Chapter 23 Beckett #2
"If I never let myself have you, I can never make you pay for it," I said. "That's the whole system. And the only kind of love I can give anybody is the kind nobody can tell me I haven't earned. That's the kind I do where they can't see it."
There was a long silence on that step.
"So you paid nineteen thousand four hundred dollars into a dog's account," Tessa said. "In three instalments. A month apart."
"So it'd read like a payment plan."
"Because a gift can be refused," she said, "and a system can't."
She put her face in her hands a second. When she took them away she was not crying. She was doing the other thing she does, which is looking straight at a problem.
"All right," she said. "Then I have to put mine down, and I've been sitting here ten minutes trying to get out of it."
"You don't have to."
"I do, because you just did." She pulled the cardigan across herself. "I have made needing anybody into a crime, Beckett. Not a weakness. A crime. I could not take a decaf off you in December without making a face about it. In October I would not let you carry a bag of food eleven feet.
"And I've called it strength, and I want to say something about my mother and I'm not going to be fair to her.
"She built the house onto the clinic," Tessa said.
"Everybody says that like it's romantic.
She poured forty feet of covered concrete between a surgical suite and a kitchen door in 1998 so she would never have to go home.
She was never once not at work. And she was the best person I ever met.
She died at fifty-four owing money on ground she'd rented for twenty-four years.
I have arranged my entire adult life to be exactly like hers and called it loyalty. "
"Tessa."
"And this is the thing I actually came out to say and then didn't say for an hour." She looked at me. "It was never about being kept. It's in the clause. I wrote it in red at that table, I will not be kept. I meant it when I wrote it and it isn't true.
"I was never afraid of somebody paying for something.
Since I was twenty-two I have been afraid of needing somebody out loud.
I have been afraid of being the one left standing there holding the need.
That's all it is. It isn't complicated and it isn't strength.
I have organized a hundred and six animals and a brother and a business around it. "
I did not say anything, because there was nothing to say to it that would not have been smaller than it.
"You stayed," she said. "I opened the door at three in the morning and told you to go. I know how to do that, I'm extremely good at it. And you sat down on my couch."
"Yeah."
"Nobody has ever done that," Tessa said. Her voice went, once, and she put her hand up. "Don't. Don't come over here, I'll lose it."
I stayed where I was, which was the hardest thing I did all week.
We did it at the board, because that is where the law is in that house.
She got the marker off the top of the refrigerator, which she can reach if she wants to, which I had suspected since January.
"Draft it," she said.
"You're the one who wrote the charter."
"You're the one who does capitals."
So I drafted it, and she stood at my shoulder and made me change one word.
Amendment two. Full disclosure, both directions, effective immediately. No party shall decide a material thing alone. This includes money. This includes the other party's own good.
"That last sentence is aimed at me," she said.
"It's aimed at both of us."
"It's aimed at me specifically. Leave it in."
Then I said the thing I had been holding since about five in the morning. I said it before she initialed, on purpose. I did not want it sitting under a signature she had already given.
"I want to ask you something out loud," I said. "In advance. Before I do any part of it."
"All right."
"Walt's house has been sitting empty since December. It's paid off, he owned it outright. It's mine. I've had a number on it since January because a man came and gave me one." I put the cap on the marker. "It's four hundred and sixty. Your formula price is four ten."
She did not say anything at all.
"I'm not offering you money. I'm not paying anything off and I'm not doing anything through a dog.
I want to sell my grandfather's house and put it into your mother's ground.
I want both our names on the deed. I want a lawyer to write it and you to read every page and change whatever you want.
If you want a written debt against my share so it's a loan and not a gift, we'll do it that way. "
"Beckett."
"It's not a rescue. It's a partnership and there's paper." I looked at her. "Let me do it where you can see me."
Tessa Reeves stood in her mother's kitchen with her hand over her mouth for about ten seconds.
"Beckett, that house is the only thing you own."
"I know exactly what it is," I said. "He fed a kid for free in a back booth for eleven years because his father wasn't there. He'd think putting it under a rescue was the funniest thing that ever happened to him, and then he'd do it."
She took the marker out of my hand and initialed amendment two, T.R. She looked at the board a second longer. Then she capped it and put it on the counter instead of the top of the fridge.
Then she turned around and got both hands in my collar.
I have kissed that woman in a hallway and in a truck and on a kitchen floor at midnight.
It was not like any of them. Neither of us was in a hurry and neither of us was proving anything.
She had her hands on the sides of my neck.
I had one arm all the way around her and my other hand up in her hair.
It went on a long time. About two thirds of the way through it she made a small sound against my mouth that was not a good sound. I stopped. She said, "Keep going," so I kept going.
Behind us on the stove, the soup was still on low.
At two o'clock I was at the rink, in the room forty minutes early, which is normal for me.
I had a photograph on my phone that I took at seven that morning. It was of a refrigerator door with a charter on it and two amendments under it and four sets of initials. There is a place on Colfax that will print a small photograph in nine minutes.
I unlaced the top of my blocker, the padded glove on my stick hand, where the wrist strap anchors.
There is an exam form in there with a dog's medication schedule on it in a woman's slanted handwriting, dated the fourth of October. She wrote it at dawn so a night would look like medicine. There is a grey square of paper the size of a stamp with a crease across it from a concrete floor.
I put the photograph in with them and laced it back up and sat there with the thing on my knee.
I have been paying for eleven years. I paid a room in Minnesota and I paid a market for two seasons. I paid a woman $19,400 in a currency she never agreed to accept. I have understood myself the entire time as a man with an outstanding balance.
And that morning she stood on a step and heard all of it. She heard the sentence about my mother and the corollary and the dog's account. She did not send me an invoice.
I could not make it add up. After a while I stopped trying, and went out and skated.