Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Rook
He read it twice to himself. I watched the second time happen in my peripheral vision.
“It’s long,” he said. “He uses punctuation.”
“He would.”
“Periods, Rook. Commas. A hockey guy texting in complete sentences. It’s unsettling. I don’t trust it.”
“Out loud.”
He read it to the windshield, slow.
Easton: Mattias. I remember you. The serious kid who stayed after every skate.
I’m not angry and I haven’t been for a long time, so we can set that part down right away.
What happened to me wasn’t done by a twenty-one-year-old who moved three feet down a bench.
It was done by men with a lot more power than you had, and I think you’ve always known that.
But I’m not going to tell you that you owe me nothing, because that would be its own kind of lie, and I’m too far out here to bother with those anymore.
I made my peace. I’ve got a rink and a beer league and a learn-to-skate class full of six-year-olds who can’t stand up, and I am, against all odds, a happy man.
So if you’re reaching out because you’re carrying something, then put it down.
Don’t carry it. Spend it on the next one. There’s always a next one. Yours, Alan
The exits started naming lakes. Pine trees crowded both sides of the highway. I said nothing about the message.
Alan Easton was the cautionary tale I used as mortar in the walls I built. Now, he’d written to tell me he was, against all odds, a happy man. He kindly requested that I stop using his life as a reason to wreck my own.
I didn’t feel relief. It was closer to the moment after you set down something heavy, and the muscle keeps firing, still braced for a weight that’s gone.
“You okay?” Varga asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s allowed.” He looked at the phone for a second longer. Then he set it in the cupholder and left it there.
“Your mother said before dark,” I said.
“My mother says a lot of things.”
“She said the lake road ices by four.”
“It’s been icing by four since 1987. My mother has never been wrong about it.” He pointed. “There. The mailbox shaped like a loon. Turn before the loon.”
The road turned to gravel and ran through a forest of birch and black spruce. I cracked my window and took in the resinous scent. Varga had gone quiet beside me.
Then the trees opened, and there was the house.
It sat low and long on a rise above the lake, a contemporary log build with honey-colored timber and big windows under a green metal roof. A stone chimney pushed pale smoke up into the cold sky.
A porch ran along the front, with a cord of split wood stacked neatly and head-high against the near end.
Someone had strung the rail with early Christmas lights, warm and white.
Two trucks and a hatchback were parked near the house, and a pair of snowshoes hung by the door beside a row of boots lined up on a mat.
Past the house, down a slope, was the lake.
It had frozen solid, snow-dusted, running out a quarter mile to a far shore. A line of boot prints led out to a fishing shanty, maybe two hundred yards from land. A dock stood frozen into the near edge, lifted half out of the water on its posts for the winter.
Rich smells curled around us as we approached the porch steps: wood smoke, onions, and paprika.
“Okay,” Varga said, low. “Brace.”
I didn’t have time to ask for what.
The front door banged open, and a golden retriever leaped off the porch like he’d been fired out of a cannon. He hit me at a dead run with his whole back half swinging. Seventy pounds plowed into my shins, and I struggled to stay upright.
“Medve,” Varga said. “This is Rook. He belongs here.”
I dropped to one knee in the snow and let the dog put his paws on my chest. He stuck his cold nose in my ear and then licked my cheek. He made a high, desperate whine, as if he’d been waiting his entire life for me specifically. I scratched his neck and got a mouthful of fur for my trouble.
“He likes you,” said a voice from the porch.
A woman came down the steps with her arms crossed against the cold. She didn’t wear a coat, only a flannel shirt with wool socks and clogs. She had her brother’s face: the bones of it, the same wide mouth and pale eyes set level under a straight brow.
“You’re the soup,” she said.
I stood up with the dog still leaning his full weight into my leg. “I’m sorry?”
“Five years ago. The knee.” She stepped up to me, studying my face. “He told me a guy brought him soup when he got hurt. It was a teammate. He said that once, five years ago. I’ve asked him every Christmas since whether there was someone, and every Christmas he says just me, you know me.”
She dropped into a flat, unbothered voice that could have been an imitation of Varga if it weren’t honest. “And now he climbs out of a truck in November with a man. So, I sorted it. You’re the soup.”
“That’s him,” Varga said, coming around the front of the truck. “He’s the soup.”
