Chapter 12 Sully
Chapter twelve
Sully
Two mugs. I'd pulled two mugs from the cabinet before I'd finished waking up.
I stood there, hand still on the second one, looking at it as if it owed me an explanation. I put it back, closed the cabinet, and started my coffee.
Pratt had been on the road for five days. I kept reaching for things I didn't need. I went to the wrong drawer and opened the wrong cabinet. Twice I stood in the kitchen doorway for no reason at all.
I picked up my phone, found my sister, Tricia, in my contacts, and called her. I didn't have anything specific to say.
She picked up on the second ring.
"You good?" she asked. No how are you or what's up.
"I've got the day off. Tomasz wanted to train a new bartender, and he asked if I could switch days. Thought I'd check in."
"Before or after you unnecessarily reorganize something?"
"Before," I said. "I'm in recovery."
We talked about her kid, who'd recently discovered he could climb bookshelves. She mentioned a job meeting that achieved nothing in ninety minutes.
I asked the right questions, and she answered them. We went back and forth the same way we'd done since we were kids. I told her about meeting a beluga named Ansel, but I didn't tell her who was with me.
Tricia had a way of seeing through me. She'd been doing that since at least high school. She looped around topics instead of coming at them directly.
"Are you sure there's nothing specific, or—"
"Calling to call."
"Okay," she said. "You're allowed."
We hung up, and I got dressed for the day. My phone buzzed while I was pulling the Ironhawks t-shirt over my head that I'd bought in a frenzied shopping splurge.
Pratt: Soft ice this morning. Good otherwise.
That was Pratt's way of saying good morning. He reported on the surrounding conditions.
Sully: How soft? Ankle-deep? Are we talking marshland?
It took four minutes to get a response. He'd probably read my message, gone back to whatever he was doing, and answered when he was ready.
Pratt: Not that soft. Edges held.
Sully: Devastating. I had money on the marshland.
Pratt: You bet against the ice?
Sully: I always bet in favor of entropy. It's usually a losing position, but I commit.
Another pause.
Pratt: Reasonable.
I set the phone down. Then I thought of something else and picked it up again.
Sully: How's Columbus?
Pratt: Fine. Same.
Sully: You say that about every city.
Pratt: They're all the same city with different signage.
I laughed, always a good thing to do before noon.
Dara from 4C showed up mid-afternoon with a bag of Chinese food . I took her coat.
"Cal wants a rematch," she said, already inside my kitchen opening the containers. "He also wants you to know he wants to bet twelve dollars next time."
"High-roller. I still think he uses weighted darts."
We ate on the couch with the TV muted, captions running under a home renovation show. On screen, a couple stood in what had been described, via caption, a bonus room.
Dara pointed her fork at the screen. "She doesn't want the Murphy bed."
"She said she wanted the Murphy bed."
"She said she was fine with the Murphy bed. That's not the same thing."
"She literally said—" I looked at the screen, where the caption had moved on. "She said it would be practical."
"Practical." Dara turned to look at me. "She said practical."
"That's a positive word."
"Sully, when someone says a Murphy bed would be practical, they are describing it the way you'd describe a colonoscopy. It might be necessary, but it's unfortunate and definitely not what anyone wants."
On screen, the husband put his arm around his wife and pointed at the wall where the Murphy bed would go. She smiled at the wall.
"She wants a garden," I said.
"I agree. She wants a garden, and he wants a Murphy bed for guests they don't have."
Around the forty-minute mark, she glanced at the wall.
"Not back until when?"
"Few more days."
She looked at me, then back at the TV. "You're counting."
"I know the schedule. I watch the—"
"I know," she said. "How many away games this month?"
"Dara."
"Asking for a friend."
"Six."
I looked at the wall. It was just that—a wall. Pratt had been gone for five days already, and I still found myself listening for sounds from the other side.
Tricia was right. Reorganizing was my vibe. I turned my attention to the vinyl album shelf. I could arrange things by type of music instead of artist. That would put the Bee Gees next to Donna Summer instead of the Beach Boys.
I pulled all the albums off and stacked them on the floor. The room immediately looked worse.
I sorted by genre until I had a small pile of albums that didn't fit neatly anywhere. I decided it could be miscellaneous and piled everything back onto the shelf.
