Chapter 18 #2
"You're not avoiding loss, Jack. You're choosing it. Every time you leave, you lose someone. You just get to pick the terms. You get to be the one who walks away instead of the one who gets left behind. And you call that freedom, but it's not. It's just grief with a steering wheel."
Jack couldn't speak. His forearm was wet. The motel ceiling was a blur.
"Dad died," Josie continued, and her voice was shaking now — not with anger but with the effort of holding together the way she always did, the way she'd been doing since she was thirty-two years old and suddenly the only Callahan who answered the phone.
"Joel died. And it was awful. It was the worst thing that ever happened to this family, and I will never, ever be over it.
But you know what? Dad had fifty-four years.
He had Mom. He had us. He had the shop and the porch and Sunday dinners and the kitchen table.
Joel had thirty-three years and he packed every one of them full — the nursing degree, the friends, the plans for that stupid boat he was never going to buy.
They had lives, Jack. Full lives. Messy, imperfect, rooted lives.
They didn't run. They stayed and they built and they loved and then they died, and the people they left behind survived because we had something to hold onto.
Memories. Routines. The porch. The table. The house."
She took a ragged breath.
"What do you have? A bag and a motel room. That's what seven years of running bought you. A light bag and an empty room."
Jack sat up. Pressed the phone against his ear. Breathed.
"I don't know how to stay, Jos," he said. His voice was wrecked. "I keep saying that and it keeps being true. I don't know how."
"Nobody knows how. That's not a skill, Jack.
It's not carpentry. You don't measure twice and cut once.
You just... wake up every morning and choose to still be there.
That's it. That's the whole thing. And some mornings it's easy and some mornings it's terrifying and some mornings the person next to you has cold feet and bad breath and you choose them anyway because the alternative is this.
" She paused. "A motel someplace you’ve never heard of and a phone call to your sister because you've got no one else. "
What could he say? Everything Josie said was true — and it painted a picture of him as being the dick in every scenario.
“Fuck,” he groaned.
Josie paused, then: "Do you think she'd take you back?"
"I don't know."
"That's the wrong answer. The right answer is 'I'm going to find out.' The right answer is 'I'm getting off this phone and getting in a car and going back.' The right answer is—"
"I can't just show up with nothing, Jos. I can't walk back in there and say I'm sorry and expect her to believe me. I've done nothing but leave. Words aren't enough."
"Then don't use words." Josie's voice softened. "Jack. You're a carpenter. You build things. That's what you do. So go build something that tells her you're staying."
The room was quiet. The ice machine hummed.
"I have to go," Jack said.
"Yeah. You do."
"Jos?"
"What."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank me by going home. And I mean home, Jack. Not Lockport. I mean wherever she is. That's home now."
She paused. And then, softer: "But call Mom this week. Okay? She's waited long enough."
"I will."
"Promise."
"I promise."
"Good. Now go. And Jack? If you screw this up, I'm driving to Maine and dealing with you personally. And I will bring the kids. Both of them. And the hamster."
She hung up.
Jack sat on the motel bed with his dead phone in his hand. The same position he'd been in on the gallery after the first Josie call — phone silent, chest cracked open, the weight of everything he'd been avoiding finally pinning him in place.
But this time was different.
On the gallery, the weight had pushed him further into fear. Had sent him spiraling toward the exit, building the case for leaving, stacking reasons like lumber for a wall.
Now the weight was pushing him the other direction. Toward. Back. Home.
He thought about his dad. Paul Callahan, who'd spent thirty years in one shop building things for people.
Who'd known every customer's name, every grain of every species of wood, every shortcut that wasn't worth taking.
Who'd built a porch and taught his sons to hammer on it and died with sawdust in his hair because he was in the middle of something.
Always in the middle of something. Never finished.
Never done. Because that was the nature of building — there was always another project, another repair, another thing that needed tending.
His dad hadn't run from that. Had never looked at the endless work of maintaining a life and thought: too risky. Had just shown up every morning and picked up his tools.
And Joel. Joel, who'd wanted to sail the Caribbean and never got the chance.
Who'd mapped routes and bought books and dreamed about a future he didn't get.
But Joel hadn't waited. Hadn't held himself back from living because living might end.
He'd been a nurse. He'd helped people. He'd had friends and plans and Sunday dinners and a diner he went to at midnight after his shifts.
Joel had been in the middle of something too when he died. On his way to meet his brother for eggs before midnight. Living a full, ordinary, beautiful life that happened to end on a wet highway.
The men in Jack's family didn't run. They stayed. They built. They died in the middle of things because that's where people who are actually living tend to be — in the middle. Not at the edges. Not on the road. Not in motel rooms with light bags and empty hands.
Jack stood up.
He didn't have a plan. Didn't have a speech. Didn't know what he was going to build or how he was going to prove that this time was different — that the man walking toward the lighthouse was not the same man who'd walked away from it.
But he had his hands. And his hands had always known what to do, even when his head was a mess and his heart was in pieces. His hands could measure and cut and join and build. Could make something permanent out of raw materials. Could create the thing his mouth couldn't say.
He picked up his bag. Same bag. Same weight. Same gesture he'd made a thousand times in a hundred towns.
But this time, when he walked out the door, he turned south.