Free Everything Breaks by Vicki Grove

bent to gather her purse and waitressing uniform. “Dad, I got you some of those breakfast biscuits you’ve been wanting.”
    I took the keys from the ignition and walked back to the trunk.
    â€œJanet, a man’s wounds are his own,” I heard Bud tell her. “This guy doesn’t want to go to the clinic, so don’t pester him about it and that’s that!”
    Bud never talked to Janet like that. Never. I stayed hidden behind the open lid of the trunk. Janet said nothing, and a couple of minutes later I saw Bud walking back toward the porch in a proud way, putting all his weight on one foot at a time, holding his arms out from his body for balance.
    I finally hung both grocery sacks from my left wrist and slammed the trunk closed.
    Janet was looking straight at me with tears in her eyes. “I just don’t want to take any chances with you, Tuck,” she said in a ragged whisper.
    But that ship had sailed. All the chances had already been taken as of last night. She didn’t get that, but Bud did, from Korea.
    I twisted my mouth into a reassuring smile. “My legs feel a hundred percent better. Once I showered, they turned out to be barely scratched.”
    I went on inside with those groceries, thinking how I owed Bud a huge one.
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    The rest of Sunday afternoon I stayed up in my room, lying on the bed and flicking Trey’s lighter. Ringo lay there next to me with his head on my chest, comforting me with his terrible, familiar breath. He’s so old that he usually doesn’t climb the stairs, but that afternoon he somehow knew how much I needed him and made an effort.
    I listened close in case more pebbles hit my window, but they didn’t.
    One time I heard Bud and Janet arguing and drifted out to the hall to eavesdrop, thinking it would be about the clinic and my legs. It turned out to be about Bud, though. Apparently the eye test people weren’t the only ones giving him grief. His heart doctor wanted his driver’s license taken away from him as well.
    â€œBut Dad, you
know
that Dr. Hitchford said if you had another heart attack and lost consciousness, it would be tragic if you were behind the wheel and—”
    â€œI get a sorta warning before I pass out, Janet! I’d have
plenty
of time to pull over! What’s Dr. Hitchford know about bum hearts anyhow, him barely forty years old?”
    â€œWell, Dad, he
is
a cardiologist,” Janet said meekly.
    I went back to my room shaking my head, wishing there was some way I could trade places with Bud. He wanted to drive more than anything in the world, and the idea of driving made me sick to my stomach, as sick as when I’d bailed from Trey’s car and thrown up in the ditch. I would never drive again. That hadn’t been a hard decision, hadn’t even taken any actual thought. It was just a fact. Driving a car had slipped quietly and firmly all by itself onto the list of things I was never going to do, like eating live scorpions, or cutting off one of my ears, or sticking my hand into boiling tar.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    After we ate that night, Janet went back to the restaurant to help close up. I was sitting in the den with Bud when the phone rang. It was Aimee, the cheerleader who’d dated Zero for a couple of weeks in September, then had dropped him flat and more or less broken his heart for about a day and a half.
    â€œTucker?” She was crying. “Listen, Zero gave me a white rose corsage for the dance last month, did . . . did you know that?”
    â€œNo.” She must have ordered Zero to buy her that. You had to tell Zero everything where the everyday world was concerned. His head was filled with velocities and angles and variable resistances. There was little room left for things like flowers.
    I began watching Bud for something to do while Aimee talked. He was staring glassy-eyed at a really, really old VCR tape of a Monday