Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Jack
SIX HOURS EARLIER
The thing about working with your hands is that your head never really switches off.
It was mid-afternoon and I'd been on my back under a Tacoma for the better part of two hours. Exhaust manifold. Whoever had touched it last had made a mess of it, and now it was my problem. I didn't mind. Worse things than having a problem you can actually fix.
The radio had been going all day. I wasn't really listening until Bill Withers came on—Lovely Day, that long held note—and I thought of Maddie. That happened sometimes. A song, a smell, or even nothing at all. She'd just show up in my head and I'd let her stay there.
I didn't have the words for what Maddie was. I just knew she was the kind of person who belonged to a bigger world—one with more oxygen than there was in this town—and I was just lucky to be breathing her air for a while. I tried not to think about that part too hard.
I felt my phone buzz somewhere around three but my hands were deep in the engine and I let it go. When I finally got to it there were two notifications: a missed call from Maddie and a text.
Call me when you get this. I have news!
I read it twice. Stood there with my thumb over her name and grease on my hands.
I knew what the news was. Maddie was the smartest person I'd ever met. She’d been grinding through her bio degree for years, balancing labs with double shifts and living on peanut butter while she typed out med school applications on my cracked laptop until three in the morning.
I'd never doubted her for a second. Not once.
I set the phone down and went to find Hector.
"I need to head out early," I said. "Something I've got to take care of."
He looked up from the parts catalogue, assessed me for a second, and nodded. "Go on then."
I grabbed my jacket and my keys and walked out into the afternoon. The bike was where I'd left it. I stood next to it for a second, helmet in my hands, and thought about what I was about to do.
I hadn't been to my father's house in eight months. Hadn't had a reason to. The man had a phone and he knew how to use it when he wanted something, which was the only time we talked anymore. Eight months was the longest stretch in a while and I hadn't lost any sleep over it.
But I had to do this. Today of all days, I had to do this.
I put my helmet on and rode.
His place was twenty minutes out of town, down a road that got narrower the further you went. A small house with a porch that sagged on one side, a field behind it that nobody farmed. It had always looked like it was waiting for something that was never going to come.
He was on the porch when I pulled up.
Two cans on the railing, one in his hand. He watched me cut the engine and take my helmet off without saying anything. That was his way—let you come to him, let you feel the distance.
"Jack." He looked me over. "Didn't think you still knew where this was."
"Dad."
He looked older than the last time. Or maybe I just noticed it more when I hadn't seen him in a while. But I saw it now, the way age had settled into him like rust on a frame. He’d been a big man once, but the mass had slumped, heavy and soft in the wrong places.
He had my eyes, or I had his, and I'd never decided how I felt about that.
"How've you been?" I said.
He looked at me over the top of his can. "Since when do you care?"
"I'm asking, aren't I?"
He shrugged and looked out at the field. "Same as always."
I nodded. Same as always meant drinking and watching the days go by and making sure everyone in reach knew whose fault it was. I didn't say that.
"I need to come in for a minute," I said. "There's something of Mom's I need to get."
That got his attention. He looked back at me, slower this time. Then he stood, pushed the screen door open and went inside without a word. I followed him in.
The house smelled the same as it always had.
Stale air and cigarette smoke, the mustiness of a place that never got opened up.
It was worse than I remembered. Dishes in the sink, a pile of post on the table that hadn't been touched in weeks.
The curtains my mother had hung were still there, grey with dust now, the hem coming loose on one side.
I'd fixed that hem once. Apparently nobody had since.
He leaned against the doorframe between the hall and the kitchen, can in hand.
"So." He took a pull from his can, eyes on me. "What is it you need?"
I looked at him for a second. There was no way to say this that didn't open a door I didn't want opened. I knew that coming in. I'd known it the whole ride here.
"Mom's ring," I said.
He didn't say anything right away. Just looked at me the way he did when he was deciding which direction to come from.
"That Clarke girl then." He said it like he was turning something over in his mouth.
"Madison," I said. "Yes."
He made a sound low in his throat, not quite a laugh. Took another pull from his can and looked at me like I'd just said something funny.
