Chapter 7
The flight from Reagan National to Hartsfield-Jackson took just under two hours, which was exactly enough time to answer seventeen emails, review briefing materials for Monday’s agriculture subcommittee, and think about Chad approximately forty-three times.
He’d lost count somewhere over Virginia.
The flight attendant brought a ginger ale, and Hank caught himself wondering whether Chad preferred ginger ale or Sprite—which was, he recognized, not a thought a serious person had while reviewing soybean subsidies.
His briefing folder lay open on the tray table.
He’d read the same paragraph four times without retaining a word.
This is who you are now. A United States senator who can’t focus on soybeans because a twenty-three-year-old bartender might prefer Sprite.
His phone buzzed in the cupholder before he’d cleared the airport loop. A text from Chad: Safe landing?
Yes. Driving to Shelby’s now.
Quick response: Cool. Don’t text and drive!
I’m voice texting.
OK. Be careful then.
Your concern is touching.
I’m very concerned. You’re my ride to good restaurants.
LOL!
He set the phone down and focused on the road. His smile lingered.
The landscape shifted as he left the city behind—strip malls giving way to farmland, billboards advertising peach stands and personal injury lawyers, the occasional church marquee promising salvation or a fish fry.
Sometimes both on the same Saturday. This was home.
Or had been. Now it was a constituency, a set of appearances, a place that knew a version of him he’d been performing so long it had almost become real.
Almost.
Shelby’s house sat on three acres outside Cumming—white clapboard, wraparound porch, like something out of Better Homes and Gardens.
She and Lowell had bought it right after the wedding.
Shelby had thrown herself into the renovation the way she threw herself into everything—her dissertation, her garden, and her opinions about Hank’s love life.
Hank pulled into the gravel drive and parked beside Lowell’s truck. Before he’d cut the engine, the front door burst open, and a small figure came careening down the porch steps.
“Fuzzy! Fuzzy!”
Owen was almost two and already possessed of his mother’s determination and his father’s complete disregard for formality. Hank barely got the car door open before the boy was attached to his legs.
“Hey, buddy.” Hank scooped him up. Owen’s hands went immediately to his beard, grabbing with the scientific curiosity of a toddler conducting research.
“Fuzzy,” Owen said again.
“That’s me.” Hank settled him on his hip. “You’ve gotten bigger. What’s your mama been feeding you?”
“Dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets,” Shelby clarified from the porch, dish towel over one shoulder. “Current obsession. We go through forty pounds a week. I’ve considered buying stock.”
She came down the steps and wrapped her arms around both of them—Hank and Owen together—and held on a beat longer than usual. When she pulled back, she studied his face with the look he’d learned to dread during their marriage: the one that meant she’d spotted something he hadn’t meant to show.
“You look different,” she said.
“I got a haircut.”
“That’s not it.”
“New shirt?”
“Hank.”
“I look the same.”
“No, you don’t.” She took Owen from him and balanced the boy on her hip, still studying him. “Come inside. Lowell’s finishing something in the barn. I made pimento cheese.”
“You made pimento cheese?”
“It’s cheese and mayonnaise, not a declaration of love. Don’t get sentimental.” But she was smiling, and Hank followed her inside, feeling oddly transparent.
She always could see through you. That was the problem, and the gift.
The kitchen was cluttered in the way of houses with toddlers—Owen’s artwork magnetized to the refrigerator, a basket of toys in the corner that had clearly migrated from its designated territory.
Owen made a beeline for the basket and settled in with a plastic stegosaurus, narrating an elaborate scenario that seemed to involve the dinosaur going grocery shopping.
Shelby handed him a Sweetwater 420 without asking.
“It’s barely noon,” Hank said, taking it.
“Noted.” She took one for herself and dropped into the chair across from him.
“So. I have heard about this person—Chad—exactly once, over the phone, with approximately zero usable details. You gave me a briefing memo, Hank—name, age, occupation—like you were staffing a committee. I need actual information. What does he look like?”
Hank turned the bottle in his hands. “He’s... young.”
“You mentioned. With a tone of voice that suggested you were turning yourself in.”
“Blond. Blue eyes. About six feet. Lean.” He stopped, aware that he was listing physical attributes like a police report.
“He’s an art student. Senior at GW. Corcoran.
He paints—actually paints, Shelby. He’s talented.
There’s this piece he did, abstract, two figures—First Kiss.
He let me have it.” The painting was back in DC, propped against the wall of his apartment, waiting.
Chad had said a couple of weeks for the varnish to cure before he’d hang it.
