Between These Walls (6 page)

Hunter choked on the beer he had just swallowed. With a few coughs, he managed to recover, yet couldn’t help but laugh at the notion. “Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious, Hunter. It’s done wonders for me.” She pulled her cell phone from her purse and started scrolling through her address book.

“
Women
go to massage therapists!”

“Not only women. You’d be surprised.”

“How can you suggest that with a straight face?” Brendan teased.

“You’re too chicken shit to go. Hunter isn’t.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to say that,” Hunter joshed.

“When you got injured playing ball in school, didn’t it feel better when I rubbed the spot for you?” Ellen asked Hunter.

“Yeah ...”

“So there you go. It’s the same thing, only you make an appointment and my massage therapist is far better at it. Therapists have these awesome techniques.”

“So I’m supposed to pay some beautiful woman to give me a back rub?”

“Yeah, a beautiful woman,” Ellen chuckled. “I’d recommend the full body massage.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll be fine without the magic fingers.”

“Trust me. Here’s the number for the clinic.” She reached for a cocktail napkin, wrote down a phone number, and slid the napkin against Hunter’s hand. When Hunter shot her a wary glare, Ellen held her arms out sideways. “Keep the number with you. If you change your mind, call the clinic and tell them you want an appointment.”

Without a second look at the napkin, Hunter folded it and shoved it into his wallet as far back as possible, behind a twenty-dollar bill.

“And tell them I referred you,” Ellen said. “I’ll get a discount on my next visit.”

Hunter shook his head at the whole idea, as did Brendan.

Kara returned and eyed the baskets of wings, which now sat half full. “Sorry, I saw someone I knew. Did I miss anything?”

“Not much,” Ellen said. “Hunter’s about to experience a personal renaissance.”

Hunter rolled his eyes.

CHAPTER 4

On Monday morning, Hunter engaged in his normal routine at the office to start the workweek. He perused his calendar for upcoming appointments, then opened his email and deleted the junk items. Without fail, first thing on Monday mornings, a client would send an urgent question, which he would answer. When you face a problem, it feels as though that problem is unique to you. You don’t realize how many others have faced the identical challenge. And in this case, Hunter offered a boilerplate answer.

To help keep his skills sharp, he spent time each Monday reading a sales-oriented newsletter or two in his email, searching for a tip that might help him seal his next deal. Especially in his current dry season.

This morning, Hunter decided to drink his coffee black. He poured himself a cup in the kitchenette down the hall, then settled back at his desk. He had an appointment after lunch, which left him a few hours that morning to conduct research online. Company websites, news stories, marketing software—he tended to find his golden nuggets when and where he least expected them.

He sure needed one.

“Where are you?” Hunter murmured as he browsed news stories looking for any small, local companies that had announced plans to expand their operations or develop a new product.

“Please help me find it, God,” he added. Throughout his days, Hunter tended to maintain recurring prayers to God. More like conversations with a friend than prayers.

Hunter sensed his job was in danger. How much longer could his drought last before the ceiling crashed?

His father had worried about his own job for as far back as Hunter could remember. The man, like Kara, had traveled on a constant basis all through Hunter’s childhood. Most often, Hunter saw his father on weekends, and by that point, his father had grown exhausted and wanted to relax.

As a child, Hunter, on a constant search for connection with his father, found it difficult to develop the father-son bond he had seen among his friends’ families. Even as a youngster, when he spent the night at a friend’s house or joined them for dinner, he watched the interaction his friends’ fathers initiated with their kids. It looked so effortless to Hunter, as if neither party tried, yet an unspoken bond existed between them. Pats on the back; words of encouragement; those final, extra seconds of rough-and-tumble play before dinner. The kids seldom requested those things. And when those incidents occurred, they just happened. None of his friends entered into verbal agreements to engage in that behavior with their dads.

Not a word spoken. Yet it spoke volumes to young Hunter.

Here at his desk, Hunter craned his neck around the entrance of his cubicle and caught a glimpse of sunshine through a nearby window.

