Pain Management

Pain Management

“My wife left me.”

Duncan’s hair is military-short, neatly trimmed because of the recent inspection—once a year, all hell breaks loose in the form of waterlogged bleach- towels, clean uniforms, timers, and thermometers. Managers like us have to have nice hair, freshly cut. Today there is a hint of stubble on his chin, evidence he could grow a thick beard if he ever wanted to. His hair, however, is thinning. He’s thirty after all. 

“I’m…sorry to hear that,” my face falls into a grimace—what I was about to ask him seems incredibly selfish in light of this. I don’t even remember why I came back here. After that can you blame me for the questions his statement vaporized? If a guy’s dad dies or something, there’s stuff to say, but not after that.  “My wife left me,” is the atomic bomb of conversation starters—there’s nothing afterwards but the toxic radiation of despair and crushed dreams. He twiddles his pen a little, glancing down at the chart he is filling out—I glance at his hand, his left hand, his ring finger, which for the last three years has been crowned with a dull, blackened, steel band. Only pale skin, no unimposing wedding ring, no Addy, no anything. Only Duncan and his weirdly ring-free hands. 

“Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m not okay,” he scoffs immediately, before I’ve even finished, “Hell, I—“ Duncan only shakes his head and is silent, and I remember how his straight dark hair usually falls on his forehead—when it’s not so short. Adriana loved to run her hands through his hair I remember that from when she invited a bunch of us managers over for a movie night. Duncan had sat on the floor, his shoulders cradled by Addy’s legs. He fell asleep halfway through the first movie, her fingers threading through his hair just so. Their faces were pale blue from the light of the TV, hers smiling and his for once without a frown. That night was when I got the Crush From Hell on him. Just sitting in his living room watching his wife play with his hair.

“She’s moving out tomorrow, doesn’t want me around for it,” he says, his voice dragging over every word—dragging in that way that tells me he knew it was coming, just never shared. He had to have known it was coming. People don’t just break up, not after the life he and Addy made for themselves. Even if this is news to me, to everyone else by next week, it can’t have been news to him. The hustle and heat of the restaurant slows around us, as servers go out to the dining room to buss tables and Cook’s help goes into the walk-in fridge—a truly monstrous thing, kept organized by force of will and the luck of having steady clientele—and I shift from one foot to the other. Duncan is never the one who needs anything from anyone, and that eats at me in a way I’d not expected. It is the kind of thing that keeps you awake at night, turning it over and over again in your mind, trying to find a way to either fix it—heal the hurt, put bandages on hearts and feelings and people-shaped lacerations—or feel less guilty about it—because it wasn’t my spouse leaving me after all, and Duncan doesn’t give a damn about how other people will grieve the fact that he’s told them at all—and you just can’t. 

“You can come over and hang out at my place,” I say. Nothing in my tone suggests for one second that I mean it any other way but that, and I remember how he rubs the pads of his thumb and middle finger together when he’s trying to think of what to say. When he’s trying to be nice, to not be an asshole to a friend. Because Duncan is usually an asshole. He rubbed his fingers together that way a year ago when I’d told him about the Crush From Hell and that I knew he and Addy were perfect for each other and that I knew this and I knew that. 

“Kate…” he draws out my name forever in that embarrassed awkward tone, the voice that guys use to turn women down at parties or get togethers or coffee-after-works. The “I see where you’re going with this, and I’m not going there with you and I’m not sorry for it,” voice. It was the voice he’d spoken with last year—we’d been sitting on the bus together when it happened. We’ve taken the same route since he got married and he and Addy moved, and I had just finished vomiting out every little thing to him that afternoon. He’d missed his stop because of me—I’d missed my stop because of me too—just staring at my face as though I’d grown an extra head. Maybe I did.

“Damn it, Duncan, it’s not about that. You need a place to be that’s not work so you don’t kill yourself with the stress—you were planning on coming in for work tomorrow and begging a shift from someone, weren’t you? Weren’t you?!”

