I feel it there, a small hard pressure against the bone.

The sink is the size of a dinner plate. I wash my hands and the soap is a bar, not liquid, Ivory, sitting in a dish with water pooled around it. I rinse and dry on the hand towel, which is clean, which surprises me.

The mirror is small and speckled at the edges where the silvering has gone. I look at myself in it for the first time tonight. The new shirt. The bra straps at the collar, which I stopped trying to hide an hour ago because the shirt was cut for them and hiding them was making the neckline bunch. The jaw, softer than it was. The eyebrows, five hairs different. The hair behind the ear, still holding. The whole face sitting on top of a body that pees sitting down in Sully's half bath while four men play cards in the next room.

I open the door. The hallway is dark. The kitchen light is off. The garage light comes through the door at the end of the hall, a bright rectangle with the table inside it, and I walk toward it and the sound of my shoes on the hardwood is different than it used to be, shorter stride, hips doing the work, the heels coming up loose inside.

Giorgio is alone at the table when I come back in. He's stacking chips into towers of twenty and counting them twice, Kwame's habit, picked up off him years ago. The others are inside getting beers. I can hear the fridge door through the wall.

"Good game tonight," he says.

"I took your money."

"You took Marty's money. I broke even." He stacks another tower. "You want to get out of here? Get a burger or something? It's early."

It's not early. It's midnight. But the night has been fine, better than fine, and I can feel the carefulness of it sitting on my shoulders like a coat that almost fits. A burger at one of those places on Wadsworth that stays open for the bar crowd sounds like the best idea anyone's had all week.

"Yeah," I say.

We take his truck. He doesn't ask where I want to go. He drives to the place on 44th with the green neon sign and the parking lot that's always half empty, the place we went after games in the early years when we were both younger and could eat a burger at one in the morning without paying for it the next day.

The booth is red vinyl with a patch of duct tape on the corner where the seam split. The waitress calls Giorgio hon and brings us coffee without being asked. He orders the green chile burger. I order the same thing, four words, and she writes it down and takes the menus and never looks up from the pad.

"You did good tonight," he says.

"I folded seven-deuce like a coward last week."

"That was the right call."

"It was the coward's call."

He turns his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer. He does this when he's working on something. The diner is mostly empty. A trucker at the counter, two guys in the back booth sharing a plate of fries. The fluorescent light is flat and yellow and makes everyone look slightly sick.

"The guys are trying," he says.

"I know."

"Marty doesn't know what to call you half the time. He practiced in the car on the way over. I heard him."

"He said Mara three times tonight."

"Four," Giorgio says. "He said it once to Sully when you were in the bathroom. He was checking if it sounded right."

I put my hands around the coffee cup. The ceramic is warm.

"It sounds right," I say.

"Yeah." He turns the cup again. "It does."

He looks up at me. Nine years of Fridays and he has never once asked me a question I didn't want to answer.

"I'm sorry about the seltzers," he says.

"What?"

"The first night. The seltzers. I didn't know what to get. I stood in the store for twenty minutes looking at the beer section and the seltzer section and I felt like an asshole."

"They were fine."

"They weren't fine. You drank them because I bought them." He stops turning the cup. "I should've just gotten the beer."

"I don't drink beer anymore."

"Since when?"

Since the beer started tasting different. Since the carbonation sits in my stomach wrong and the bitterness is too much and I can feel the alcohol hit faster than it used to, my body smaller, my blood volume less. Since I started sitting down to pee and the world rearranged itself around the fact.

"A while," I say.

The burgers come. The waitress sets them down and refills the coffee and calls us both hon this time, both of us the same, no gap and no pause anywhere in it. Giorgio picks up his burger and doesn't take a bite.

"You seem good," he says.

"I am."

"Better than before?"

I pick up the burger. The green chile is running down the side and I catch it with my thumb. "Different than before."

He nods. He takes a bite. We eat in silence for a minute and the silence is the old kind, the kind that doesn't need filling.

"Your dad," I say. "The valve thing. How'd it go?"

"Good. He's home. Mean about it, like you said." He wipes his hands on a napkin. "He asked about you. I said you were doing well."

"What'd you tell him?"

"I said you were doing well. That's all."

The burger is good. The chile is hot enough to make my eyes water and I eat it anyway. Giorgio watches me eat and I can feel him watching and it isn't the watching of a man looking at a woman. It's the watching of a man checking if his friend is still in there.

"Same time next week," he says.

"Same time."

He drives me back to Sully's to get my car. The truck is warm and smells like the vinyl cleaner he uses on the seats. At the curb in front of the house he puts the truck in park and turns to me.

"You're still you," he says. "That's what I wanted to say."

He says it like he's been rehearsing it since the diner. He says it like he needs it to be true. And it's true, mostly, in the way that matters to him. It means I'll still take his money at cards and eat his burgers and know the name of his father's surgeon. The rest of it, the bra straps and the bathroom and the jeans that button at the hip, the rest of it is mine to carry and his to not ask about, and that arrangement is the friendship now, and I take it.

"I know," I say, and my voice slips upward on the second word, tired, and I let it. There's nothing left tonight to hold it with.

I get out of the truck. He waits until I'm in the car with the engine running before he pulls away. The house is dark. The garage door is down. The game is over.