Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
After work the next day, Rose found a seat on the bus going south, settling the bags of groceries next to her that she’d kept in the fridge at work during the day.
She worried a little about Henry, who’d spent the day at the Field Museum.
They’d taken the bus there together, and she’d walked the rest of the way to work.
She’d given him a printout of a street map, along with her spare key; he’d insisted he wouldn’t mind the almost three-mile trek home, and that it would be perfectly fine if she visited her brother that evening.
A couple of years ago, after Ryan’s short stint in jail, Thursday nights had become movie nights for them.
It had been Rose’s idea. Now that he was doing all right, she kept waiting for him to suggest cutting back to one night a month, or opt out of them completely.
If he ever did, she’d understand. Most brothers probably didn’t want to hang out with their sisters every week, after all.
But he’d never once canceled, which had made Rose feel guilty for texting from work that day to say,
Hey, I’m going to stop by tonight, but I’m not going to stay for a movie, okay?
She didn’t want to stay out too late and leave Henry by himself, and bringing him along would’ve been uncomfortable, since neither she nor Ryan had ever brought a friend or a date.
Ryan didn’t even know that Henry now fell in the latter category, and she didn’t plan on telling him.
After all, she had even posed it to Henry as a friends-with-benefits type of situation.
Ryan had answered that she didn’t have to come over, but she told him she wanted to.
Griffin might or might not have told Ryan about their disastrous evening; if Ryan brought it up, she wanted to defend Henry.
Also, Ryan had sent her a text the day before saying that maybe she shouldn’t go to the Reuter mansion, after all.
She wanted to reassure him that it would be no big deal.
She got off the bus and walked the short distance to Ryan’s place, less than a mile east of the White Sox’s Rate Field. His apartment was the lower floor of a small two-story brick house, smushed between two boxlike brick apartment buildings.
The truth was, she also hadn’t wanted to completely break the tradition.
They sat on his not super comfortable futon couch, took turns choosing the movies, and ridiculed each other’s choices—Rose’s rom-coms and Ryan’s action movies.
Once in a blue moon, Ryan selected an arty film that managed to be both smug and depressing at the same time.
They ate popcorn topped with nutritional yeast and garlic salt, the way their parents had always made it.
Maybe it wasn’t much. But the weekly get-togethers felt like a little pocket of safety and stability.
When Ryan came to the door, in a hoodie and sweatpants, he frowned at the grocery bags in her hands. “What have you got?”
“It’s nothing!” she said as she came inside. “It’s just a few things.”
She took them to his kitchen, where two baseball caps, an unopened roll of paper towels, and various cleaning supplies sat out on the kitchen counter.
His apartment was never dirty, but it was cluttered, lacking anything in the way of storage furniture, baskets, or bins.
She cleared a space, plopped the bags down, and started taking out produce.
He leaned against the doorframe and watched her with an annoyed look. “Why are you shopping for me again?”
“Because you’re busy!” She brandished the box of protein bars. “Look, Costco had the ones you like.”
“And you’re not busy,” he deadpanned, as she put the bars in his cupboard. “You’ve got nothing special going on.”
“I’m not doing this so I can check your kitchen,” she said, guessing what he was thinking. She’d not-so-secretly done that a few times, early in his sobriety, and she wasn’t sorry. “I haven’t even thought about that for a long time.”
“I know. I’m just saying you don’t need to do this.”
She opened the fridge door to put the away the cantaloupe and oranges. “Obviously, I do. Look at this.” She gestured to the meager contents of the fridge—hot dogs, a tub of margarine, and two different brands of giardiniera. “You’re going to get scurvy.”
“You have to let me take care of myself,” he said with more emphasis. “It seems like you don’t think I can.”
Oof. Did he think that? It wasn’t true at all. She shut the fridge and turned around, meeting his serious gaze.
“I know you can. You’re doing great.”
He was and he wasn’t. The truth was, she wanted to fix more than his grocery situation.
She felt like he was gritting his teeth through life, like someone recovering from a serious injury, except it wasn’t healing, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
He needed a purpose in life, and she couldn’t give him that. But she could give him a melon.
She added, “They had great deals on fruit.”
To her relief, he chuckled. “I don’t buy very much at a time. I shop about every other day because there’s a really cute cashier.” He pushed off from the doorframe he’d been leaning on and sat down at the card table that was his kitchen table.
Oh. He didn’t usually talk to her about things like this. She leaned back against the counter. “Why don’t you ask her out?”
“Nah, she’s got a wedding ring. I just think she’s cute.”
