Chapter 8 Sully
Chapter eight
Sully
On my next day off, I finally returned Devil in the White City the way I did most things I'd let slide, with a practiced air of mild contrition. On the way in, the Harold Washington Library's gargoyles loomed over me. I gave them a quick glance, checking whether they’d noticed.
The woman at the circulation desk scanned the book without looking up. "Chicago doesn't charge overdue fines," she said in the tone of someone who'd delivered the information several thousand times to people who braced unnecessarily.
"Right," I said. "I knew that."
She looked at me for exactly one second. "Okay."
I stood there a moment with my prepared apology going nowhere, then pocketed my hands and left.
The coffee place two blocks south of our building had a short line. The guy behind the counter remembered my order and started on it when I came through the door. I respected the efficiency.
"You look like you're thinking."
I shrugged. "I try not to do that before coffee."
"Smart man."
I paid and picked up my cup. Then I turned back.
"You forget something?"
"Actually—can I get a second? Same thing."
He looked at me. "You don't usually."
"I know."
The rest of the way home, I didn't try to figure out why I'd bought the second cup. Examining too closely was how I talked myself out of things worth doing.
The hallway was quiet. Pratt's door was closed. It wasn't a game day, so he was either at the practice facility or home lying low.
I set the second cup down in front of his door and straightened. My keys were in my pocket. I turned them over once without taking them out.
I didn't knock.
I stood there for a minute, maybe less. If the door opened, I had something ready.
The door didn't open, and I went to my place. I put music on, "Rhiannon." I still didn't understand what Stevie was onto with that one.
I opened the cabinet above the stove where I kept things that didn't have a permanent home. There was a tin of loose tea from a phase I'd gone through in October, a can of bacon, and a box of matches. I realized I didn't need any of those and closed the cabinet.
My plants on the sill were still hanging on. I watered them, probably too much, but they received it without comment.
I looked at the wall and thought about knocking. It would tell Pratt I was home.
I didn't. The coffee was already out there. If it meant something, I didn't need to knock. If it didn't, knocking would make it mean something, and that felt like cheating.
Strategic patience was foreign to me. I sat on the couch while Stevie sang.
I made it through the day, but eventually I needed something to do with my hands. I could cook.
There was pasta in the kitchen. It was that or cereal, and I'd had cereal last night for dinner.
The pot was the first thing I grabbed. It was the big one that I used when I had people over. I'd already filled it and had it on the stove before I registered which one I'd reached for. I stood there a moment, looking at it.
Then I salted the water the way Tomasz had shown me once during a slow close. He said to use more salt than you'd think. He'd said it twice. That was how I knew he meant it. I turned up the heat.
While it came to a boil, I pulled out garlic, a can of crushed tomatoes, and the heel of a Parmesan block that had been in the back of the fridge longer than I cared to admit.
Oil in, garlic in. I let it go until the edges started to color.
I added the tomatoes, turned the heat down, and left it to do what it needed to do.
The pasta went in when the water was ready. I stirred it once and left it.
There was going to be too much. One person didn't need the big pot, and I wasn't a leftovers person. Food in containers had a way of becoming a project I kept meaning to get to until they evolved into something to apologize to.
When the pasta was done, I pulled it straight into the saucepan and tossed it until everything was coated. Then I stood at the counter with two bowls and split the pasta evenly.
I looked at them for a moment. Then I went to the wall.
"I made pasta. There's too much of it and I'm not interested in a container situation, so."
Returning to the kitchen, I started eating over the sink.
Thirteen minutes.
I know because I checked my phone when I set my bowl down at six forty-three, and when the knock at the door came, it was six fifty-six.
Pratt was in the hallway with a bottle of wine. It was a good one, not showing off expensive, but good.
"You know wine," I said.
"Well enough."
I found the opener on the third drawer try. My kitchen drawers operated on a system of pure entropy. Pratt watched me do the whole thing without offering to help or making me feel watched. It was a skill.
I poured two glasses. Looked at the counter, where we'd both eaten standing up once before, and carried both glasses to the table instead.
My table had four chairs and usually held my mail, a jacket I kept meaning to hang up, and whatever book I was currently not finishing. I'd cleared it that afternoon while I'd been moving around the condo, not doing anything in particular.
Pratt sat across from me. He set his glass with measured space from the edge, far enough not to be a spill risk, but close enough to reach without leaning. He settled with both forearms on the table, fully present.
My place felt different. I was using my table for something I rarely used it for. When I had friends over, we usually ate in the kitchen or on the couch.
I picked up my glass, and he picked up his. He pushed his forward, and our glasses clinked.
"The pasta's still warm," I said.
"Good," he said.
I talked while I plated it. The bar was safe and familiar, a territory I could cover without looking where I was going. Thursday’s shift had run hot until around ten and then flipped into the weirdness that happened when the after-work crowd thinned and the staying-for-its-own-sake crowd took over.
