Signs and Wonders Read Online Free PDF Page B

him coming into the kitchen her face lit up, nothing deadpan about that. She was always happy when he came, no matter what condition he was in. For the first few minutes, we were so distracted by the commotion of cooking and getting all the food on the table that we didn’t notice how high he was. But then I realized he wasn’t eating, just holding up his fork and looking at it, as if inspecting it for cleanliness. He seemed transfixed. After a while the two of us watched in silence.
    Finally he noticed, and put it down. “It’s beautiful, you know?” he said.
    “It’s Mom and Dad’s old set,” Stephanie said. She passed mesome garlic bread, nudging me to hand the basket to Alan. She wanted him to get something into his stomach.
    “No, I mean forks in general,” Alan said musingly. “There’s this perfection to them. You know what word I’ve always liked?
Tines.
The
tines of a fork.
It sounds so perfect, like little chimes. Like a trinity. Like a trinity of chimes.”
    “Oh, kiddo,” Stephanie said. “What did you take?”
    Alan smiled at her. He was the most affable addict I’d ever met. “I feel good,” he said. “I got a little help from Ludo.”
    This was a guy from Allentown who’d served in Alan’s unit. They hung around together a lot, though they often fought, Ludo driving off and leaving him stranded at a bar, or a McDonald’s at midnight, or a truck stop in Ohio, halfway through some road trip they’d cooked up and then abandoned.
    I could see he wasn’t going to eat anything, and Stephanie’s eagerness for him to be there like a normal person was tearing at my heart. “How about you lie down for a bit?” I said.
    He smiled at me, his green eyes warm. “That’s not a terrible idea, sir,” he said. He settled himself on the couch, and in a couple minutes we could hear him snoring. At first Stephanie just sat there, staring down at her spaghetti, tears glimmering in her eyes. But I reminded her she didn’t want to get sick, that she had to keep her strength up, and she nodded and lifted her fork. She was sensible like that.
    After dinner, I did the dishes while Stephanie made up the spare room for Alan, then crashed in front of the TV. To my surprise, when I went back there to check on him, he was awake. The bedside lamp was on and he was reading one of her
Cosmos.
    “Guess what?” he said when he saw me. “The female body has a hundred pleasure receptors.”
    “Must be nice,” I said.
    “Seriously,” he said. “I know maybe three.”
    “Yeah.” This wasn’t a topic I was interested in pursuing. “You need anything?”
    “Where’s Steph?”
    “Sleeping. She’s had a long day.”
    “I hear you,” he said. “I hear you.” He was sitting propped up against the pillows, his legs straight out in front of him. With his shoes still on you couldn’t tell which one was the prosthetic foot. He saw me looking.
    “You’re a doctor. Tell me why it’s the one that’s gone that hurts.”
    “The nerve endings,” I said. “They call it ghost pain. The OxyContin should help.”
    He snorted. “I’m not going to lie to you, OxyContin’s like baby aspirin to me at this point.”
    I didn’t know what to say to this. “How’s the physical therapy going?”
    “How do you think?” He closed his eyes, and a small smile played across his face. “I was in this tank once, me and Ludo,” he said. “We were going through this patch of desert when we heard all this artillery, it sounded real heavy. And then it just stopped. Ludo tells me to stick my head out and see what’s going on. I say no way, I’m gonna get killed. We argue about it for a while. Finally I say okay and stick my head out the top. I look around and I can’t see a damn thing. Not one single person for miles. All I see is this brown desert. After a while, none of it makes sense to me. You know how if you look at a word too long, you can’t tell if it’s a real word? I couldn’t even tell the difference