Rose laughed, but felt a little disappointed. A relationship might’ve given him a great sense of purpose.
Ryan said, “So Henry’s got a crush on you.”
She tried to arrange her features into a semblance of surprise. “What? No! You saw how grouchy he is. We’re just friends.”
“That’s what you said about that hiking vlogger guy.”
“Ugh, I forgot about him. I went out of my way for him, too!”
“Literally,” Ryan added. Rose had told him how the trek through the state park had felt more like a forced march. But when it came to dating, she’d often put up with too much.
Ryan picked at the label of the hot sauce sitting on the table. “Well, Henry’s all right.”
Apparently, he hadn’t heard about the argument with Griffin. “He is. But he’s not staying here. In our time, I mean.”
Ryan squinted up at her. “Do you really think you can send him back?”
She shrugged. “I’m going to try.”
“But what if you can’t? What’s he going to do then?”
A little bit of hope sparkled like stray glitter. She mentally brushed it off. Although, like glitter, it was hard to get rid of completely.
“We’ll see what happens,” she said.
There was no point worrying about the future. Her arrangement with Henry wouldn’t last long. If she was smart, she’d focus on enjoying every bit of it.
—
And in the next couple of weeks, for the most part, Rose did. When she was at work, Henry read at the library or at home, and they made the most of their evenings. On most nights, they stayed in.
But one night, she took him to a board game café that served jibaritos, the sandwiches invented by a Chicagoan from Puerto Rico, which used mashed, fried plantains in place of bread.
Rose had always loved them. Henry didn’t care for them, but he enjoyed trying to teach her chess; she taught him Scrabble, which she’d played with her grandma.
The café owner, glancing around at the hundreds of contemporary board games on the shelves, declared that Henry and Rose were old-school.
“Oh, you have no idea,” Rose told the man.
He said, “Well, it looks to me like you both won.”
Rose’s boss, Lisa, approved her request for a few days off, although it was short notice.
This gave Rose more time to show Henry the things she thought he’d enjoy.
When she took him to the top of the Willis Tower, he marveled at the view from one hundred and ten stories up.
However, he balked at venturing out onto the glass observation deck.
“Come on,” she coaxed. “Hundreds of people step out on there every day.”
“Then it is only a matter of time before it gives way.”
She shook her head and got in line for the Skydeck. When it was her turn, she walked out to the edge. A bird flew over the tops of the other buildings below her feet. She turned around to look at Henry and stretched out her arms.
“Look! I’m standing on air!”
He reached her in a few long strides, picked her up, and ignored her surprised squeak as he hauled her back to the solid floor.
“What are you doing?” she said, laughing as he set her down.
“Rescuing you, of course.” He kissed her.
She took him to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, mentioning that the name had nothing to do with Emily’s Griffin.
Nobody called it that, anyway, she explained; the “Griffin” had been a somewhat recent addition, and Chicagoans were hostile to name changes.
Henry said he heartily approved of this civic trait.
He spent two hours at the U-boat exhibit, enthralled by the explanations of both the naval strategy and the science of submarines. But he also liked Rose’s favorite room, the Whispering Gallery.
Maybe because the museum was about to close, they had it to themselves. She showed him the brass footprints that indicated where he should stand at the end of the long, curved room, then took her place at the other far end, her back to him.
In a low voice, she asked, “Henry, are you enjoying the museum?”
“Good God,” he murmured. “It is as though you are right next to me.”
She felt the smile spread across her face. The effect of the curved walls on sound waves was pure science, but it felt like magic.
“Don’t you know?” she teased. “I’m always with you.”
A moment of silence. She scrunched up her face. That had sounded too serious.
“And yet you are too far away,” he said, his voice dipping into that lower, huskier tone that sent delicious shivers up her spine.
“Is that right?” she asked, with a quick glance at the gallery entrance to make sure they were still alone. “What would you do if I were closer?”
“Hmm. I do like you being able to hear me without seeing me,” he mused aloud. “Maybe I will blindfold you.”
Rose pressed her fingers to her lips. The tingles in her body traveled lower. “You have to really trust someone to let them blindfold you,” she said.
“And do you trust me?”
“Absolutely.”
Much later that night, after Henry had found many ways to tease and indulge her, he slept naked next to her in the lamplight.
The scarf-turned-blindfold had been set aside, and Rose looked at him for a long time, memorizing his dark straight brows, the contour of his jaw, the texture of his skin.
She could’ve asked to take a picture of him, but she knew no photo would capture him the way her memories could, the image filtered by the unnamed feelings in her heart.