Hunter recalled one Friday afternoon when he was seven years old. He had gotten home from school and had holed himself up in his bedroom. Sitting on the floor, thumbing through his collection of baseball cards, he separated his Cleveland Indians cards from the rest of the pack. He picked up his new Orel Hershiser card and admired its crispness, ran his finger along its firm edges. Its sharp corners took him by surprise as he tapped his finger upon them. His friend’s father had said the team was on the road to improvement and might even make it to the World Series in a year or two. Hunter’s eyes gleamed at the thought of going to a World Series game with his dad, though even at his young age, he knew his father wouldn’t be able to go.

He’d heard a shout outside the house. Then laughter. The voice of someone several years older than Hunter. A voice, Hunter had noticed of late, that had developed a deeper timbre. Then he heard the voice of an adult who had joined in the fun.

Hunter made his way to the bedroom window. From his vantage point on the second floor, he looked down upon his backyard and saw Bryce, his fifteen-year-old brother, throwing a baseball to their father. From the sight of Dad’s dark suit coat and blue, striped tie resting at the edge of the patio, Hunter figured his father must have just arrived home for the weekend a few minutes earlier. Bryce had caught him before he’d had a chance to walk into the house.

Donned in baseball gloves, father and son tossed the baseball to each other, back and forth. A rare sight, given Dad’s constant travel.

Bryce’s face beamed. He shouted something at their father, then planted his feet on the ground to ready another pitch. A sophomore in high school and a gifted pitcher, Bryce had qualified for the varsity team since his freshman year. He was
that
good. And Dad mentioned it often.

When he’d wound up for the pitch, he released the ball. A breaking ball! But Bryce hadn’t given Dad advance warning. By the time it reached their father on the other side of the lawn, it had caught Dad by surprise. He reached to grab the ball—and took hold of it at the last possible second.

“Ooh!” Bryce’s voice boomed. “You got it, old man!”

Dad laughed. “Almost threw my back out doing it! Great pitch. I used to pitch those back in school. Seems like a lifetime ago ...”

Looking down from the window, Hunter wished he could be his big brother.

With a surge of energy coursing through him, Hunter raced to reassemble his baseball cards and return them to the shoebox he kept under his bed. If he hurried, he might get downstairs in time to get some tosses in. The sun would set before they’d finished with—

“Dinner time!” He heard his mother’s voice bellow from the open window in the kitchen. A moment later, he heard her voice from the stairwell. “Hunter! Time for dinner!”

His heart sank.

He couldn’t believe he’d missed the rare chance to play catch.

Hunter had never shared that memory with another soul. It struck him as random. Meaningless.

So why did he ache each time he recalled it?

Staring at his computer monitor, Hunter shook himself out of his stream of consciousness.

Doesn’t matter,
Hunter thought to himself. If he didn’t focus on finding new clients, he might end up with a lot of time to play catch. And that would make the bills difficult to pay.

As he browsed through a list of results on a search engine, he dug the knuckles of one hand into his back, just above his waist, and moved them around in tiny circles. When he’d awakened that morning, his back had already felt sore. Now it really hurt. The discomfort ran from his lower back to his below his waistline. It would feel better if he got out of his chair and walked around the office, giving his muscles a chance to stretch, but he couldn’t spend his whole day doing that.

Hunter thought back to Ellen’s suggestion at the restaurant on Saturday night.

Maybe a massage was worth a try. It couldn’t make matters worse.

Embarrassed at the notion, he started to think it through anyway. He could keep it discreet. He didn’t need to tell anyone, did he? It wouldn’t be the first secret he had kept in his life.

Did he still have the phone number Ellen had given him? He forgot where he had placed it, but his best guess would be his wallet.

Retrieving his wallet from his back pocket, he rifled through it, checking behind his credit cards, frequent-customer reward cards, business cards. He didn’t find it. Then he remembered: Ellen hadn’t given him a business card. She had written it on a cocktail napkin.

He fingered through the section in the back of his wallet, where he kept his cash, and—there! Stuck between a twenty-dollar bill and a five, he found a thin napkin folded in quarters. With one final glance around him, as if an informant had sneaked into his cubicle, he picked up his phone and dialed the number. A receptionist answered and asked if she could help him.

