10. Grant
Grant
David Kowalski's number is open on my phone and my thumb still not moving. I've been staring at this same screen for forty-five minutes. I've done more decisive things in active conflict zones.
I set the phone down.
The sun is barely up, painting Oak Street in that grey-gold light that makes Copper Falls look almost soft. The Ramirez kid two houses down is shooting hoops in the driveway, going through the same motion over and over. Normal people doing normal Friday things.
I've mowed the lawn six times. Fixed the porch railing. Replaced three fence posts. Learned which nights Mom can eat a full dinner and which nights it's crackers and ginger ale. Learned what Sophie's tired laugh sounds like versus her real one.
I'm supposed to call David Kowalski this morning and commit to leaving in eight weeks.
My thumb won't move.
I go downstairs and make coffee and sit at the kitchen table with my laptop like a man who has a plan.
The plan is to research what staying would actually look like. Be systematic. Run the numbers. Approach this like any other logistics problem.
I open a browser tab. Construction project manager jobs central Illinois.
Springfield: $85K-$95K. Peoria: $78K. Champaign: $75K. All of them are at least $100K less than what I'm making.
I close that tab. Open another. Cost of living Copper Falls IL.
Lower than overseas, obviously. No hazard pay, no per diem, no end-of-contract bonuses. But also no malaria medication and no driving past checkpoints.
I look at home prices. Three-bedroom in a good neighborhood: $180K. The house Sophie and I could—
I close the laptop with a snap before I start spiraling.
Mom wakes up shortly after, so I go make her breakfast.
She takes her pills and eats slowly.
"Did you make the call?" she asks.
"Not yet."
"When?"
"I don't know."
She sets down her toast and looks at me with sixty-seven years of accumulated patience. "Grant. I'm going to tell you something, and you're not going to like it."
"Okay."
"You can't decide whether to stay by researching job salaries. That's not how the decision works." She folds her hands. "Your father spent three months one summer looking at job listings in Chicago and Indianapolis. Did I tell you that?"
"You mentioned it."
"What I didn't tell you is that what stopped him wasn't the money or the logistics.
" She meets my eyes. "It was the morning he walked into the kitchen and you were feeding Chris before school because I was running late for work.
You were thirteen. Chris was a toddler. You were annoyed about it — I could hear it in how loud you were putting down the bowl — but you did it.
Without being asked. Without making a thing of it.
" She pauses. "He said to me that night, 'Patty, I'm not trapped.
I'm exactly where I should be.' And he never looked at another job listing. "
I sit with that.
"I'm not saying stay because of Sophie," Mom says. "I'm saying: If you do stay, know what you're staying for."
She finishes her breakfast. I watch her move through the kitchen and think: this woman has been surviving things her whole life while I've been somewhere else.
"Sophie texted this morning," she says. "Asked if I needed anything."
My chest does the thing. "What'd you tell her?"
"That I'm fine. That you're here." She rinses her plate. "She said she'd come by Monday."
"Good."
"Mm." Mom doesn't elaborate, which means she's elaborating in her head.
She's halfway to the sink with her mug when she adds, almost as an afterthought, the way she drops the things that actually matter into the middle of unrelated sentences: "Chris called last night, by the way. While you were out at the store."
I go cold. My body tenses and my gut twists with guilt. "What'd he want?"
"He wanted to know how the scans looked. Asked if I needed him to come out." She rinses the mug, sets it in the rack, doesn't look at me while she says the rest of it. "I told him not yet. Told him to wait until there's something worth driving eleven hours for."
"You didn't tell him about—" I gesture around vaguely, uselessly, at the general shape of my life right now.
"About you and Sophie? No." She finally turns around. "That's not a phone conversation, Grant. That's a look-your-brother-in-the-eye conversation, and it's not mine to have for you."
The coffee in my stomach sours, slow and unpleasant.
