Free Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook

remember about that day?”
    “Are you sure you want to talk about it?”
    “When you first decided to help me. How did that happen? It looked to me like you came out of nowhere.”
    “We came out of the history building, initially,” he said.
    “Is Jack sorry he came to help me?”
    “No, he’s not sorry.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I know.”
    She didn’t see how he could, for sure. She looked at his plate. “Do you like the chicken-fried steak?”
    “Not really. Do you want some?”
    “I don’t really like that kind of gravy. So how are you and Jack cousins—through your moms or your dads, or what?”
    “His father and my mother are brother and sister. You’ve got some Jell-O over your mouth.”
    She wiped it off with her napkin.
    “Are you in a dorm?” he asked.
    “Yes. Kinsolving,”
    “Oh, so you’re one of those lucky ones with the air conditioning. It gets pretty hot in student housing where I live. And Elaine and I had a baby in August.”
    Shelly tried not to react to this. She shouldn’t care if he had a baby. She should be happy for him. But her mood dropped. Somehow, fatherhood made her connection to him seem tawdry and incidental. “A boy or a girl?”
    “A boy—Nathan. Nate.”
    “So your wife’s at home with him?”
    “Until I get the car to her in a little while.” He didn’t actually want to discuss Elaine, having argued with her before leaving for campus. They were behind on rent and needed a second car besides the ’61 Cutlass he had purchased used, and he couldn’t afford to buy one as long as he was in school. Either he or Elaine had to stay home with the baby, and the other needed to earn a decent paycheck, and it was obvious to both of them that Wyatt—even working part-time painting houses—was currently doing neither.
    “Were those guys calling you Earp because of Wyatt Earp?”
    “It’s the never-ending joke.”
    “That’s not who you’re named after?”
    “I’m named after my grandfather. We’re from a long line of Wyatts.” He looked at her arm in the sleeve of the yellow cardigan. It lay crookedly on the table. “It’s all right?”
    “I can bend it, but I can’t straighten it out the whole way. It feels like there are rubber bands around the elbow, keeping it like this. It looks pretty bad.”
    “Can I see it?”
    “See it?”
    “Look at it.”
    “Now?”
    “If that’s okay.”
    “If you’re up for it. I don’t usually show it to anyone. It’s ugly. Beware.”
    He watched her pull the cardigan off her shoulder, push her shirtsleeve up, and reveal a thin, misshapen arm webbed with inflamed scars. Above the elbow, the arm turned oddly. “The bullet went all the way through,” she said. “Right here. There’s a piece of metal in there, holding the bone together. Or I guess the bone has grown back, but the metal’s still in there. If you press here, you can feel some of the screws.”
    He put his fingers where she indicated. The scars felt smooth and oddly erotic to his touch. A girl from his design class paused to talk, but when she saw his hand on Shelly’s arm, she was flummoxed and walked on past with her tray.
    “Feels creepy, doesn’t it,” Shelly said about her arm.
    The ropy, sensual feel of the scars unsettled Wyatt, the pulse of the blue veins in Shelly’s wrist reminding him of how he had felt her heartbeat while he was trying to stop her from bleeding. He turned her arm over, noting the high school ring on her middle finger and the blunt cut of her unpainted nails, then turned it back again and looked at the scars. “Not creepy at all. It looks nearly perfect.”
    She dragged the cardigan off the opposite shoulder and stretched her right arm out beside the left. “It used to look like this.”
    But he felt somehow more entitled to look at the injured arm.
    “Is it horrible?” she asked, rolling the shirtsleeves down and buttoning up the cuffs.
    “It’s wonderful. They put it back together. Are you going to finish