Chapter 8 #2
I put my hand on the lid.
The wood was warm from his pocket. I could feel the faint tooth of the finish under my fingertips. The letters were set deep enough that I could read them with my thumb.
“In case,” he said.
His voice was flat in the way his voice was flat, unhurried, the way he said everything.
“In case you ever want to upgrade the shoebox.”
I did not move.
I did not breathe, for a second, and then I did, because not breathing was a thing I had mostly trained myself out of.
The dusty old Nike box. The one I had taped shut in the cabin and carried out into the afternoon and down a mountain road under my elbow with Clover inside squeaking a protest I had imagined and not imagined.
The box I had not taped shut again, after.
The box I had slid under the nightstand in Ironridge on the first night in this apartment and had not opened because I had not needed to, because Clover now lived on a shelf, and the thing I had been protecting her from had been me.
He knew all of it. He had been there for all of it.
I looked up at him.
His eyes were entirely soft. That particular softness he only did when it was the two of us, the softness that had almost nothing in it of the man who could organize federal agents from a camp stove and everything in it of the man who made me coffee in the morning and turned the handle toward my hand.
He was waiting. Patient. Giving me the threshold.
My throat did the thing it did.
I was out of the chair before I decided to be.
I got my arms around his neck and my face into the side of his throat and I held on, and he caught me against him without any of the fumble a less prepared man would have needed — his hand came up to the back of my head, his other arm closed across my back, and he held me, and he did not speak.
That was a thing he did. He let my moments be my moments. He didn’t fill them.
I stayed there long enough to feel his pulse against my cheekbone. Then I pulled back.
“Hang on.”
He let me go. I took the box in both hands and carried it to the bed.
I knelt down. The shoebox was under the nightstand where it had lived since moving day.
I slid it out. Nike. Pale cardboard, the swoosh on the lid faded, the corners soft from constant moves.
The black electrical tape I had sealed it with in the cabin was gone — I had peeled it off the night of my first week in Ironridge, sitting on this floor, peeling it strip by strip and putting the strips in the small bin under the desk, and I had not taped it shut again.
I set the shoebox on the bedspread. Set the walnut box beside it. Opened them both.
The difference in the two containers sat there between my knees. The shoebox smelled like old cardboard and the specific mustiness of a thing that had been carried through too many rooms. The walnut box smelled like fresh-cut wood and oil finish and something faintly like pine.
I picked up the birthday card first and moved it across.
I laid it on the satin lining at the bottom of the walnut box, and the yellowed card sat against the pale cream satin and looked, for the first time since I had owned it, like a thing someone was keeping on purpose rather than a thing someone had forgotten to throw out.
Dante was in the doorway of the bedroom. Leaning against the jamb, arms folded, not coming in. Watching.
I moved all my old things.
And at the bottom of the shoebox, folded once, was the card-stock tab.
It had been one of perhaps forty tabs I had made.
After the federal agents came and Creed went and we packed the cabin down into crates and boxes, I had been the one to take the maps off the wall.
I had peeled my tabs off the paper carefully with the edge of a thumbnail and put them in an envelope, and the envelope had gone into a drawer, and sometime in December I had taken this one out of the envelope and put it in the shoebox because I had wanted something in that box that belonged to the second half of me.
I moved it over.
I laid it on top of the photographs. Yellow against cream against the dark walnut, a small bright rectangle that had, in its small way, helped take a man out of his bed at dawn by federal agents in a state he thought he owned.
I closed the walnut box. The brass catch clicked home.
I looked up at him.
“I love it,” I said.
My voice cracked on the it. I didn’t fix it.
“I love it. It’s — “ I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye. “Now this place really feels like home.”
I heard myself say it and I heard, at the same time, the part of me that kept me honest about such things say that isn’t quite accurate, because it wasn’t.
This place had felt like home before the walnut box.
It had felt like home the first night I had slept eight hours without waking.
It had felt like home the first time I had eaten breakfast sitting down without producing a running inventory of reasons I was allowed to.
It had felt like home the first time I had said Daddy in the dark without my throat closing, and the first time I had crossed a room to get a pen without asking, and the first time the word mine had come out of my mouth about an apartment and I hadn’t braced for it to be taken back.
It had felt like home the moment I had stopped waiting for it to end.
I looked at him.
He was in the doorway. Arms folded. His cuts on the hook by the front door and his dark henley on and his hair still damp at the temples from the snow.
The three cream letters I could not see from here but could feel the existence of, stitched along the bottom right of the back panel on the hook. WIZ.
My Daddy.
Home had never been the place. It had never been the apartment above the hardware store and it had never been the cabin on the mountain and it had not been any of the rooms I had slept in before those, and it was not going to be any room I slept in after, either.
Home was the man in the doorway with his arms folded and his patience banked behind his eyes and his handwriting burned into a lid on my bed.
“Thank you,” I said.
He uncrossed his arms. He crossed the room. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside me and put his arm around my shoulders and drew me into his side, and I closed my eyes against his ribs and I did not cry, because I did not need to.
The walnut box sat on the bedspread between us with my name on the lid.
Home was here.
Home was him.
***
Thank you for spending time with Dante and Sadie. If their story brought you to the Heavy Kings for the first time, Duke Carson's world is waiting for you — pick up the series to find out what the club looks like twenty years on, and what kind of man grows up in Big Mike's shadow.