I've been so occupied with the logistics of staying — the salary numbers, the job listings, the house prices — that I haven't once let myself sit with the fact that somewhere in Denver, my brother still thinks of Sophie as an old chapter, and has no idea that his older brother is currently rearranging his entire life around her.
That conversation is coming. Not today, not this week necessarily, but coming, and there's nothing to do about the front except wait for it to arrive.
"He say when he might visit?"
"No timeline. You know your brother." Mom's tone stays light, but there's something careful underneath it, the same carefulness she uses when she's managing two things at once and doesn't want either of us to notice the seams. "Once things settle down, is what he said. Whatever that means to him these days."
I go back to my phone and still don't make the call.
***
Saturday, I'm in Dad's garage supposedly organizing his tools when Sophie texts.
Sophie: How's Patty doing?
First text in three days. I pick up my phone too fast.
Me: Good. Doc is pleased with her progress.
Sophie: That's great. Tell her I'm thinking about her.
Me: You could tell her yourself. She misses you.
The three dots appear, disappear, appear.
Sophie: Working all weekend. Long shifts. I'll come by Monday.
Me: Okay.
Sophie: How are you doing?
The question catches me. I type and delete three responses.
Me: Figuring it out.
Sophie: That's honest.
Me: I'm trying to be.
Sophie: Good. That's good.
The dots appear. Stay for almost a minute.
Sophie: I miss you.
Me: I miss you too.
Sophie: I still need space. Is that okay?
No. It's not okay. I want to see her. I want to talk to her. I want to make this decision standing next to her instead of alone in a garage that smells like WD-40 and my father's absence.
But she needs space and I need to give it.
Me: Yeah. Take what you need.
She doesn't text again.
I sit in Dad's garage with his tools arranged around me — the level he used for twenty years, the circular saw he called by name, the workbench he built out of oak because he said particle board was an insult to anyone serious — and try to figure out what being sure actually requires.
I think, unhelpfully, about Chris — about the version of this decision where I'm not the only Guilligan brother whose life this rearranges.
I don't have an answer for that part yet either.
I put it in the same drawer as everything else I'm not ready to open.
***
Sunday, I go to the cemetery.
I don't plan it. I just find myself driving north, and then I'm pulling into the lot near the maintenance shed, and I sit in my truck for ten minutes before I get out.
I haven't been here since I came home. The photo Mom sent me after the funeral showed the headstone from a distance, grey granite in a green field. I memorized the section and row and then didn't come.
Section B, Row 7. Near the old oak.
The grass is damp. My boots leave prints.
DAVID LAWRENCE GUILLIGAN 1955 — 2022 Beloved Husband, Father, Friend
Simple. Practical. No flourishes. Like the man himself. Mom's name is already carved next to his with just the birth year — 1958 — and the blank space where the date will go. They planned it together. Made it easy for whoever was left behind.
That should've been me, standing here. Making it easier for her.
I sit down on the grass, right in front of the stone.
"Hey, Dad."
My voice sounds too loud.
"I'm late. I know." I rest my arms on my knees. "I should've been here for the funeral. I should've pushed harder to get home. I told myself the logistics wouldn't allow it, but that was—" I stop. "That was bullshit. I could've found a way. I just didn't want to face it."
A crow lands on a headstone three rows over. It watches me with the attentive, slightly judgmental quality of all crows.
"I met someone. Sophie. Chris's ex-wife.
" I almost laugh. "Yeah, I know. Complicated.
But she's been taking care of Mom for six months while Chris was in Denver and I was in abroad.
She just showed up. Kept showing up." I look at the headstone.
"She's a pediatric nurse. Watches families every day — parents who stay, parents who leave, kids who wait.
She knows what showing up looks like, and she knows what it looks like when someone doesn't. She's been watching both for years. "
The crow takes off.
"I've only built a bank account and a résumé.
No home. No roots. No one waiting when I come back.
" I pull up a blade of grass, tear it apart.
"I've been running from what you had. Since I was eighteen.
Called it freedom. Called it important work.