Hank had caught himself checking the wall for it every morning anyway, as though it might appear on its own.
“He let you have it?” Shelby’s eyebrow went up. “A painting?”
“I offered to buy it. He said I could just have it.” Hank heard how that sounded. “Don’t read into it.”
“I am absolutely reading into it.”
“He works at a bar in Dupont Circle. Bartends to pay for school.” He took a pull of his beer. “He’s been hurt before. An ex with substance problems. Another situation that went badly. He has reasons to be cautious, and he’s giving me a chance anyway, and I’m—” He stopped. Studied the beer label.
“You’re what?”
“Trying very hard not to mess it up.”
Shelby watched him with something he could read perfectly but didn’t want to name.
“And the physical part?” she said. “The thing you were terrified about? How did that go?”
Heat crept up his neck. “It went well.”
“Well. Again, you sound like you’re reviewing a committee hearing.”
“It went... very well.”
“Henry Fortner.” She leaned forward, eyes alight. “You are blushing.”
“I’m not—”
“You are crimson.” She pointed at the counter. “You are the color of that tomato.”
“Can we change the subject?”
“No. We cannot.”
Hank rubbed the back of his neck. This was Shelby.
She’d seen him through everything—the stilted intimacy during their marriage that had confused them both, the midnight phone calls after the divorce when the loneliness was a physical weight, the afternoon two years ago when he’d sat in this same kitchen and finally said the word gay out loud. She had earned this.
“It was good,” he said carefully. “Really good. Better than—well, better than I’d built it up in my head, you know? Twenty years of imagining. I was convinced the reality would be awkward and terrible, and I’d discover I’d been wrong about myself.” He looked at her. “I wasn’t wrong.”
Shelby’s face softened. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.
“Good,” she said. Simply.
Then she released his hand, and the softness sharpened back. “Follow-up question. Have you experimented? Tried different things? Or are you doing the same thing every time, like it’s a set menu?”
“Shelby—”
“I’m serious. You spent a long time in a holding pattern. You’ve got some catching up to do.” She pointed her beer at him. “Stop being so vanilla. Try something new. Something adventurous. Like—” She waved a hand, searching. “I don’t know. Doggy-style.”
Hank choked on his beer. It went partly up his nose, which was both painful and embarrassing.
“What?” Shelby looked enormously pleased with herself.
“I’m not—” he coughed. “We’re not having this conversation.”
“We are having this conversation. You just snorted a craft beer because of it. That makes it legit.”
“I can’t take sex advice from my ex-wife.”
“Why not? I have ten years of field research. I’m an expert witness.” She grinned. “Doggy-style, Hank. Write it down.”
From the corner, Owen looked up from his stegosaurus. “Doggy,” he said, smiling.
“See?” Shelby said. “Even Owen agrees.”
Hank buried his face in his hands. He was laughing despite himself—or maybe because of himself. It was absurd, all of it: his ex-wife prescribing sexual positions while a toddler spoke of dinosaurs and doggies.
The back door opened, and Lowell came in, wiping his hands on a rag. Broad-shouldered and unhurried, he paused in the doorway, taking in the scene—Hank red-faced, Shelby triumphant, Owen waving a stegosaurus.
“Do I want to know?” Lowell asked.
“No,” Hank said.
“Probably not,” Shelby agreed.
Lowell nodded, unsurprised. He crossed to the sink and washed his hands with the thoroughness of a man who’d learned not to ask follow-up questions. “Heard you met someone,” he said over his shoulder.
“Shelby told you.”
“Heard her on the phone. I was just in the blast radius.” He dried his hands, grabbed a beer, and sat down at the table. “Good for you. About time.”
It wasn’t effusive. It wasn’t a speech. Hank appreciated that more than he could say.
“Thanks, Lowell.”
“Mm-hm.” He took a pull of his beer. “She’ll keep grilling you through dinner, just so you know. I’d pace yourself on the details. Give her too much at once and she escalates.”
“I do not escalate,” Shelby said.
Lowell looked at Hank. Hank looked at Lowell. Neither of them said anything.
“Oh, shut up,” Shelby said. “Both of you.”
They ate lunch on the back porch—pimento cheese sandwiches, tomatoes from the garden still warm from the sun, sweet tea so sugary Hank’s molars ached. Owen sat in his high chair between Shelby and Lowell, dismantling his sandwich and discarding the wreckage.
Watching them—Shelby wiping Owen’s face, Lowell refilling her glass without being asked, the boy reaching for both of them indiscriminately—Hank felt what he always felt here. Warm inside this family’s orbit, yet aware the orbit wasn’t his.