Chapter 7

“So, who’s this girl that’s driving you again?” Mom asked for the thirtieth time that morning after I explained why I didn’t need a ride to the doctor’s.

“Her name’s Rosita. I don’t actually know her last name. She runs the taco place across from the high school.”

“I don’t think I know her, but I don’t go down there very much. I do remember Betty mentioning some foreign girl moving to town a few years ago.”

“She’s from Puerto Rico. It’s not exactly foreign. They’re US citizens.”

“But they don’t speak English, right? How do you two even communicate?”

It took everything in my power to keep me from rolling my eyes at her. My mom was a good person and I knew she didn’t really mean anything negative by that. Far from it, in fact. She just kind of lived in her own world here, always dealing with the same people and keeping to the same routine.

“No, they speak Spanish, but most people from there, especially the ones that move into the states, speak English, too. Her’s is very good. I mean, how would she run a business here if she didn’t speak English?”

“I didn’t know, I was just asking. So how did you two meet?”

“I went into her place a while back when I was wandering around town and we got to talking. I ran into her at the bus stop when I got back from New York and when she found out I had to go to the doctor today, she offered to give me a ride. We’re just friends.”

Mom gave me a look I’d seen before and said, “Well, I’m just glad you’re socializing again. You’ve been moping around here for weeks. You two have fun.”

“I think I have pretty good reasons for ‘moping around’.”

“I wasn’t judging, I was just observing,” she said in the least believable statement of all time.

I heard a car pull into the driveway and pushed myself out of the chair I’d been sitting in and pulled my crutches under my arms.

“I gotta go.”

“Will you be back tonight?” Mom asked.

“Yes, she’s just giving me a ride there and back, and then she’s got to go close her restaurant.”

“I just meant, if you two were going to go somewhere else, I wanted to know so I didn’t worry.”

“It’s not like that,” I said again. “I gotta go. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Okay. Well, good luck at the doctor’s.”

“Thanks,” I called over my shoulder as I popped the screen door open with my crutch and edged through.

Rosita was already out of her car and heading towards the porch when I made it out of the door, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid. I know my mother meant well, but tact wasn’t her strong suit and she clearly already thought there was more going on here than there was. I actually really liked Rosita, but she’d shown no interest in that kind of thing. Besides, even though I wasn’t particularly sad that Terri and I had split, since our marriage had died a long time ago, jumping into something else didn’t really seem like the best way to go.

Of course, I could never explain that to my mother.

“Are you in a hurry,” Rosita said, seeing me not pause as I reached her, hoping she’d get the hint and follow me back to her car.

“No, I just...” I started to say before my mother came through the screen door and interrupted me.

“You must be Rosita,” she said, coming down the steps and sticking out her hand.

“Yes,” Rosita said, shaking my mother’s hand while looking at me slightly confused.

Although I wanted to, I couldn’t exactly pull her away from my mother, at least not without hearing about it for the next five years, so I just shrugged and turned back to the pair of them, abandoning my attempted escape.

“Rosita, this is my mother, Mary Brewer. Mom, this is my friend Rosita.”

“Nice to meet you, although I think Henry might have lost some of his manners, because he didn’t mention your last name.”

This time I did roll my eyes as Mom gave me the least sly glance ever, as she proudly fished for information I hadn’t been able to give her.

“Delgado.”

“I see,” Mom said, before turning to me and making it even more obvious and embarrassing. “It’s Delgado.”

“Got it,” I said, starting to look for a hole to climb into.

“I really appreciate you taking Henry to the doctor’s. I’d offered to change my schedule, but he insisted he’d rather get a ride from you.”

I opened my mouth to protest, and then shut it, since it wouldn’t do any good. Mom had offered to cancel her schedule, but in a way that made it clear she both really didn’t want to and that she’d hold it over my head for the rest of my life if she did. Of course, this way she got to play the martyr card and still get to do what she wanted to do.

“I don’t mind. I haven’t had many chances to visit any of the nearby towns and I thought it would be nice to have a guide to show me around. Besides, I really want to find out what happened with the police at the high school yesterday.”

I whipped my head around to stare at Rosita, surprised she’d heard about that already.

“How’d you hear about that?” I asked.

