A week later, Sue was waiting for the elevator in the office lobby. It was her first day back at work, and she was looking forward to it. In fact, she'd been looking forward to it so much that she was an hour early.
"Good morning, Miss Thomas!" Levi jumped up to let her know someone was talking to her. Sue turned around to see Myles coming toward her. Aside from his arm, which was still in a sling, he looked ready to take on the world. He repeated his greeting.
"Good morning," she replied. "You look in a lot better shape than the last time I saw you."
"May I respond in kind." At her puzzled expression, he smiled. "So do you."
"Oh. Thank you." The elevator doors opened, and they both stepped in. "How's the shoulder?"
"Healing nicely, from what I was told. Ribs still hurt a little, but I'm glad to be back at work."
She nodded. "That makes both of us." The elevator doors opened and they walked into the empty Bullpen. He stepped out ahead of her and headed toward his desk.
Sue went over to the coffee station and set a pot brewing. Then she turned around and walked over to her own desk. There was a flat white box sitting on it, which she opened. Inside was a beautiful silk scarf. She looked up.
"You didn't have to do this."
He got up from his chair and came over to lean against her desk as she sat down. "Well, since yours got ruined on my account, it seemed only fair. I'm sorry I couldn't find the exact pattern; I did look." He smiled a little ruefully. "You could also call it an apology for my atrocious sentence structure while I was fingerspelling. I was trying to subject you to as little of my inexpertise as possible."
She laughed. "Actually, you did extremely well."
Blond eyebrows went straight up. "You've got to be kidding."
Sue held out a hand as she explained. "No. The way you fingerspelled everything to me was actually easier for me to understand, simply because ASL is a visual language; it uses nouns, verbs, adjectives, but not a lot of the 'extra' words that spoken English uses. A 'gloss' in ASL would be considered an 'abstract,' I guess you'd call it, in English."
He nodded in understanding, and she continued, "Even with Signed Exact English, or SEE, which is actually the closest to what you were doing, small words like 'the,' 'an,' 'to,'— things like that— are usually dropped, as well as many suffixes. When Jack or Lucy sign with me, they usually use Pidgin Signed English, which uses elements of both."
"So, if I had been 'grammatically correct,' from an English point of view, it would have probably given you a worse headache."
She smiled. "Yes. So thank you." She signed it as she spoke it.
He looked at her for a long moment, then signed WELCOME As her eyes widened, he shrugged a bit, smiling, then signed, spelling where he was unsure, WE G-O-O-D team. THANK YOU, T-O-O.
She nodded as Levi nudged her to let her know someone was coming. Myles looked up, and abruptly headed back to his desk. Sue laughed softly at him, shaking her head, then turned as Tara gave her a big hug.
"Welcome back, you two." Bobby Manning was right behind Tara. "I see, Miss Thomas, that you survived not only a concussion, but twelve hours stuck in the middle of nowhere with Myles as your only company. Care to comment on how you managed to stay sane?" He tossed a grin at Myles, then turned back around to Sue.
Sue glanced over Bobby's shoulder. Myles looked up at her, checking to see if anyone was paying attention, then signed OUR S-E-C-R-E-T. PLEASE. She smiled brilliantly, then replied, quite truthfully, to Bobby.
"I couldn't hear a word he said. That made all the difference in the world."
FIN
