17. Lance
Chapter seventeen
Lance
The apartment on Flint Street is too quiet after the noise of Captain Eddie’s.
I don’t turn on the lights. I sit on the edge of the mattress with my boots still on and let the dark settle.
On the nightstand, Parker’s sketchbooks are stacked where I’ve kept them all week—three of them, hardcover, full of a boy I loved drawing a boy I used to be.
I haven’t opened them since the basement.
I had them in my hands in her doorway this afternoon and I couldn’t do it.
Fuck off, Broussard.
He said it holding a bag of catfish, and somehow it went in deeper than anything I heard in two years of marriage.
The knock, when it comes, is three raps, evenly spaced, and I’m already across the room with my hand on the door before it lands on me where I’ve heard it before.
I open the door.
Nash is leaning against the frame with his hands in his jacket pockets.
Brown hair, aqua-blue eyes, and a passing resemblance to Parker that once fooled me into thinking he had some of Parker’s goodness in him too.
He gives me the smile he used to give me across the mess hall, and everything in me goes quiet and careful.
“Broussard,” he says. “You look like hell.”
“Nash.” I don’t move to let him in. “I thought you went back to Connecticut.”
“I was in the neighborhood.” He tips his head, easy. “Say again—that’s the greeting? After I drive six hours?”
“I didn’t ask you to drive six hours.” Six hours.
I’m already triangulating it. That’s not Connecticut.
Philadelphia to the north, Charleston or Asheville to the south, maybe Knoxville.
I don’t remember him ever mentioning friends or family in any of them.
So he’s not passing through. He’s sending me a message.
“No,” he agrees. “You never ask for anything.”
“That’s how they trained us.”
“Corps forever.” He smiles. I don’t.
“For some of us.”
His jaw compresses, just an instant too fast.
“Can I come in, or are we doing this in the hallway so your neighbors can enjoy it?”
I should say no. I know the shape of this.
I’ve read the pamphlets. I’ve sat in the beige rooms. But it’s late and I’m hollowed out from the parking lot, and I know exactly how loud he can get in a hallway if I make him stand in one.
“Roger that,” I say, and step aside. “But make it fast. What do you want?”
“To see how you’re doing.” He wanders past me into the middle of the room like he’s clearing it—the window, the nightstand, the exits. He always did that. “Saw you on the news. The anniversary thing. Ten years.” He shakes his head like it’s a grief we share. “Got me thinking.”
So that’s what pulled him out of whatever hole he’s been in. My face on a memorial flier, and he read it as an invitation.
His eyes snag on the sketchbooks. “You drawing now?” he asks.
“They’re not mine.”
“Whose are they?”
“Nobody’s.” I slide them into the drawer, and his eyes track my hand the whole way. I know I’ve told him something, though I couldn’t say what.
He sits in one of the chairs at my table, uninvited, and drags a hand down his face. Up close he looks tired in the way that used to make me want to fix him. “Look. I know things ended badly. I’ll own that—I let some things get out of hand.”
“Tracking,” I say, dry—the old way of telling him I’m following.
“Tracking.” He laughs. “Don’t you miss it? The Corps. The brotherhood, the mission, the structure. Being part of something that mattered.”
“That’s a stupid question. You know the answer.”
“I do.” He stands, slow. “Civilians see the flag and the haircut and they think they get it. They don’t get anything.
They can’t. But you and me—we speak the same language, Broussard.
You can’t manufacture that.” He crosses the room to me, and here it is, the reason he drove six hours.
“I want us to get back together. You and I make sense like nobody else does, and I was an idiot to lose you. I just—” His voice drops, warm and rueful, the love-bomb right on schedule. “You make me crazy, Broussard.”
The whole time he’s talking I’ve been watching his hands—the right one resting on the back of a chair, the left loose at his side—and I’ve missed half of what he said. That’s what our marriage was, right there: pretty words on his lips, but my eyes watching his hands.
“I’m done making you crazy,” I say.
He blinks.
“You sure about that?”
“Okay. Time to go.” I hold the door open. “I’ve had a shitty day, and I’m not going to stand here and let you cosplay as a Marine. You’re not one.”
His face hardens instantly. “You watch it. I went through Parris Island just like you did.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t get a dishonorable discharge.” I wrench the door wider. “You’ve had your look. Out you go.”
