Chapter 18 Sully
Chapter eighteen
Sully
Icame into the kitchen mostly upright, wearing yesterday's t-shirt, on the assumption that I was about to make coffee.
What I saw when I got there was Pratt at his counter slicing chicken into rectangles a person could measure with a ruler.
He'd already portioned white rice into a glass container at his elbow.
A second mug was on the counter, handle pointed toward me before I'd cleared the doorway.
I put it together. "Game day."
"Yes."
He didn't look up. I leaned a hip against the corner of the counter and watched him. "What time?"
"Eight-eighteen."
He poured coffee into the second mug and pushed it toward me. I drank.
"You didn't sleep on the floor."
He finished a cut and set the knife down so the blade lay flush against the long edge of the board. Then he wiped his hands on the towel.
"No."
I waited for a follow-up.
"It's not a strong system if it can't handle shocks."
The knife was already back in his hand.
I chuckled under my breath. "Good to know I qualify as a shock."
"You qualify."
I drank the coffee and watched Pratt crack an egg one-handed into a hot pan. The white spread and seized.
He plated the eggs for me. Then he spooned roasted carrots out of his air fryer and placed them along with the chicken and rice into three sections with no overlap.
"Eat with me."
"Thank you."
I was at the midpoint of my workweek. It was Saturday morning. I had a floating day that Tomasz placed wherever he needed it. This week it was today. I never argued because he always won.
After Pratt left, I went home to my place.
The box had been on the lower shelf of the closet since the morning after I came back from Nora's. I'd parked it there because I was tired of seeing it on the kitchen counter every time I walked past.
I'd thought the closet would help clear things up . It didn't. It was eight feet from where I made coffee, and through the door I could feel exactly where the box was.
The top shelf was where I kept the things I couldn't throw away but almost never used: a snowboard helmet, electrical cords that seemed to multiply on their own, and the printer box that had migrated there from the living room.
The shelf was high enough that I had to stretch to reach it or stand on a chair.
I dragged a kitchen chair down the hall and stood it in front of the closet. The legs left behind a new scrape on the floor.
The box was light in terms of weight. Emotionally, it was almost two tons. I lifted it off the lower shelf with both hands. As I slid the box onto the top shelf, I caught a thumb on the corner of the cardboard, and it tilted a quarter inch.
Bryan's room was on the second floor, east-facing, and in the fall, the light came through the one window gray and cold. His mother was downstairs making something with onions. It was different from my house because his mother cooked and my mother opened cans.
Bryan was sitting on the carpet, leaning back against the milk crate he used for a nightstand. He was sixteen. His hair was overdue for a cut. It fell into his dark eyes, and he didn't push it back. He had both hands laid flat on his chest and his feet crossed at the ankles.
I was on the floor beside him, close enough that our shoulders touched when either of us breathed in. I had come over to play Nintendo. He had held a record sleeve up when I walked in and said we're doing this first.
He had bought the album at a yard sale for a quarter. He told me about it on the walk to school.
He lowered the needle.
There was a half-second of hiss first. I'd never heard that before. At fifteen, the music I knew came out of a laptop and a pair of earbuds. It started clean.
The first chord came in.
"Just listen."
What I remember isn't the music. I learned the music later by heart, every track, because we played the album approximately two thousand times between that afternoon and graduation. What I remember from that first listen was Bryan's face.
He turned it up toward the ceiling, and his mouth didn't move. His eyes were open, but he didn't track anything. Before the first song was over, he smiled.
I had never watched another person be happy in that specific way before. I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it.
By the time the album ended, he had not moved. Neither had I. Bryan's mother called up the stairs that dinner was in twenty minutes. She had to do it twice.
My thumb was still on the corner of the cardboard. The plastic bin of cords was under my right elbow.
Bryan was dead and had been dead for three years, and the album he'd bought for a quarter was in a cardboard box in my hall closet in Chicago, and I was going to leave it there.
I set the box flush against the back wall of the shelf. My hand stayed on the front edge of the cardboard for one more beat. I straightened a flap and pushed the box another half inch deeper.
I climbed down and closed the closet door. The chair went back to the kitchen.
The phone rang while I was putting the chair back.