My phone buzzed.
Pratt: Game in three hours. You working tonight?
Sully: Friday. Go do your pre-game thing.
Pratt: Already did.
Sully: The whole thing?
Pratt: Yes.
I pictured Pratt, focused and slightly bewildered by me.
Sully: The song and everything?
Pratt:The song and everything.
Sully: Good luck.
Pratt:Thanks.
Then, after a pause:
Pratt: Watch if you can.
I ordered Italian delivery early in the evening. It always arrived with an extra meatball.
Before eating, I crossed the room and put Steely Dan on. It was what I liked to call cocktail rock. It never sounded right without a wineglass in hand.
I poured a glass of the Montepulciano from one of our vendors that I'd been saving for no particular reason. Wednesday night was a reason.
Sitting on the floor in front of the couch, I dug into my third meatball and put the game on.
It was not a good night for Columbus, but it was an excellent one for Pratt. The announcers kept mentioning him.
Pratt is locked in tonight. Was that newsworthy? How else did he play hockey?
Late in the second period, a Columbus forward cut through the slot and got a clean look. Pratt moved maybe six inches, and the puck hit his chest, then dropped in front of him. The forward stood there for a half-second with his stick still raised, personally offended.
I dug into my fourth meatball and watched Pratt skate to the corner for a puck. Some goalies filled the gaps with performance. Not Pratt. He just went and got the puck.
After finishing my dinner, I took my plate to the kitchen and came back. I sat on the couch as the game moved into the third period. Somewhere along the way, I nodded off.
My phone lit up at eleven forty-three.
Pratt: 16 saves. Won 3-1.
I woke up enough to read it.
Sully: I watched most of it. That save off the post in the second. That guy looked personally offended in the replay.
I had to wait almost five minutes for the response.
Pratt: He was.
Sully: Does that feel good? When they look personally offended?
A pause.
Pratt: Yes.
I laughed into the couch cushion.
Sully: Goodnight, Pratt.
Pratt: Goodnight.
***
The next morning, I wasn't sure I wanted to wake up. I knew what day it was, and I'd pushed it out of my mind all Wednesday.
It was there, already in the room.
It had been three years.
My mother picked up on the third ring.
"Hi, honey."
"Hey."
"You okay?"
"Yeah. I'm good."
"Good." She let it settle. "That's good."
I didn't call often. Usually, it was Mom checking in, but I called on the anniversary each year.
She'd known Bryan since I brought him home after school when I was nine years old. She'd fed him dinner approximately four hundred times, and she stood at my side at the funeral, saying nothing because there was nothing to say.
She didn't bring him up on the phone. She always waited on me.
"Tell his mom hi for me." That was all I could get out before I needed to hang up the phone.
I grabbed my coat and keys and left the condo.
The Harold Washington Library reading room had ceilings tall enough that the light arriving at the tables lost something on the way down. I sat near a window with a book I'd grabbed off a display on the way in.
It was The Undertaking. The name sounded appropriate. I opened it somewhere past the middle.
I didn't read it. That was fine. All I needed was the exercise of sitting somewhere with living people around. Somewhere that didn't require me to do anything.
Bryan would have found it funny.
He'd have come in, clocked the whole setup—me at a library table on a Thursday afternoon with a book I wasn't reading—and pulled out the chair across from me. He'd look at the book and then look at me.
The Undertaking, he'd have said. Interesting choice for a guy who's fine.
I am fine.
You're in a library, Sul.
Libraries are for everyone.
You haven't been in a library since— He'd give it some thought. Since Miss Grand forced us to check out books in sixth grade. You have never voluntarily been in a library.
I use the library.
You return books to the library. That's not the same thing. He'd have leaned back in his chair then, tipping backward. It always looked like he was about to go too far, but he never did.
What's going on?
We'd grown up six houses apart in Lexington, Massachusetts. We'd been best friends since the third grade. He had nearly twenty years of practice reading me.
He would have sat across from me in the library and waited me out. He was always patient.
What he would not have done was let me leave without saying the true thing.
The last time I'd seen him in person was on a chilly day in October, fourteen days before his mother called me. We'd grabbed lunch when I was passing through Boston between a weekend shift and a drive back to the apartment I was subletting in Providence.
