Read Online Warm Wuinter's Garden by Neil Hetzner - Free Book Online Page A

by the maitre d’, who was born Robert but had
transmuted to Raoul, he would be chided and wheedled.
    “Darling, please, do something. For my sake.
This is just too painful to watch. Pain is fine, in its proper
place. Nipple piercing, certain scarf and whip hobbies, par
exemple. But not hobbling. Hobbling’s so declasse’. Fine for
hospitals and refugee camps and Roumanian train stations. But, not
for that bastion of nou- and entre-nous and oldvelle Cape Cod
cuisine, Pete’s Retreat. Please! Do something, or you’ll end up
like poor Porgy. Wheeling your way down Cat Fish Row. Lumpkin,
please, do you really want your mouth so low to the ground in this
Eden of iniquity? Be a good lamb. Listen to Raoul. Have
surgery.”
    For weeks, if Peter could just bear with it
and keep moving, the pain would finally go. However, there came a
point where the pain never left. Any pressure on his heels was
excruciating. After a number of nights where the sweat from the
kitchen’s heat had mixed with tears drawn by the stabbing in his
heels, he had gone to a podiatrist. The doctor had diagnosed a
calcaneal exotosis of the plantar fascia. After prodding, and with
some asperity, the doctor had translated his diagnosis as bone
spurs. The spurs were calcium deposits caused by the body trying to
repair the tendons he had torn while making his celebratory
non-smoking run. The doctor suggested a progression of cures from
inserts and exercises to cortisone shots in the heels to surgery to
remove the calcification and to re-attach the ligament. If one
treatment didn’t work, they would move on to the next. When Peter
pressed him, the doctor had admitted that the aftermath of both the
cortisone and surgery would be painful. Neither procedure always
worked.
    Peter looked up from washing his hands to the
restroom’s water-speckled mirror. The puffy shadows under his eyes,
the dull stare, the limp oily thin brown hair, the sallow cheeks,
the thin white arms, and the soft shrunken belly, forced over his
belt by the curvature of his spine, made him think that he looked,
as was true of many restaurant owners, like a prisoner of war. By
some strange process he had chosen a life where he remained locked
inside a building for most of the hours of most of the days of the
year. While half of eastern Canada and all of Massachusetts waited
fifty weeks of the year for the pleasure of fighting their way onto
Cape Cod for its beaches and beauty, he missed the beauty and
beaches because he kept himself chained to a building filled with
chipped cups, greasy floor mats, blackened pots, a wheezing
walk-in, disappearing help, disappearing inventory, particularly
shrimp and beer, and a disappearing clientele.
    Peter had tried the recommended exercises,
but they’d made the pain worse. He had added rubber mats by the
stoves. He had begun a self-diagnosed regimen of three aspirin
every two hours. He had filled his shoes with arch supports and
cushioned liners. The pills and orthotics and mats had helped just
enough that he could keep working; however there had been several
nights that first cigarette-free summer, usually on the weekend,
when he had had to crawl from the car across the sandy yard to the
weathered porch of his home at two in the morning.
    It was fool’s luck he found the Avia sneakers
with the recessed heels. He was at a shoe store looking for more
orthotic things to put into his shoes when he noticed a display
describing the sneaker’s shock-dispersing design. He bought a pair.
Within days he felt some relief. Within four weeks the pain had
diminished to the endurable throb that he was feeling at that
moment. The shoes worked so well that he had insured himself
against the vagaries of shoe fashion and competition by spending
just over one thousand dollars to buy twenty pairs of them. His
horde was stored in the chicken wire cage storage area along with
the flour, liquid shortening, linguini, cans of tomato paste and a
dozen bags of samp.
    Before