“There was a guy at the rail for most of the night,” I said. “Ordered nothing for the first twenty minutes. He stood there with his hands flat on the bar, as if he were waiting for someone to explain what came next.”
Pratt ate, listening.
“I asked him what he was drinking, and he said, ‘I’m not sure yet. So I left him alone. Figured he’d either settle or leave.”
I sat down.
“He didn’t. Stayed right there. Watched the room, but not like people-watchers do. More like he was trying to learn the rules.” I picked up my glass, turned it once. “About half an hour in, I gave him a beer. Nothing interesting. Just something to hold.”
“He didn’t order it?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But he took it and didn’t question it. He drank about half, then set it down and said thank you, like I’d done him a favor he hadn’t known how to ask for.”
Pratt paused, holding his fork in the air, and then resumed.
“He came back up an hour later with a different posture. He had his shoulders down and eyes up. Ordered a second one. Same beer. He paid, tipped, and then left.” I took a bite. “That’s a full arc, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You decided he needed something.”
“I decided he needed an entry point,” I said. “It's the same thing on most nights.”
"Pasta's good," Pratt said.
"Thanks. Nora has a theory that every bar has a frequency, like a radio station, and the bartender's job is to keep the signal going. Lose the signal and the room goes to static. She's not wrong, but she's also deeply philosophical for someone who refuses to explain how she takes her coffee."
"How does she take it?"
"Black, but she makes a face every time, like she's terribly disappointed. Three years of this. No explanation offered."
Pratt ate another forkful and then set his fork down. "How do you decide," he asked, "whether someone needs something or wants something?"
I opened my mouth to deliver the easy answer, a bartender one about language and positioning. I had it fully assembled, but it didn't come out.
"Need shows up first," I said. "Before they know it themselves. It's in how they sit and whether they make eye contact or avoid it. Want is noisier. It announces itself. Need waits."
"And you act on it before they ask?"
"Most of the time."
"Does that ever go wrong?"
"Sure. I sometimes read someone as needing space when they want to talk. Or I come over and they aren't ready. I recalibrate." I picked up my fork. "The read isn't always right, but not reading at all is worse."
He considered that and nodded once.
I changed the direction of the conversation.
"I saw on the bar's TV that you're from Minnesota, right? Is it as cold there?"
He answered quickly and easily, as though he had answered it dozens of times and knew the response.
"Colder. I think it's even that way indoors.
In Minnesota on February mornings, the locker room hadn't heated up yet.
You'd sit on the bench with your gear half on, and the cold would come up through the concrete and your skate blades and settle in your feet. It didn't hurt exactly."
"But you felt it."
"You felt it." He set his glass down. "My father ran the four-thirty sessions on Saturdays. He thought early ice built something specific."
"Did it?"
A beat. "I don't know what would have been different if I'd had late ice instead. So I can't say."
It was a perfectly Pratt answer.
"Did you want to be there?" I asked. "At the four-thirty sessions."
He looked at his glass. "I wanted to be good. The sessions were necessary for that."
"That's not an answer."
He didn't fill the silence that followed. Neither did I. It sat between us over the remains of the pasta and the wine..
Pratt carried his glass to the sink, rinsed it, and set it in the rack beside mine. He was ready to go.
"Thank you for dinner," he said.
"You brought the wine."
"You made the food."
I walked him to the door. He stepped into the hallway and turned back once.
"Goodnight, Sully. Thank you for the coffee."
"You—you forgot something." I reached out for his hand, and he let me pull him back inside.
I kissed him. He kissed back. I smiled like I was half-drunk.
"Goodnight."
He left, and the door closed behind him.
Usually, when my friends left, something in the condo would reset. Their energy went with them, and the space contracted back down to my exact shape.
It didn't happen when Pratt left. There was a hole.
I wiped the table. The clock above the stove said nine forty-seven. It had been three hours. I pulled out a chair and sat at the cleared table.
Once, as he watched me get my dorm room ready for visitors, Bryan said, Sul, sometimes you move so fast nobody can follow you.
It wasn't a criticism. Just an observation from someone who'd known me long enough to see the shape of me clearly. I'd laughed.
At midnight, I was brushing my teeth when my phone lit up on the bathroom counter.
Pratt: Thank you again.
Sully: The wine was a good call, for the record.
His reply came while I was putting the toothbrush back.
Pratt: It had your name on it.
I laughed out loud into the bathroom mirror; the sound bounced off the tile. I looked at my face and then turned off the light. I lay on my bed in the dark.
Pratt's side of the wall was quiet. I thought about doing something but didn't think too long, or I would think myself out of doing it.
I found a shirt on the floor and pulled it on. Next, a pair of jeans. I opened my door and stepped into the hallway.
At Pratt's door, I knocked. Not two. Only one.
From the other side, I heard a sound. I stood and waited.