After the Fall

anything, give me a call. All right?”
    “Will do. Thanks, man. I owe you one.”
    He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “I’ll buy you a beer or something.”
    “Not going to turn that down.”
    “Deal.”
    He left, and I hobbled toward my desk.
    To my great surprise, the paperwork hadn’t piled up much in my absence. A few insurance claim forms, maybe half a day’s worth of charts that needed to be filed. The work waiting for me was easily under ten percent of what I’d anticipated.
    “Oh my God.” Mike’s voice made me jump. When I turned around, he was staring at me with wide eyes. “When you said you’d gotten dumped off the horse, I was thinking . . . How fast were you going ?” Before I could respond, though, he pointed at my chair. “Sit. I’ll get you another to elevate that leg.” And he disappeared down the hall.
    He returned a moment later with a chair from the back and helped me get situated with my leg up on the chair with a pillow under it. I saw the question in his eyes and quickly diverted him: “So have you seen any patients since I’ve been gone?”
    He cocked his head. “Of course I have. Why?”
    “Because . . . my desk . . .”
    “Your—” Then he nodded. “Oh, right. Jason came in and gave me a hand with the filing and everything. I hope that’s okay.”
    “Okay? Dude, it’s your operation here. But if he messed anything up, you’d better blame him and not me.”
    Mike laughed. “Don’t worry. He’s got a better handle on this sort of thing than I do.”
    I scowled. “You’re not going to lay me off and hire him, are you?”
    “Oh God, no.” He groaned. “I love him with all my heart, but we’d kill each other. And besides, he still has the club to run.” Then Mike’s expression turned serious, and I knew exactly what was coming next: “So, what happened, exactly?”
    I exhaled hard. “So I took Tsarina out on the trails . . .”
    When I’d finished, Mike shook his head. “Wow. And how’s your other leg doing?”
    “It was fine until I tried to come down the stairs this morning.” I shifted gingerly. “Now it hurts.”
    Mike glared at my leg as if it might offer up some explanation for its lack of cooperation. “Well, take it easy today. If the pain gets out of hand, you might need a little treatment on it. Just to keep the inflammation down.”
    “I’ll let you know. Thanks.”
    Mike went back to check on a couple of patients, and I got to work. Since I was typing at a fraction of my normal speed, I made notes by hand. Of course, since I was writing with my left hand, those notes took a hell of a lot of effort to write. By ten thirty, my desk was covered in sticky notes that may as well have been written by a four-year-old.
    And by noon, I was ready to never tell anyone ever again what had happened. The jingle of the bell on the front door made me cringe because invariably, the first thing out of any newcomer’s mouth was “Oh my! What in the world happened to you?”
    From there, the conversations proceeded predictably, nearly every one of them a variation of the same:
    “Oh! Are you going to sue the guy? Damned reckless motorcyclists. You should file a complaint with the county for letting those bikes out on the same trails as horses. But anyway, sounds like you got lucky. My brother’s wife’s cousin’s babysitter’s ex-husband’s psychic once had a dog sitter who fell off a horse and broke seventy-eight bones in her body. Paralyzed from the ears down, too! And that horse was barely even moving when it happened!”
    That, or the endless well-meaning but nevertheless frustrating offers to help me with everything. I appreciated people’s generosity, but my God, I loathed being in that position.
    I loathed it almost as much as I did this motherfucking itch. Holy shit. I dug my finger under the edge of the cast on my arm, clawing at the incessant irritation underneath it. Twenty-first goddamned century, and we still hadn’t figured out how to put on a cast that wouldn’t make the skin itch like this?
    The phone rang again. Of course.
    Somewhere in the middle of all the ringing phones and itching limbs and incomprehensible notes, my cell phone vibrated on my desk. God. Now what? The day had already spiraled into a trifecta of things I hated—sympathy, dependence, and inefficiency—and I still had a few hours to go. I didn’t want to be bothered by—
    Ryan.
    Four letters on my caller ID, and half a day’s worth of tension