Chapter 36: Four Feet
The right shoulder wakes before I do. We have both accepted the arrangement.
A torn labrum does not hurt where people expect.
It is deep and slightly forward, under the collarbone, where you would put a thumb to hold somebody still.
Sometimes it is a catch, not a pain. The arm travels an arc and something inside declines to come.
Here is what I did about it on four hundred dollars, with no insurance.
Ibuprofen. Four dollars for a hundred.
Two tablets twice a shift, with food, never more. Any more and you lose the stomach.
I counted them. I have counted everything I put into my body since I was twelve.
Ice from the break room machine, double-bagged.
Twelve minutes on the front of the joint at the end of a shift.
Twelve, not twenty. Twenty is how you burn skin at six in the morning.
A tennis ball, ninety cents, between the wall and the back of the shoulder blade.
That is not physiotherapy. It is what you do when physiotherapy costs a hundred and ten an hour.
Sleep on the left. A rolled towel under the right elbow so the arm never hangs behind.
That detail is worth more than everything else on the list, and it costs a towel.
Tape, six dollars a roll. Two strips, one over the joint and one across.
It holds nothing. It reminds the skin where the shoulder is, and the shoulder behaves better when watched.
Isometrics four times a day, elbow at the side, pressing into a door frame.
And the thing I did not do, which was anything overhead.
Not a shelf. Not a coat hook. Not a hand raised to ask a question.
Twelve years of not lifting that hand above my head has changed how I stand in a queue.
Now Delphine.
The ninth of February, half past three, at the bottom of aisle D.
There was water on the floor. A drum on a trolley had a slow leak. No cone out.
She was carrying two flat boxes, which means she could not see her feet.
She went down the way people go down when nobody has taught them how.
The feet go forward. The hips go back.
The arm goes out straight behind and the whole weight arrives on the heel of one hand.
I was four feet away, on her left and slightly behind.
Four feet is nothing. Four feet is one step and a reach.
I have taken hold of falling people ten thousand times. That is not a figure of speech.
My hands came up to the height of my sternum.
Then they stopped, because of a sentence Ruth said on the second of January.
“Do not put your hands on anybody. Not in anger. Not to help somebody up.”
I said, “What if somebody falls?” She said, “Then somebody falls.”
She was not being cruel. She was being accurate. Then she said one more thing.
“You have a prior and a pending charge. If you touch anybody, the only version written down is theirs.”
So at half past three, four feet from a woman going backwards onto concrete, I put my hands down.
It took less time than it takes to read that.
She landed on the heel of the right hand, then the elbow, then the head. Lightly. That is the worst part.
The lights came up because of the noise. Nine people came round the aisle.
I did not go to her. I shouted for Marcus to get the first aider and not to move her.
That is the correct instruction. It is the only useful thing I did.
A woman from the benches knelt and put a coat over her. I stood four feet away, hands at my sides.
They took her out at four fifteen. Fractured wrist. Six weeks in a cast.
Fractured wrist. I would like you to notice that, because I do.
On the twenty-fifth of December a man broke a wrist on a floor, and my life ended.
On the ninth of February a woman broke a wrist on a floor because I did nothing.
Delphine came back on the twenty-sixth with a cast and a bag over it.
On her second night, at the vending machine, with no anger in it: “You were right there.”
“I was.”
“You could have caught me.”
The honest answer, which I did not give her, is that catching her was the least of it.
I could have taken her weight, turned her hip, and set her down on her side, arm tucked.
That is a thing I have known how to do since I was thirteen.
What I said was: “I know.”
She said “Okay” and went back to the benches. She never shared the flask again.
I have spent twelve years being the safest person in every room I walk into.
That night I found out the price, and I paid it in front of nine people in under a second.