I don’t say that. 

That’s the other head, and I’ve learned my lesson about letting it talk.

But neither do I wait for Duncan to finish what he’s saying. He’d be a crap hostage negotiator. By the time he finishes sentences sometimes, the killer has already offed all seven hostages and found more. It’s amazing he even made manager at a place like this—especially compared to me, who talks-and-does-and-walks-and-shows everything a mile-a minute because that’s what this place needs in management.

“I’m not even going to be home most of the day, you can just sit around reading or something—My roommate will be home, though,” I say softly. I wonder how his stubble, which is a Tuesday-afternoon lawn, feels. Addy hates it when he forgets to shave—he is always telling us about his wife’s little isms, and that is one of them. That and she hates power-strips, loathes them with undying passion. I can’t even summon up the anger necessary to cuss the remote when the batteries die, while Addy’s hatreds are forces of nature.

Duncan’s eyes, each a washed-out nearly-invisible blue, bore into mine for a long second. I make a conscious effort to make eye-contact with people, especially when I’m walking on eggshells around them—directness is the antidote to bashful idiocy, I believe. Slowly, his shoulders raise and lower a little and his eyeps turn back to the food-preparation chart. A thundering shout goes out from Cook as to the current whereabouts of his gaw-damn mushrooms, gaw-dammit. 

“Yeah, I guess I could do that,” he twiddles his pencil again, caught between his fingers which are still alienly ring-less. “Um…when would be okay?”

“Just whenever, I’ll tell Pip you’re going to drop by,” I make sure not to rush it. That’s the key to playing something cool, is not to rush it. Duncan nods, and then looks over my shoulder at someone—the new kid, looking faint and upset. Cook is yelling for him. Poor thing, his first day too. 

“Kate, Drew sent me to get mushrooms, but I can’t find them and—“ his voice is rising, close to tears.

“Here, I’ll help you find’em—and we call him Cook, kid,” Duncan is done with his chart, lying his way through the temperatures of the freshly-cooked six-o-clock food. He stands, and stretches just a little. Clenches his hands, his left one too bare, too similar to the right one, too ring-less. “Kate can you get Cook’s insulin before he kills himself?” Cook is a diabetic, all the best cooks are. Duncan disappears himself into the fridge, the new kid in tow behind him. 

We don’t talk about Duncan or his wife or even Cook’s gawdamn mushrooms for the rest of the night. I have waitresses to rotate, and Duncan has his hands full making sure Cook kills neither himself nor his newbie help, and then there are the tills to count after everyone else has gone home. It’s just us, sitting in the starkly bright, lonely little office in the back. I count the left till and Duncan counts the right, and I try to focus on the money rather than my companion. 

“She served papers a week ago, irreconcilable differences,” he murmurs. It is sudden, without warning but also not a dramatic announcement. It just is—barely even a statement. He doesn’t stop what he’s doing, doesn’t take the one ear-bud out, just starts talking. I don’t say anything, because it’s less awful than trying to comfort him—he doesn’t want comfort, I know him well enough for that. I get done with my till first, putting it in the lockbag and then throwing it into the safe, but I don’t go anywhere. I sit back down, the white light beating down on my head, the silence kept at bay only just barely by the snicking hiss of paper-on-paper as Duncan counts out the last of the money. 

“Should be pretty easy to settle in court, I think, we never shared bank-accounts,” he says finally—the gunman has found another eight or nine hostages after killing the second batch—and suddenly Duncan laughs and it is awful. Just awful. He’s got nothing in his life other than work and Addy. Addy is gone, or as well as. And I’m just work, I’m not Addy. I’ll never be Addy. That’s what I told him I knew, last year. I told him I knew I wasn’t Addy, and that I never would be. And now Addy has abandoned him. Addy Addy Addy Addy Addy Addy Addy Addy. 

Never Kate.