Hunter kept his voice low. He hoped the person in the next cubicle wouldn’t hear him. He’d never hear the end of it.

“Hi, I’d like to, uh, make an appointment, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir, could you please repeat that? I couldn’t quite hear you.”

Oh brother.
Hunter sealed his lips tight.
No, I don’t want to say it louder!

“I’d like to make an appointment, please,” he said, his voice a tad louder. “A massage one.”

“We can do that. Have you visited us before?”

“No. Never,” he replied, making sure she heard the second word.

“So you probably don’t have a particular massage therapist you’d like to see. I can schedule you with—”

“Actually, a friend of mine goes there. Her name is Ellen Krieger. She told me to let you know she referred me. Whoever she sees is fine with me.”

“Oh sure, I love Ellen! She always makes us laugh.”

“Do you have an opening this evening? I’d like to stop by on my way home from work, if possible.”

CHAPTER 5

The small lobby reminded Hunter of a sunrise.

From the framed prints on the wall to the color of the chairs, the room featured early-morning pastels in blues and pinks and sherbet oranges. On any other day, Hunter wouldn’t let anyone catch him dead in a place like this.

Ellen better be right,
he thought. At the sound of spa music coming from speakers overhead, he sighed to himself. Then the discomfort in his back caused him to shift at his waist toward his left, and he remembered why he’d come in the first place. He took a quick look around the room and breathed a sigh of relief to find it empty. No one would see him here.

He made his way to a receptionist’s glass-topped desk. At the corner sat a glass globe filled with sand and seashells. A starfish sat atop the contents, as though a perfectionist had left it behind in her haste. Kara would have loved it here.

“May I help you?” asked the receptionist, who had wispy, sandy-brown hair and a winning smile. From a few feet away, Hunter could detect the scent of bath oils on her skin.

“My name is Hunter Carlisle. I spoke to someone on the phone this morning about a massage thing.”

“Ellen’s referral?” she said as she slid a sheet of paper into a clipboard. She grabbed a pen from a cup on her desk and handed both items to Hunter. “This is a client intake form. We’ll need your name and address. Please also note any past injuries, health problems, or if you have a specific area of discomfort you’d like us to focus on.”

Hunter filled out the form, noting the discomfort in his back as the reason he had made his appointment. He picked up a chill in the room but attributed it to self-consciousness about showing up in such a place at all. He returned the form to the receptionist, who started typing its details into a computer, and he took a seat on a plush chair.

A minute later, the receptionist waved him over to follow her.

“You caught us at a good time, between the afternoon appointments and before a lot of people show up after work,” she said. She opened a door and allowed Hunter to lead the way inside.

Hunter swept the quaint little room with his eyes. “Do many guys show up here?”

“You’re not the first,” she replied with a smirk that implied she understood the self-conscious origin of his question.

Hunter’s eyes went straight to a massage table in the middle of the room. Covered by a striped bed sheet, the table appeared a few inches longer than his height. One end had what looked like a cushioned doughnut, which Hunter assumed was for his head, with a hole for him to look through.

“Would you like the table warmed up?”

He had to grin at the thought. No one had ever pre-warmed a bed for him.

“I guess that’s fine. Does it come with the package? I’ve never been to one of these places before.”
As if she couldn’t tell by now.

She flipped a switch beside the table, took a final perusal of the intake form on the clipboard before leaving it on a small desk. As she did this, Hunter turned around and noticed a small bookshelf behind him. He examined its shelves and found books on various topics, from massage techniques and anatomy to healthy-living cookbooks and inspirational literature. A small boom box sat on top of the bookshelf.

On the other side of the room, certificates hung above a small desk. Hunter noticed two taller bookshelves accented with candles, lotions and oils. The room had a lightness to it. Tinted windows lined one wall, the kind where you could see outside but outsiders couldn’t see you watching them. The receptionist adjusted the blinds that covered the window before getting ready to leave.