Act of God

him that night, and he’d “imprinted” on me, the vet called it. Now it was like he embraced me every time he saw me. I’d never been nuts about cats, but there was something about his attitude that... Jesus, what was wrong with me?
    I rubbed Renfield on the head, then snapped my fingers a couple of times at the edge of the bed, the signal he’d learned for getting down. I threw back the sheets, hopped out of bed, and hit the floor. Literally.
    My left knee had collapsed under me as soon as I put weight on it.
    Renfield scuttled about six feet away from the noise of the impact, then came back cautiously to investigate, making a little moaning sound in his throat. I stayed on the floor, gingerly stretching out the joint. No pain still as I flexed it, and there had been only a brief, searing jolt when the knee buckled. Renfield nuzzled my left leg. I pushed him away, but he kept coming back. I got up using my right leg, very carefully shifting my weight onto the left one. No pain, no apparent weakness, and I found that I could walk fine so long as I kept my weight exactly over my feet.
    Reassuring Renfield that everything was okay, I went out to the kitchen and had some toast and juice. I showered and found a clean shirt I’d left at Nancy ’s. Getting dressed in the bedroom, I made another unwelcome discovery. Putting my right arm into the sleeve of my suit jacket and grabbing the right lapel with my left hand to pull the jacket on, nothing happened.
    There was no strength in my left shoulder. I couldn’t draw my left hand across my chest against even the minimal resistance of the jacket sleeve on my right arm. There was just a clicking noise and the same twinge inside the shoulder I’d felt the night before with the bureau.
    I looked at Nancy ’s newest piece of furniture. Walking over to it, I kept my weight centered. Then I kicked it in the part of its legs I took to be its shins.

    What’s the matter, John?
    I raised myself awkwardly from where I’d laid the tulips crossways to her headstone. “Had a little problem hauling furniture, Beth.”
    You’re getting kind of old for Pepsi Generation moving parties, aren’t you?
    “The ones in front of a rented van where beautiful people are smiling and the dog catches a Frisbee in its teeth?” That’s what I had in mind. A pause. But that’s not the whole story, is it?
    “No.” I told her about Pearl Rivkind and William Proft. Sounds like you think you did the right thing and made a mistake, all at once.
    “Maybe not the only mistake, either.”
    The furniture moving again?
    “Only partly, Beth. It’s more Nancy and me.”
    Another pause. How do you mean?
    “There’ve been some... I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes everything’s just right and other times I’m not sure we’re on the same wavelength.”
    What does she say?
    “About what?”
    About your... wavelengths.
    “We haven’t talked about it.”
    Sure you have, John. You just don’t realize it.
    I looked away from the grave toward the edge of the harbor below us. A Styrofoam board was crashing against the rocks, so weathered and battered it was hard to picture what it had been before going into the water.
    John?
    “Still here.”
    But trying not to be?
    I looked back, not toward the headstone, but below that, to where she was. “What do you mean?”
    You have a way, you always did, of closing off things you don’t want to hear.
    I shook my head. “Beth, I wouldn’t have gotten this far, not as an MP or a claims—”
    I don’t mean professionally, John. I mean personally. You close off and miss things.
    “Like what?”
    Like whatever you and Nancy should be resolving.
    “Which is?”
    That’s something you’ll have to see for yourself. With her. I watched the hunk of Styrofoam bounce off a few more rocks and started to empathize with it.

    “John, how you doing?”
    I looked at Elie, holding a clipboard behind the counter at the Nautilus club I’d joined a while before. He was the manager, his black hair, olive skin, and blue eyes the kind of mix he’d told me was typical of his Lebanese background. “Not so good, El.”
    His face darkened. “When I didn’t see you for a while, I figured it had to do with that gang... thing.”
    I’d been involved in a bad situation, a shoot-out with some members of a street gang into drug-pushing. “This is different, El. There’s something wrong with both my shoulder and my knee.”
    “What happened?”
    I told