12. Corey
— ? —
Corey
The drive to the foundation takes nineteen minutes. I spend all of them rehearsing what I’m going to say, and none of it survives contact with the lobby.
The Skair Foundation occupies the first four floors of a renovated brick building downtown, all exposed beams and natural light and framed photos of smiling volunteers.
I’ve been here twice, both times on Willow’s arm, both times bored out of my mind.
Today I shove through the glass doors like a man storming a beach.
The receptionist stands up. “Sir? Sir, do you have an appointment?”
“Where’s Skair?”
“I’m sorry, you can’t just…”
“GLENN SKAIR.” My voice bounces off the exposed brick. Heads turn. Someone’s coffee cup stops halfway to their mouth. “Get him down here or I’ll go floor by floor.”
I don’t have to. The elevator opens and Glenn steps out, and whatever he sees in my face tells him exactly who I am and exactly why I’m here, because he crosses the lobby in six strides and his fist connects with my jaw before I get a single word out.
“That’s for hurting Willow, you bastard!”
The lobby erupts. I stagger back into the reception desk, taste copper, and then instinct takes over and I swing back.
We crash into the desk together, pens and paperwork flying, someone screaming, and I get one good hit in before he lands another, and we go down in a tangle on the polished concrete floor like two idiots who never learned a better language.
“Say it.” I get a fistful of his expensive shirt. “You and my wife. Say it to my face.”
“Are you INSANE?” He shoves me off, scrambles up, chest heaving. His lip is bleeding. “Your wife? I’m not sleeping with Willow!”
“I’ve seen the texts. Dinner again tonight? Ring any bells?”
“What texts? We have dinner together because we’re friends, you fucking dumbass!”
“Friends.” I’m on my feet now too. Around us the entire staff of the foundation stands frozen, phones out. Someone is filming this. I don’t care. “Friends don’t hold hands across restaurant tables. Friends don’t get midnight phone calls. Friends don’t…”
“She was comforting me! My husband just fucking died!”
The lobby goes very quiet.
The word doesn’t fit anywhere. I stand there with blood in my mouth and my chest heaving and I try to make the sentence mean something else, and it won’t.
“Your what?”
“My husband.” Glenn’s voice cracks down the middle, and the fury on his face is collapsing into grief right in front of me, right in front of everyone, like a building coming down.
“My husband, John, died a few weeks ago. We were married three years. Together eight. Nobody knew because I was a coward, and the only person who ever knew, the only person who sat with me while I fell apart, was your wife. THAT’S what the dinners were.
THAT’S what the midnight call was. She held my hand while I planned a funeral I couldn’t even cry at. ”
Glenn is gay. He was married. His husband is dead. And the husband was John, the quiet man I met at a charity thing years ago and forgot about within the hour.
The facts sit there and refuse to become anything other than what they are.
She was comforting a widower. And I called her a whore for it.
“Where is she?” My voice comes out wrong, scraped raw. “Please. I need to see her. I need to…”
“You need to.” Glenn wipes the blood off his lip with the back of his hand and laughs, and there’s nothing in it but contempt. “You NEED to. That’s rich.”
“Glenn. Please.”
“You want to talk to her?” He pulls out his phone, dials, puts it on speaker. She answers on the second ring, her voice careful. “Willow,” Glenn says. “He’s here. He knows.”
Silence on the line. Three seconds of it, long enough for me to lean toward the phone like a plant toward light.
“Willow. Baby, I’m so sorry, I didn’t…”
“Stay away from Glenn. Stay away from the building. You told me never to show my face again. Let’s keep our word.”
Click.
The dial tone fills the lobby. Somebody coughs. A security guard has appeared at Glenn’s shoulder, hand hovering near his radio.
“Mr. Skair, should we call the police?”
“No police.” Glenn doesn’t take his eyes off me. He straightens his ruined shirt, and when he speaks again his voice is level and cold and absolutely done. “Get out of my building before I finish what I started.”
I go.
Outside, the sun is shining. People walk past me on the sidewalk with coffee cups and phone conversations, an entire city full of people who didn’t just burn their lives down in a nonprofit lobby.
She was comforting him. His husband died, and she was the only one who knew, and she carried that grief for him while I sat in the dark inventing crimes.
I get in my car and I don’t start the engine. I just sit there with my split lip and my ringing jaw, and for the first time since the kitchen, I let myself understand what I’ve done.