We ate at a diner near his place, sitting in a booth by the window, and he'd ordered the same thing he always ordered: scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and coffee. We'd talked for two hours about nothing important.
I complained about my job. He complained about his job. He told me about a mutual friend's engagement that neither of us had seen coming. At the end, he'd walked me to my car and said call me this week and I'd said, yeah, definitely before I got in and drove away.
I didn't call that week.
Bryan's mother called me on a Sunday morning two weeks after the diner. I was still in bed. She opened saying, this is Bryan's mom. It had always been Mrs. Baker before.
That was my first clue that something was wrong. I just didn't know how wrong. He'd used a gun.
I sat in the Harold Washington Library with my hands flat on the book I wasn't reading and let the memory move through me.
It wasn't the call. I didn't need to go back there.
It was the diner. Bryan's fork with scrambled eggs on it.
Two hours of nothing important that turned out to be our last hours.
Call me this week.
Yeah, definitely.
I turned another page I didn't read and hung around for another twenty minutes.
When I was at Lake and State on my walk home, my phone buzzed.
Pratt: Bus to the airport. St. Louis next. You working tonight?
I stood on the corner and typed.
Sully: Tomorrow. What's in St. Louis? Never been there.
Pratt: Hockey.
Sully: Besides hockey.
The street light cycled, and I crossed.
Pratt: Toasted ravioli.
Sully: Have you had it?
Pratt: No. Varga says it's unnatural.
Sully: You should have it while you're there, as research.
Pratt: I'll consider it.
That was likely a no, but I had made him consider it.
I crossed on the green and headed north with my hands in my pockets and The Undertaking under my arm and the first smile of the day on my face. Bryan would have pointed it out.
He would have looked at my face on that corner and known immediately. He would say something that would make me laugh before I could get defensive about it.
I kept walking.
At home, I went to the living room and sat on the floor with my back against the couch. I pulled my knees up toward my chest.
I'd had friends before Bryan and I had friends after, but Bryan was the one who'd known me before I knew who I was. The guy I grew up with knew a version of me that existed before I started editing. He's seen the entire inventory.
Bryan was there for the awkward years, the years I hadn't known yet that I was gay. He knew before I told him.
When I finally said it out loud, we were seventeen, sitting on the hood of his car in the parking lot of a closed grocery store at eleven at night. I'd been working up to it for weeks, and when it finally came out sideways, I was terrified.
He looked at me for a second. Then he said: Okay. So when you said you thought that guy from the lacrosse team was annoying, you actually meant he was hot.
I swallowed hard. I actually meant he was hot.
Got it. He nodded like I'd told him something practical, like deciding to buy a different car. Is there anything you want to do about it, or are you just telling me?
Just telling you.
Okay. That was that.
He never made it weird. It was just a fact about me, the same as any other fact, and Bryan had approximately nine thousand facts about me filed in his head.
After that, it was easier to breathe.
Sometimes I thought about how much real estate he'd occupied. How completely I'd assumed he'd always be there, six houses away, or a phone call away, or available for a two-hour lunch at a diner booth whenever our schedules crossed. He was permanent until he wasn't.
I got up eventually and got ready for bed. It was early, but sleep was the fastest way to get to Friday.
Before I reached the bedroom, I turned back and crossed to the living room wall. I put one knuckle against the drywall and knocked.
Nothing from the other side, of course. Pratt was in St. Louis, likely in a hotel room with the temperature at sixty-six degrees and the blackout curtains pulled before he'd set his bag down.
I'd spent the past three years constantly on the move, trying to keep the rooms around me full. That way I didn't have to think.
It worked.
At least it did until a man moved in next door who wanted to look at me when I was still. I took my hand back.
I climbed into bed and lay on my back, staring at the ceiling.
Bryan would have had a read on Pratt immediately.
He'd have met him once and generated an accurate take on the situation.
He'd have watched Pratt for about twenty minutes and then found me at some point later, saying something like: He doesn't need you to be on, you know. You know that, right?
I'd have said I know.
I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and pressed my palm flat against the drywall. On the other side, everything would be in its place, waiting for Pratt's return.
I kept my hand there.
He doesn't need you to be on.
I know, Bry. I know.
Sunday was three days away. I was already counting.