Tricia's name on the screen. I wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear and finished sliding the chair under the table.
"You're checking on me."
"I'm calling my little brother."
"On a Saturday morning?"
"I call you on Saturdays."
"You usually call me on Mondays."
There was a pause on her end that meant she was deciding whether to argue the point or concede it. "Fine. You see through me. I'm checking on you."
"Noted."
"So, how are you?"
"I'm good."
She waited.
"I am," I said. "I put the box away. It's in the closet. I won't do anything with it for a while. It will gather dust—in a new closet."
"Where in the closet?"
"Top shelf. Behind the printer box I never opened."
I heard noises in the background. Tricia said something away from the phone in the voice she used for that, patient and final at the same time. Her kid, Eddie, responded immediately, loud and incomprehensible.
"What happened?"
"He's mad that his banana broke."
"It broke?"
"In half. I peeled it, and it just broke. He thinks I peeled it wrong."
"Did you?"
"Apparently."
"Glue it back together."
Tricia laughed. "That is what you would do. He wants a new banana, but that would require a trip to the grocery store. I'm not doing that until tomorrow. We have a perfectly fine banana. It's just in two pieces instead of one."
"You're raising a structuralist."
"I'm raising a small dictator who believes that I will fold eventually. He's constantly drafting new laws for the household." Something crashed softly on her end. "Hold on."
I waited until she came back.
"Sorry. He's fine. The banana is also still fine, and the peel is now in the trash. He can eat half a banana now and the other half later, and the world will continue."
"Mom would've given him a new banana. You know that."
"Mom would've opened a can of pears or peaches and called it a day."
I laughed. "That's mean."
"It's accurate. Mom didn't mess around."
I leaned against my counter and watched a square of sun move across the floor.
"I'm really okay, Trish. I want you to know that."
"I know."
"I'm going to work in a couple of hours. I'm going to come home after, and I'll do it again tomorrow."
"Okay."
"You don't have to call me on Saturdays to check up."
"I will when I think I need to. It's what big sisters do."
"I know."
I heard comments in the background again. I wasn't sure whether it was a demand or a question.
"I have to go."
"Go."
"Love you."
"Love you, Sully."
I set the phone down and smiled. Then I pushed off the counter and went to get ready for work.
Pratt would already be at morning skate. Tonight, I told myself, after his game. I'd walk over to his condo and say it. I had the opening of the sentence ready—There's something I haven't told you.
***
Carver's at four-forty on a Saturday ran at half-volume. The ice machine cycled audibly in the back corner. I heard a pan set down hard through the swinging kitchen door, and then someone laughed at the start of a story.
Tomasz had already tuned the TVs above the bar to an Ironhawks pre-game show with the sound off. A man at the rail had begun the long, slow project of nursing a club soda.
I tied my apron and went straight to work.
Nora was on the floor side of the service rail, working through credit slips with a pencil tucked behind her ear, doing math in pen. She didn't look up when I passed her. "You got some sleep."
"I did."
"That's dangerous."
"Unprecedented, even."
Nora capped her pen and set it down. "Sullivan."
"Don't."
She tasted her coffee and made a face. "You haven't told him."
"Not yet."
She nodded slowly.
"He needs to know."
"I've got a shift to run."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got."
She held my eye for a beat longer. "You're managing him."
I'd built three rebuttals to her first sentence on the way to work. None of them survived face to face, and I had absolutely nothing for the last charge.
By six, the room was nearly full. By six-thirty, Nora was behind the bar with me on the second well, and we'd dropped into the silent two-person choreography we ran in a busy room.
I reached for the gin when her hand was already on it. She asked for tonic, and I'd already poured it for her. We hadn't said a word in twenty minutes when she spoke at the soda gun, voice pitched low for me alone.
"If he comes in tomorrow and asks me why you were at my place, I'm not lying for you."
"I'm not asking you to."
"You will be, if you don't go home and tell him."
"I know. That's why I will."
Above me, the bar TVs were ready for puck drop. Three guys sat at a desk above the ice, the rink lit behind them. A clock counted down in the corner.
I built a Manhattan and focused on the bar.
Tomasz turned the sound up at puck drop. Loud enough to hear at the bar but not carry out into the room.