The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,8
good fit for us. We use Charlie’s visits as a way to avoid work. It’s nice for everyone.
There were a lot of stories in the neighborhood about how Charlie ended up on a bicycle with a squeeze horn at forty-something. They are all some variation of this: The perfect job, great family, life was sunshine and Skittles until an armored bank truck ran him down at Tenth and Peachtree and permanently damaged him. Wife and kids left, Charlie lost a career, a home. He has a lot of pain in his neck, he once told me, and headaches that stop him cold. He doesn’t always speak well. His words get slurred and really loud when he’s excited, and combined with the fact that Charlie is also a close talker in a bicycle helmet that sits a little crooked, a conversation with him can be a bit, well, surreal. He seems to have moments of adult clarity, but they are fleeting. Mostly Charlie’s just a big goofy kid. I asked about his past one day. He talked about the accident. He talked about after the accident, but never before the accident. It was as if there hadn’t been anything up till then. In a rare and serious moment that day, he told me that the very next second of your life can change everything. He’d spent months in rehab at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta and learned that patients there referred to us on the outside as TABs—Temporarily Able-Bodied—another reminder that life is mutable. It’s a lesson I had learned before Charlie pedaled into our lives, but I’ll never forget his earnestness that day. We hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks and we always worried about him. Charlie spends his days on a bike in Atlanta’s treacherous traffic, and since he seems to have only about half a brain, he’s a kind of ticking time bomb. Rauser and Neil have running bets—ten bucks says he gets it this year, etc. I pretend I’m above all this.
Charlie visits at odd times, never really anything to count on—midmorning or late afternoon, but generally several times a week, always smiling and almost never without a gift. In the summer he might fill up a worn baseball cap with blackberries. In the winter he plants pansies in the planter outside our front door. There’s a nursery two blocks away and we think he pinches them at night when the only thing between Charlie and flats of beautiful, bright pansies is five feet of chain-link fence. He seems to like the yellow ones with the deep purple eyes, the same ones, coincidentally, in short supply on the long wooden tables at the nursery.
He came in smiling with his little helmet sitting crooked on top of his head and the thick-rimmed glasses he wears pushed all the way up to his eyebrows. He was wearing his courier’s uniform—shorts with an embroidered golf shirt, short white socks. His body was lean and strong, and the muscles in his legs let you know that Charlie was a kind of athlete, but something about the way he held his head, the occasional tic, the open-mouth stare that seemed to grip him at times, made it clear that something was very off about poor Charlie.
He held out his upside-down baseball cap. “Figs,” he said, too loudly and with enough of a slur so that it sounded like fligs. “You like fligs, Keye? Neil, you like?”
“Fresh fligs?” Neil asked. “Cool. Where’d you steal ’em?”
Charlie pointed toward the door. “Off a damn tree,” he said, and looked pleased. Neil roared and clapped his approval. He’d been working with Charlie on how to swear. I shot Neil a look.
“My mom and dad have a fig tree in their yard, Charlie,” I said. “Want to see how they eat them?” I opened the fridge and found a package of Italian cream cheese. Neil and I ate it on everything from celery sticks to sandwiches. “You okay with a knife, Charlie? Can you split these in half?”
Charlie nodded. “I know how to clean fish with a knife.”
“Wow,” I said, and grated some orange zest into the mascarpone, then added a little honey. Charlie carefully dipped a teaspoon in and dribbled it on each fig as instructed. I followed with about half as much chocolate hazelnut cream. We took a moment to admire our work.
“Damn beautiful,” Charlie said.
“I promise you’ll love ’em,” I said.
“You keep your promises, Keye?” Charlie asked, and popped a fig in