The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter Page B

redecorating.”
    â€œIt was more like training than decorating. He hired a painter to paint and to teach me to paint. Older guy, more expensive, but he had the moves and was willing to share them.
Set the brush, then move it. Look and your hand will follow. You find wet roller seams with your ear, not your eye
. I’d grown up doing this, listening to instructions,guiding my hands with Dad’s instructions. If he was no longer able to advise me, he hired somebody who could. He always said, ‘You can buy anything, if you pay enough.’”
    â€œThat sounds like a dad, all right,” said Betty.
    â€œWhen everything was limited — the shirts he could wear, the chairs he could use — his brain changed.
Evolved
is probably the word. The arms lost reach so the imagination gained.”
    Stan thinned everywhere save for a little paunch, his “goody bag.” His shoulder blades sliced through his sallow back. His collarbone was a bow. Most relevantly, his sense of touch diminished with every millimetric curl of his fingers, every hidden fraying of nerve endings.
    His tracheotomy tube, that arc of silver respiration, was replaced twice a week. Working slowly, usually after a shower, air-drying in his saggy boxer shorts, Stan would boil a small aluminum pot of water on the stove to sterilize the alternate tube, its two inserts for night and day and the glass jar that would house them. The bent fingers of his tented right hand could fit into the wide grips of a pair of rubber-handled tongs while the idle left was indeed quick work for the red devil of the glowing stove burner.
    Younger, Andy simply assumed there was no
other
cause than Disease No.1 for the blunt, nail-less fingers of his father’s left hand. Surely the fingers were also curled by the foul gravity that was changing the orbit of his ribs. In the kitchen at four years old, when he saw Stan’s left hand support his right and a saucepan handle in it, when the dangling left fingers brushed the angry red spiral of a maximized stove burner, when the burned fingers came up weeping, Andy thought adults, not his dad, felt less pain.
    â€œDad, your fingers.”
    â€œOh, damn.”
    Two, maybe three years would pass before some casual question of Andy’s about the blunted, penile fingers of Stan’s left hand prompted Stan to clarify their history of partial amputation. “No, no. I lost them to infection,” he said. “If the fingertip gets really infected, the nail becomes like a roof. Off they went.” Stan drew the clean, bent fingertips of his right hand over the butt ends of the left.
    Betty didn’t wait, couldn’t wait, more than a week between hearing about Stan’s hand and asking to feel Andrew’s imitation of it. Lovelets you out of one cage and puts you in another. Andrew rubbed the knuckles of his fist across her hips. Not his fingertips, not a tongue, not even his smooth palm. Knuckles and then knuckle pinches. His whole fist sank between her thighs to give her a slightly gentler version of what wrestlers call a crotch tilt. Her message had been unmistakable. Show me. Show me. No one had ever cared so much about what he cared about. But then, after a meeting with his father’s lawyer and a dinner with his mother, he could no longer hold on to the two things he cared about most.
    Coaxing him to sleep one night, she’d given him her yoga advice. “Your body is the past, your mind is the future. Your breath unites them in the present.” That winter he stopped breathing easily.

30
    Fewer than two hundred metres of hill separate Andrew and the nameless rider in front of him. Although this distance will quickly double, then double again, seconds after the yellow-jerseyed rider crests the hill, Andrew feels the math is in. Unless Yellow is playing the touring cyclist’s version of cat and mouse, unless his (her) pace in this valley was an alluring feint to draw him