Mom apparently had bigger concerns because she spoke over me, asking, “Something happened with the police? Did you get into trouble? Was there an accident?”

“I’m not in any trouble and there wasn’t an accident,” I said. “I was just walking around the high school killing time and I saw this guy holding a woman at knifepoint in the rear parking lot. I subdued him and called the police, who came and took him away. End of story.”

“You confronted a man with a knife?” Mom said, completely aghast. “Are you out of your mind? You could have gotten hurt!”

“I used to do this for a living, you know. I was fine.”

“I know you used to do this, but you weren’t on crutches then.”

“I was fine. The guy was coming down hard and was barely holding it together. I was more worried I might seriously hurt him and someone would decide to sue me. Orville said he knew the guy and he’s been in a lot of trouble in the past, so it should be fine. Besides, what else could I do, just turn and walk away?”

Mom pursed her lips and I knew inside she wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t say it out loud without feeling guilty at church on Sunday.

“It might be a bit foolish because you’re injured, but it’s still very brave. It shows you’re a good person.”

I just shrugged. I hadn’t been fishing for compliments and wasn’t even planning on bringing it up until Rosita spilled the beans.

“Okay, we gotta go if I don’t want to be late for my appointment,” I said edging towards Rosita’s car.

Mom was torn between grilling me on my encounter with a junkie and questioning Rosita some more and ended up just frowning instead.

“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Brewer,” Rosita said when Mom didn’t add anything else.

Giving Mom a smile, Rosita turned and passed me to unlock her car, and open my door for me. Normally I’d have waved off the assistance, my dad’s stubborn pride having taken a firm hold of me from an early age, but her car was fairly low to the ground and I needed help holding my crutches while I braced one hand on the door and one hand on the roof of the car to lower myself in. Rosita handed me my crutches and hurried around to the driver’s side while I tried to find a comfortable way to hold them on my lap while buckling in.

Normally, I would have just put them across a back seat, except she had a tiny little car with a back seat I doubted any human being could actually sit in. I could probably Tetris my crutches back there if I really tried, but it would have required awkward twisting around and probably whacking the driver a few times while I made the attempt, so I opted to just make the best of it with them on my lap.

“So, how did you hear about what happened?”

“The high school is just across the street. Even in the back parking lot, it’s hard to miss two police cars and an ambulance flying down the street. Besides, Orville comes in most days for tacos. When he stopped by last night, I asked him what all the commotion was about, and he told me a drug addict tried to rob a woman, and that you stopped him and called the police.”

“He told you I did it?”

“Well, he said a guy that used to live here and recently moved back, and I asked if he meant you, and he said yes. So then he started telling me stories about when you two were younger.”

“Ohh,” I said, feeling a pit in my stomach, since I could only imagine the kinds of things he told her.

“It wasn’t anything bad. He said you two were friends in high school, although you didn’t really hang out with the same crowd because he was a little older than you, and because you were out of here as soon as you graduated.”

My heart crawled out of my throat, leaving only guilt behind, since Orville had to have done that deliberately. He was a smart guy and was in no way oblivious. He knew how we treated him and how we talked about him when he wasn’t around. He’d given me a solid by, by not outing who I used to be to Rosita; although I was a little at a loss as to why he would have done it.

Worse than feeling guilty about how I treated him when we were younger was lying to Rosita about it now. The weird thing was, although I never straight up lied to Terri, I had no problem just avoiding telling her things or letting her believe things that I knew weren’t true simply because I didn’t want to get into a fight.

“He was being charitable,” I heard myself say, apparently unable to fight whatever inner conscience had just reared its ugly head. “We were kind of awful to him when we were kids. I hate to admit it, but I was a serious jerk when I was a teenager.”

“All teenagers are jerks. Being self-absorbed and mean is kind of what adolescence is all about.”

“True, but I took it to the next level. I was the stereotypical jerk you see as the bad guy in all those chick-flicks about high school.”

“Really? I find that hard to believe. You don’t seem like that kind of guy at all.”

“I guess I grew up. When I think back to how I treated Orville though, I feel really guilty about it. Especially after talking to him yesterday. He seems like a nice guy and he really has his head screwed on tight.”

“His head...?” she asked, her face scrunching up in confusion.

“It just means he’s got things together and is sensible.”