But I was running from responsibility. From permanence.
From the chance that I'd stay somewhere and fail at it. "
My throat tightens.
"Should've — that's the most useless word in the English language. Should've been here when you died. Should've called more. Should've said—" I stop. "Should've said I loved you more. While I still could."
The groundskeeper drives past in his cart and gives me the nod of someone who has seen a lot of men sitting by a lot of graves and knows to leave them alone.
I sit there until the sun has moved and my legs are numb and the thing in my chest has loosened enough to let me breathe.
"I want to try," I say finally. "Stay. Build something. Be the kind of man who shows up instead of the one who leaves." I stand up. Brush the grass off my jeans. "Not because Sophie wants it. Not because Mom needs it. Because I need to know if I can."
I touch the cool granite of the headstone. Leave my hand there for a moment.
"I'll come back," I tell him. "Tell you how it goes."
I walk back to my truck. Get in. Sit with my hands on the wheel.
Pull up David Kowalski's contact.
And this time, my thumb moves.
It rings.
But I don't say anything yet. Because I'm not making this call until I've seen Sophie. Until I've told her first. Until she knows what the decision is before I make it, not after.
I end the call before it connects.
I start the truck and drive back to Mom's house, and somewhere underneath the relief of finally knowing my own mind, a small, unresolved weight settles in alongside it — the knowledge that whatever I decide, there's a phone call to my brother waiting on the other side of it that no cemetery visit is going to make easier.
***
The grocery store on a Tuesday afternoon, which is apparently when the entire retired population of Copper Falls does its shopping.
I'm working off a list in Mom's handwriting.
Ginger ale, saltines, the specific brand of chicken broth she says is the only one that doesn't taste like a penny.
Eggs. Nothing with a smell to it. Six weeks ago I couldn't have told you what a person eats on the third day after chemo and now I could brief it.
"That's a Guilligan face."
Older guy at the end of the aisle. Silver hair, cut close. Cart with almost nothing in it.
"It is," I say.
"Camden Abbott." He puts out a hand and I take it. Grip like a man who works. "I knew your brother a little. Chris. He did a summer with a crew of ours, years back."
"That sounds like Chris. A summer."
"Barely one summer," Camden agrees, and doesn't say the rest of it, which I appreciate. He looks at my cart. Broth, ginger ale, crackers. "How's your mother?"
"Halfway through. Holding up better than I am."
"That'll be true the whole way. My mother was the same." He rests his hands on the cart handle. "You're the one who's been overseas."
"Just for a while." It comes out steadier than it has any right to. "There's a contract waiting on me. Brazil. They want an answer."
"When?"
"Soon."
He lets that sit exactly as long as it deserves to, which is not long.
"What were you doing over there that they want you in Brazil for?"
"Infrastructure. Water, roads, power. Mostly water."
He looks at me a second longer than the conversation needs.
"Your dad framed my father's garage," he says. "Nineteen eighty-something. Wouldn't take money for it. My old man complained about that for thirty years."
"That sounds like him."
"Sullivan Construction just landed the water main system for the whole town. Two-year project, and I need a project manager who's actually done it." He says it the way he'd read a measurement off a tape. "You're going to say you've got a contract waiting."
"I do."
"I'm aware. I'm asking anyway." He shrugs. "$120K base. Benefits. Normal hours. Room for partnership down the line if it goes well."
Eighty thousand less than Brazil. He doesn't flinch saying it, and I'd like the record to show I don't flinch hearing it.
"Fair warning," he adds, before I've answered. "It's slower than what you're used to. Small-town politics. Council meetings. Everyone knows everyone."
"I grew up here."
"I know you did." He takes out his phone. "That's half of why I'm asking."
I give him my number, which I notice myself doing.
"No decision required," he says, putting the phone away. "Sit on it. Number stays the same either way."
Then he goes.
I stand in the aisle with a list in my mother's handwriting and finish the shopping.
Broth. Eggs. Crackers.