*
He went back to work on Monday. He counted tablets in fives on the blue tray. On Wednesday a uniformed city officer came to the counter for his mother's prescription, and Marcus counted her metoprolol three times—fives, fives, fives, then again, then again—until his tech, Rosa Villanueva, who had worked beside him for nine years, laid her hand flat on the tray and said, "It's thirty, Marcus. It was thirty the first time."
The thumb did not recover as fast as the literature promised. A patch on the back of his right hand felt like a glove inside his hand. He tested it every morning with the tip of a ballpoint pen. He woke at three and lay listening to the house. Twice he went to the garage in the dark to make sure the registration was in the glove box of his own car, and stood there in the dome light holding the plastic sleeve, feeling ridiculous, feeling something worse than ridiculous.
He canceled Wendell's first highway lesson, and then the next. He said it was the thumb. Neither of them believed it.
Celeste, a middle-school counselor, wanted him to talk. He could tell what had happened, in order, with times. He couldn't tell what it was like. Every time he tried, he got as far as the radio and the silence after it, and something in him closed like a hand.
Rosalind Mayfield came for dinner the second Sunday. She was a civil rights lawyer who had sung alto beside him at Second Bethel for twelve years, and she did not make small talk over pot roast.
"The complaint process isn't built for you," she said. "It's how a department decides how to discipline its own. You're a witness in it, not a party. You'll get a letter. Use it anyway—everything else stands on the record. If you want to sue, you have a claim, and two years to bring it. I filed the records request for the footage and the dispatch logs on Friday, so the clock's on them, not you."
"I don't know if I want to sue."
"You don't have to know."
Later, when Rosalind was gone, Wendell came into the kitchen in his socks. He was taller than his father now, which still surprised Marcus every time.
"When you did the hands thing. Did you do it exactly right?"
"Exactly right."
Wendell looked at his father's right hand on the table, the thumb a little stiff.
"Then what's the point of it?"
Celeste turned off the water.