"Well." He tilted his head. "Look at you."
I let it sit there and kept my mouth shut. I'd learned a long time ago that engaging with him was like grabbing the wrong end of something—you always came away worse off. I just needed the ring. I needed to get out of here and get back to Maddie and do this thing before I talked myself out of it.
"So, the ring," I said. "Where is it?"
He didn't move. Just stayed there looking at me with that half-smile that meant he was getting comfortable.
"Heard she's going to be a doctor," he said.
I didn't answer.
"Smart girl. Always was." He took a pull from his can. "Doctor friends. Doctor money. Whole different world from this one." He gestured vaguely at the room, at me, at everything. "And you're going to show up with your mother's ring and your greasy hands and do what exactly?"
"That's not your business."
"No," he said, easy as anything. "Suppose it's not." He looked at the can in his hand for a moment. "Just seems like you'd be holding her back is all."
The room was quiet except for the sound of the field outside, the wind moving through it.
"Must be nice," he said. "Thinking you're the kind of man who gets to keep a woman like that."
"Guess I'm a lucky guy," I said.
He held my eyes until the air in the room felt too thin, then pushed off the doorframe and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard a cabinet open, glass on glass. He came back with a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers, dropped into the couch and poured two fingers into each without asking.
I stood there for a beat, a man grown, yet the air in that room still knew how to make me feel ten years old. I knew that sitting down was a mistake, but my body seemed to remember the shape of that couch better than the seat of my bike.
I sat down.
He settled back into the couch like he'd been expecting this all along, which he probably had. I picked up the glass and held it without drinking. The whiskey was cheap, the kind that smells like a solvent before it ever hits your throat.
He took a pull from his own glass, slow and comfortable, and looked out at the field through the window. The afternoon light was going grey at the edges.
"Your mother was smart," he said. Not to me, exactly. Just out loud, like a thought he'd decided to share. "Always liked that about her."
He didn't follow it up. Just drank and looked at the field like he hadn't said anything at all.
I drank too. The whiskey burned the way cheap whiskey does, all heat and no taste, and I set the glass down and waited for whatever was coming next.
It took a while.
"She's gonna have expectations," he said. Same tone, like he was thinking out loud and I happened to be there. "That's all I'm saying. Woman works that hard, gets that far—she's gonna expect things to match up." He turned the glass in his hand. "Only natural."
He poured himself another finger and settled back.
"Your mother had plans too," he said. "You know that?
When I met her she was going to be a nurse.
Had the grades for it and everything." He looked at the glass.
"Life does the math eventually. That’s all it is.
Doesn't matter what you want. Doesn't matter what she wants.
Life does the math and you end up where you end up. "
He glanced at me then, just briefly.
"At least I never kidded myself about it."
The room was very quiet.
"Ring's in the bedroom," he said. "Top drawer."
I got up without a word. The hallway was narrow and darker than the living room, and the carpet runner my mother had put down was still there, threadbare now, edges curling up from the floor.
The bedroom was darker still, its curtains drawn. I didn't bother with the light.
The nightstand drawer stuck halfway, same as it always had. Inside: a broken watch, a folded handkerchief, things I didn't examine too closely. And underneath all of it a small velvet box gone grey with age.
I opened it. Inside, a simple gold band, one small stone. My grandmother's before it was my mother's. Cassie had called me two weeks ago, out of the blue—take the ring, Jack. It should be Maddie's.
She was the eldest, and the only one of us who’d actually built a life that didn’t smell like this house, so I’d always assumed it would go to her. But she’d already decided, like she’d been waiting for me to catch up to the idea that I was allowed to have a future.
I closed the box and put it in my pocket.
The curtains moved where the window didn't seal right. My mother had slept in this room for twenty-three years. I gave myself about two seconds on that before I turned and walked out.
Dad was where I'd left him. He looked at my jacket pocket and smiled.
"Got it then."
"Yeah."
"Good." He poured the last of the whiskey. "Good for you."
I headed for the door.
"You know what doctors make, Jack?" He raised his voice just enough. "First year out?"
"I'm leaving."