Page 58 of How to Walk Away

“What?” I said. “That you’re kind of an asshole?”

Ian blinked, and I could not read his expression. “A lesson that youcando it yourself,” he said. He looked over at Chip. “But that doesn’t mean you should have to.”

Chip looked at me. “I can’t understand him at all. It’s like a speech impediment.”

Ian didn’t take his eyes off me. “Watch yourself, little man.”

There was a knock at the door, and then my dad’s voice. “Is everybody done kissing?”

“Yes,” Chip and I called flatly, at the same time.

My dad stepped in—with my mom trailing behind him, looking dazed. “Look who I found! At the candy machine!”

“Where’s Kit?” I asked.

“She had to go,” my dad said. Then, in a stage whisper, “She’s got a date with Fat Benjamin.”

My mother, a few feet behind my dad, held an unopened Hershey bar and looked shaken and pale. I made a stab at mental telepathy, trying to promiseI’ll never tell himfrom my brain to hers. But I don’t think it worked.

My dad was as jolly and unaware as could be, and that just made it sadder all around. He put his arm around my mom and gave her a little squeeze. Then he said to Ian, “I’d like to see how to do a transfer, too.”

“You heard that conversation?” I asked.

“Sure,” my dad said. “You can hear everything out in the hallway. That’s how we knew you and Loverboy were done making out.”

“Then why did you ask?”

He lifted his eyebrows like,Duh. “To embarrass you.”

Ian coughed. Then he reached behind me to grab the transfer board and lower the bed.

I regarded Chip for a second. Next to Ian, he suddenly did look like alittle man. I’d always thought of him as “trim” or “sporty,” but standing next to Ian gave him a slightly shrimpy vibe.

“The trick to the transfer,” Ian told us all then, “is letting Maggie do as much for herself as she can. But stay close by. There’s a temptation,” he added, “when someone you love is struggling, to want to help too much. Keep in mind that the struggle makes her stronger.”

I gave Ian a look. I might be in danger of many things, but “getting too much help” was not one of them.

Ian wasn’t looking at me. He was looking right at Chip. “The most important thing,” he said, “is being there.”

When he’d finished staring Chip down, he patted the board and crooked his finger at me, like,Come here.

I pulled back my covers, and then we all beheld—because I was wearing a gown for the whole using-the-potty project—my bare legs.

Chip had seen those legs a thousand times, and caressed them, and kissed them—even shaved them once, in an exercise in erotic suspense that worked much better in theory than in practice. But these weren’t the legs that he knew. They’d atrophied so much even in the short time I’d been here, they were like a newborn calf’s legs—spindly and soft and splayed.

The sight of them made me feel deeply ashamed. I hated them. I wanted to beat them with my fists. I wanted to pummel them into bloody bruises on the mattress.

Ian was unfazed. “You’re going to need some pants for the therapy gym, lass.”

I pointed my mother toward the cabinet, and she found a pair in a gym bag, along with my last clean bra—hot pink with tiger stripes. She also grabbed one of the several T-shirts we’d cut at the shoulder.

Ian gently helped me into the sweatpants, edging them up, and when it was time to pull them under my butt and around my hips, he leaned down so I could circle my arms around his neck. I pulled up just enough that I inhaled the most delicious scent of him. Kind of gingery. Sweet, cookie-ish spices mixed with a microscopic hint of salty manliness.

I can’t even put it into words, but you know when they bring the dessert tray around at a restaurant and you immediately just know what you want—like,That one. Right there!I had that reaction to the smell of him. That one.

But we were on to the dressing-the-top-half phase, and so my mother asked the men to leave the room.

“Even me?” Chip asked.

---