The Hardest Thing

and joe-pye weed, wood to chop for the winter…

    “Okay what?” Steve was staring hard.
    “If that’s what Jody wants then…I guess I’d better do it.”
    Steve’s cell phone rang. It was the hospital. Everything—the bar, the TV sound, that fleeting vision of the future, the hope that Steve had given me—everything collapsed, condensed into that small jangling box with its flashing screen.
    “Steve Cooper… yeah… Uh-huh… When?… Okay. Yes, I understand. Thanks for letting me know.”
    He stared into space for a while.
    I was sure Jody was dead.
    “That was the nurse,” he said at last.
    “Yes.”
    “Jody just came around.”
    “What?”
    “Only for a short while. But he woke up and he talked. He’s…he’s not going to die, Dan. He’s going to be okay.”
    And we stood at that bar in each other’s arms and cried.

    Steve Cooper lived in a small, two-bedroom row house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “It’s a dump,” he warned me as we drove up there, Jody wrapped in blankets and sleeping in the backseat. “Needs a lot of fixing up. I never seem to have time.” He wasn’t kidding. It looked like he moved in and never unpacked, certainly never cleaned. We got Jody upstairs to bed in Steve’s room, Steve moved his things into what he called the “guest room,” a mountain of cardboard boxes and black plastic sacks under which he said there was a mattress,
and I camped downstairs on the sofa. It would have been fine, except there was something living in that sofa that liked to bite.
    Steve went out to work every morning at eight, came home twelve to fourteen hours later depending on how much beer he drank; I don’t think he felt comfortable being around the house with his son’s lover who was so close to his age. He never made me feel unwelcome; he was grateful for the care I gave Jody and acknowledged my attempts at home improvements with a nod and a grunt. I put up shelves, mended leaking faucets, replaced the unsanitary kitchen linoleum, washed and scrubbed and vacuumed until the place was no longer a health hazard. I even cooked—nothing fancy, but at least there was always food in the fridge. I did everything for Jody that the visiting nurses didn’t do: I washed and fed him, I gave him clean clothes, and got him to and from the bathroom. One day Jody asked me if he could walk up and down the hallway; I put his arm around my shoulders and helped him every step of the way. The next day he did it again, and the next day a little further. Within two weeks of leaving the hospital, he could climb the stairs unassisted. Within three, we were taking short walks up and down the street.
    There was a bench on the corner where we could sit in the sun until he was ready to go back. Sometimes I got him a coffee from the cafe across the road, but I didn’t like to take my eyes off him for too long.
    We hadn’t really talked yet.
    “When will they interview me?”
    It was the first time he’d referred to the investigation of Marshall Land and the charges against Enrico
Ferrari. The police were holding off until Jody was well enough to travel to New York.
    “Don’t worry about that.”
    “I’m not worried.” He took a deep breath. “I want to do it.”
    “Okay.”
    “I’m frightened though.”
    “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
    “Not that.” He waved his hand dismissively. “I’m worried about you.”
    “Me?”
    “When you find out the truth.”
    A bus rumbled past, a few cars.
    “You don’t know much about me, Dan.”
    “I know enough.”
    “I lied.”
    “Jody, it’s…”
    “No.” He put his hand on mine. It was thin and pale like the rest of him. He was no longer the pneumatic little gym bunny who first bounced up to me sucking on a straw in Penn Station. His cheeks were hollow, his ass was flat, his hair limp and badly in need of cutting. “Don’t stop me. I lied about who I am and what happened to me. I made up stuff to make myself sound more interesting.”
    “Like going to prison at the age of 14?”
    “Yeah. That kind of thing.”
    “Believe me, Jody, I’d prefer it if you weren’t a jailbird.”
    “Stuff about my parents. I mean, they got divorced, but I never lost touch with my dad. And stuff about Julian Marshall.”

    “You weren’t an escort?”
    “Oh, that was all true. Not the stuff about trying to be an actor; the only acting I’ve ever done was in fourth grade, and I was hopeless. I wasn’t much good as a hustler either. But I got