Physical therapy, Everett informed the club, was a conspiracy by small cheerful women to murder him by inches. The chief conspirator was named Priya and weighed perhaps a hundred and ten pounds and regarded his six feet of reluctance the way a mountain guide regards weather: as an interesting condition, not an obstacle. She had him walking corridors with a gait belt and a walker and eventually a cane, counting his laps on a whiteboard that she maintained with the pitilessness of a scorekeeper, and when he complained — which was, in the beginning, a significant portion of the therapy — she would consult her clipboard and say, "Mm. And yet," and point at the corridor, and he would go.
Junie attended therapy as a spectator sport. Claire brought her on Tuesdays, ostensibly to deliver soup, and Junie would install herself in the corridor's plastic chair with her coloring book and act as the department's unofficial commentator: That was a good one. That one you cheated with your arms. Priya, he's doing the face again. The other patients — a stroke survivor named Walt, a knee replacement named Dolores — adopted the commentary as part of the service, and Dolores began requesting that her own sessions be scheduled for Tuesdays, for the atmosphere.
The whiteboard had other entries, because Priya was building, lap by lap, a document that would have shamed his personnel file at the shop. STAIRS — SIX — NO RAIL COMPLAINTS. BALANCE — BEAR-LIKE (COMPLIMENT). And, in the corner, in smaller letters, a note she claimed was clinical and he suspected was personal: PATIENT'S PEOPLE KEEP SHOWING UP. PROGNOSIS EXCELLENT. She cornered Claire once by the elevators, in the manner of a professional delivering findings she considered part of the record: "I do hips. Whatever the rest of this is — keep doing it. I've discharged men with half his injury and twice his gloom, and the gloom is the part that doesn't heal. His is in remission." Claire, who had delivered soup to that hospital in Tupperware and in person and in spirit for three weeks, said she would take it under advisement, and Priya had nodded like a woman whose actual patient was standing right there.
The first laugh happened on a Thursday, in Everett's own driveway, and it was Junie's fault in every particular.
She had arrived with Claire and a mission: the tricycle of the little boy two doors down, a serious soul named Micah, aged four, had thrown its chain, and Micah's grandmother had said — in Junie's hearing, which was everywhere — that Mr. Knox used to be the man for such things, before. Junie had processed this intelligence and delivered her ruling: the bear would fix it. Bears fixed things. It was in the job description, along with growling and being brave, and it was time — she informed Everett, who was sitting on his porch with his cane across his knees like a retired king — for him to practice the whole job, not just the parts you could do from a chair.
So Everett Knox, forty-four, shot hero of Pump Seven, lowered himself with infinite care and a running commentary of profanity pitched safely below a child's hearing, onto a milking stool in his own driveway, and fixed a four-year-old's tricycle chain by feel, the way he had fixed ten thousand chains, while the four-year-old supervised and the five-year-old critiqued his grip. "Other hand," Junie said. "You're doing it the slow way on purpose." And Micah, overcome, whispered: "You're big," and Everett said, "I get that a lot, son," in a voice so dry that Claire, watching from the porch rail with a glass of tea, felt what happened arrive a half-second before it did.
The laugh came out of him like something uncorked. It started in the cave of his chest where the growl lived, and it rolled up through twelve years of rust and disuse, and it was loud, and helpless, and slightly alarming in its total lack of practice, and it scared a robin off the fence. Micah yelled with delight and did a victory lap of the driveway on the repaired tricycle. Junie stood with her hands on her hips in an attitude of complete professional vindication.
It became, afterward, a date the household kept the way other households keep anniversaries: the Thursday of the laugh. Junie marked it on the new kitchen calendar herself, in purple marker, in letters that took up two squares: BEAR LAFFED. Claire, consulted on the spelling, declined to correct it on the grounds that it was a historical document. Everett, shown the calendar, pretended to object and was observed, later that evening, standing in front of it for a full minute with his supper in his hand, reading it like a headline in a newspaper from a better country.
Priya, informed of the incident at the next session, recorded it on the whiteboard under his name, beneath the lap counts, in the same pitiless marker:
LAUGHED — UNAIDED — DRIVEWAY.
"Milestone," she said, when he objected. "We celebrate milestones. Walk your corridor, Mr. Knox."