“You’re an idiot,” she told her brother, and hugged him hard around the neck. She mouthed at me, thank you, and went back to blinking at the cold.
The screen door opened again, and an older man appeared on the porch.
He was big, like his son, solid through the chest and gray at the temples. He wore a quilted flannel shirt-jacket and offered his hand with a warm smile.
I shook his hand and waited. On the drive, Varga told me his father would shake my hand and say exactly one sentence.
He looked at me, then past me, down the slope toward the lake. “In Komárno,” he said, “we had two rooms. The boy bought us this.”
He let go of my hand and watched to see whether I’d understood. I did.
The family had crossed an ocean for the boy. They sold their house, learned a new language, and settled on an unfamiliar continent.
The boy paid it back with what I saw around me. It was a comfortable home on a lake that left his family wanting nothing else from him other than his presence.
“It’s a good house,” I said. It was the Maine in me speaking.
He nodded. “Cold out here. Come in. She’s been cooking since six.”
The heat hit me at the door. A wood stove burned high in the front room, fogging the windows at the corners. It was a big house, but it felt close, warm, and loud with a television playing that I couldn’t see, a pot lid rattling somewhere, and the dog’s nails ticking on the floor behind me.
I’d barely gotten my coat off before a woman placed a bowl into my hands. Varga, behind me, said, “I told you.” His mother fired something back at him in Hungarian. The bowl held a deep red stew, the meat falling apart in it. Paprika turned the color dark as brick.
She was small and slightly stout. She didn’t stop talking—not exactly at me , but in my direction.
It was mostly English with Hungarian sliding in underneath it.
She didn’t wait for comments or answers any more than her son did.
She told me she made too much of everything, twice, like an apology she didn’t mean.
“Too thin,” she said, as she put a bowl in my hands with a spoon sticking out. And then, “Not so thin as Luki. You live with him—you let this happen?” She didn’t slow down for the answer.
“He eats,” I said.
“He eats at restaurants.” She said it the way another woman would say he gambles.
She turned toward the kitchen, and I followed.
We all sat at a long table with a centerpiece of dried cattails.
Medve circled twice and dropped onto my feet with a groan, his warm weight slung across both my boots.
Varga’s father took the head of the table with the TV on across the room, muted.
His mother sat nearest the stove so she didn’t have as far to go. His sister sat across from me.
Varga changed.
Here he was Lukács. His father used the full name, the entire weight of it. His mother called him Luki. With his family, he was quiet. He didn’t shut down or try to be careful. He relaxed. Varga’s family was home.
He let his mother talk over him, and he didn’t get upset when his sister won an argument. He ate slowly. Whole minutes went by without a joke. I sat there with the dog on my feet, seeing a part of his life I’d never known.
His mother nudged the stew toward him. “Eat,” she said.
“I am eating.”
Varga’s father muttered something at him, a complaint about the muted game, and he shot back in Hungarian, fast and easy. His father grunted and jabbed his fork at the screen.
“Bad call,” he said, in English, so I could understand. “You see it? Terrible. I could referee this game from the couch.”
“You couldn’t see it,” Varga’s sister said. “The sound’s off, and your glasses are in the kitchen.”
“I don’t need glasses to see bad.” He fought a smile and lost. “Thirty years, I’m telling you. You never listen, your mother never listens, and the referee never listens.”
“Nobody listens to you, apa. It’s a gift,” Varga said, grinning. His father pointed the fork at him, then gave up and laughed.
Under the table, Varga placed his hand on my knee.
“I put you in the big room,” his mother said. “End of the hall. It’s the good bed.”
“The big room,” his sister repeated.
“The one we kept.”
I looked at Varga. He kept his eyes on his plate, but he squeezed my knee. One room. We would be in one bed under his parents’ roof, in the house he’d bought them.
After the table was cleared, I ended up in the kitchen with his mother and a dish towel. The window over the sink had fogged up solid. She ran the tap hot. I dried what she washed and stacked where she pointed.
She handed me a pot and didn’t let go of it right away.
“The tree,” she said. “Luki’s tree. The maple. He told me on the phone that you planted it.”
“I did.”
“In the ground. I sent it for an apartment. I thought it would try to grow in a pot on a balcony. He would forget to water it, and it would die, but I sent it anyway.” She let go of the pot. “You put it in the ground.”