“You’re so sexy when you’re angry.” He smiles, and puts his hand on my jaw.
I take his wrist off my jaw and turn it—not hard, just enough—and walk him back toward the door with the flat competence of a man trained to move other men. He’s strong. He was always strong. But I’m calm and he isn’t, and calm wins.
“Get your hands off me,” he snarls, which is fucking rich.
I get him over the threshold. He rounds on me in the hallway, and the smile is gone, and this is the face I married and spent two years failing to understand.
“Goodbye, Nash. Don’t come back.”
“What’s his name?”
“There’s no name. I just don’t want you. The divorce should have been a clue.”
“Oh, there’s a name all right.” He isn’t smiling now. “But he won’t get to have you. I promise you that.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Listen. It’s late. I’m tired. Go away, and don’t come back unless you’d like me to take out a restraining order.”
He laughs. “Seriously? A restraining order? Like a little bitch? You know those just make it worse. You think men trained to do what we did get intimidated by a piece of paper?”
“No,” I say. “It makes the people in power notice the pattern. So it can be punished more efficiently.”
“You’ll regret this.”
“I regret a lot of things,” I tell him, and shut the door.
I stand with my back against it and listen to him leave—the heavy tread, the stairwell door, the silence after. My hands aren’t steady. I hold one out in front of me and wait for it to stop, and it takes a while.
I don’t call anyone.
I know exactly where Jonny Bishop is staying. I stood in his aunt’s doorway this afternoon with that box in my arms and a speech in my mouth and I couldn’t do it, and four hours later he told me to fuck off in a parking lot.
Across the street there’s a light on in a second-floor window, and there is not one single thing I can do about any of it tonight.
I put the sketchbooks in the drawer and shut it.
I turn on a light.
Between reliving the scene in the parking lot and shuddering with rage that Nash had come to my door—to my fucking door—I catch maybe forty-five minutes of shut-eye all night.
If I hadn’t spent eight years being trained to function on less, under worse, I’d have come apart.
As it is, I sit down at my desk and concede that today is going to be a three-cup day.
The only good thing about the Comptroller’s office is that we have real offices, with doors that close. I can hide and nurse my misery in private. The spreadsheets on my screen might as well be in Sanskrit for all the sense they’re making.
After ten, I risk the trip down the corridor to the breakroom.
The trick is getting past Joe, our receptionist, who guards the front desk like a dragon guarding a hoard of staplers.
Joe is not what you’d call a people person.
He’s territorial, prickly, and treats walk-ins like they’ve personally insulted his mother.
But he’s decided he likes me, for reasons I haven’t fully decoded, and when Joe likes you, he’s yours. The trick is not to test it.
There’s a man at the desk when I arrive—polite-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, tortoiseshell glasses, wearing a three-piece suit that’s slightly too formal for a Virginia campus.
He’s speaking to Joe in what sounds like a slight French accent, and Joe is staring at his screen with the expression of a man whose computer has personally betrayed him.
“The system’s been down since Monday,” Joe says. “We’ve been manually authorizing checks for three days. I can’t confirm anything right now.”
The man takes this with remarkable grace. “No problem at all. I can come back. It’s just that my flight will leave for Portland this evening, and it would be so awkward to do this over the phone.”
“I can pull the paper file,” I offer from the doorway. “Come on back.”
I pull him into my office and he sits across from me. “Just a second,” I say. “It’s been a nightmare. Do you have the receipts?”
“Yes, I have printouts,” he says, pulling them from a briefcase. He hands them over. There is an awkward silence as I scan them.
“Flights from Portland and a stay at the Fairhaven Inn,” I say.
“Yes. I came here for a job interview with the psychology department.” He smiles anxiously.
“How did it go?”
He grimaces. “I just completed the teaching demonstration and I’m all nerves. Can you tell?”
I smile at him. “Good luck.”
“Is it a nice town, Fairhaven?”
“I like it, but I was born and raised here.”
He peers at me and blinks, then cocks his head the way people do when they’re trying to place a face. I know what’s coming. It’s the photo—the one of Parker and me in the gym, plastered all over town for the anniversary.
He opens his mouth, and I brace for aren’t you the guy from the—