Wife by Design

“I do like having you around,” his older brother agreed.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Nothing.”

It was a truculent “nothing.” Not an assured, truthful one. But he let it go. Because he knew what was wrong—if Grant was there, Darin couldn’t wait for Maddie—and was hopeful that if they continued to ignore the issue, it would fade away as so many others had in the past.

“Oh, yeah, look.” Reaching over with his right hand, Darin pulled Grant to a stop on the sidewalk. He held out his left leg. Pulled up the leg of the sweatpants he’d worn to therapy that day.

In place of the piece of gauze taped to his brother’s shin, there was a line of pink puffy skin. “Lynn came and got me and we went to her room and she took out my stitches.”

He’d wanted to be there. If for no other reason than to have the excuse to spend the time with Lynn. “She said seven to ten days,” Grant said aloud. “It’s only been six.”

“But I saw her in the hall before my therapy and I told her I was itching there and she said, ‘Let me take a look,’ and she did and she brought me right over and took out the stitches and walked with me back over to my therapy. Don’t worry, I wasn’t late, Grant.”

“I wasn’t worried. And I’m very glad the stiches are out. Now you can shower without having to make sure it’s covered.”

“That’s what Lynn said.” They continued on toward the garden.

And Grant thought about Darin’s nurse in the shower. His shower.

* * *

THAT EVENING, AFTER stopping for burgers on the way back home from The Lemonade Stand, Grant asked Darin to help him find the landscape lights he wanted in the supply shed behind their garage.

While they were in the shed, his phone rang, and he talked to Luke about a problem he and Craig had run into that day on a fifty-thousand-dollar job. At the customer’s request they were planting two rows of flowering trees along a river rock walkway and they’d run into some slate ground.

He’d tested patches of the ground himself and found the soil nutrient rich. Telling Luke he’d be at the job site at six in the morning, he made a mental note to check the design blueprint before turning in that night. He needed a plan B for the mini-orange-tree grove at the end of the line of trees if he was going to have to reroute the walkway.

Luke filled him in on the other job they’d been at that morning. And by the time Grant hung up, Darin had a bin open on the workbench.

“These are the ones you wanted, right?” he asked.

He glanced in the bin. “Yep, thanks, bro.”

Darin closed the bin with his good hand and pushed it to the corner of the workbench, turning to replace the other plastic bins he’d pulled off the waist-high shelves. Handled one at a time, the bins were light enough for Darin to move on his own without breaking the doctor’s no-lifting rule.

They were light enough to move with one hand, but his brother was using both. Slowly. Awkwardly. But successfully.

Darin’s left hand didn’t do much more than touch the underside of the bin—a two-or three-inch movement that didn’t appear to be weight bearing. But it was a start.

Grant grabbed some wire, clips and extra bulbs, put them in a bag and turned to find Darin standing at the workbench between them, frowning at him.

“What?” Grant asked a little more irritably than he probably should have. He had a problem at a job site—a very lucrative job site—he’d had a long week, his brother didn’t seem to want him around and he had formed an unhealthy addiction to a woman he couldn’t have. Could you blame a guy for being a little frustrated?

“You know that girl, Maddie, the blonde you saw me with, who was looking after Lynn’s little girl, Kara? The one who was so upset the day Kara almost fell in the hole?”

“Yes.”

“I like her.”

Play it down, man. It’s only a big deal if you make it one. Darin’s words to him when he was a junior in high school and wasn’t chosen to play first string basketball…

“I like her, too.”

Darin stood tall, making eye contact. A sign of a lucid moment. “You don’t know her as well as I do.”