Chapter 12 #2
But to his surprise, Ben finds himself blinking awake three hours later to the sound of his phone ringing instead.
Rolling over as though he’s in his full-size bed at home, and nearly pitching off the mattress as a result, he scrambles around looking for it.
It could be his cat sitter saying something happened to Roux, or Mrs. C calling to say she’s fallen and she can’t get up, or—
—Ben swallows hard, having found the phone. Pete.
He almost doesn’t answer, but the thought of letting it go to voicemail makes him feel like such a coward he forces himself to pick up the call.
Still, he’s hoping as he lifts the phone to his ear that maybe Chris had a change of heart and this is a work emergency—a follow-up from last night—anything but Pete calling to say that he heard Ben’s a total freak show and so he’d like to strike everything that happened between them from the official record and, also, file a restraining order.
But when he’s finally got the little speaker in range, Ben realizes that Pete is laughing.
Not a mocking laugh, or a mean one—a breathless, wildly entertained laugh, a laugh that sounds like it has survived several attempts to get it under control.
He gasps, “Do you have any idea how many weird conversations this explains,” and then, “I’m sorry, it’s not that I don’t see why you thought—Ben, I can’t tell you how many times I watched him eat rubber cement as a kid!
You couldn’t have known but—I mean, even the idea that we’d be—” and then he’s howling again, clearly too amused to speak.
After a second Ben finds, to his surprise, that he’s chuckling, too.
Pete’s not laughing at him, not exactly—Ben knows what it is to be laughed at, a sad corner of his soul trapped for eternity in that auditorium when he was a teenager, trying everything he could think of to shut the feed off.
This isn’t like that. Pete’s laughter is warm and delighted, so obviously tickled by the whole stupid, embarrassing thing that Ben, in spite of himself, can’t help but feel a bit better about it.
Still, he groans, as good-naturedly as he can manage.
“I’m glad this is how you’re taking it. I thought maybe, instead, you might be calling to lie to me out of misguided kindness?
Tell me you’re, just to give you a random example that’s definitely never been used on me before, unexpectedly moving to Nebraska in three hours, and not to worry if I never hear from you again, or if I see someone around the city who looks just like you but seems not to know me at all—” This make Pete’s laughter, which had been quieting down, kick off again, which is weirdly gratifying.
“So, like, I’ll take this. But I am sorry, for the record.
I’d like to use this opportunity to officially lay the blame at the feet of the Hot Dog Panic Attack.
A wonderful, delicious, and above all dangerous drink. ”
“I’ll be sure to issue a warning when I publish the recipe,” Pete says, on a final chuckle.
He takes a few breaths—there’s a sound like maybe he’s wiping tears of mirth from his eyes—and then he says, still a little amused, “I think it’s sweet, for what it’s worth.
You trying to defend my honor like that.
Misdirected, sure. And I guess you could say a little hypocritical, given that about an hour beforehand I had you—”
“I know,” Ben groans again, though he shivers a little at the memory of the position he suspects Pete’s talking about. “Even as I was doing it, I knew I was being a hypocrite. I don’t normally do things like that, for the record. I’m normally, like, chill! Low-key!”
“Are you?” Pete sounds, if possible, even more entertained. “Are you really?”
“Okay, no, of course I’m not,” Ben snaps, no real heat behind it.
“But I keep it to myself! Inside! Where inside thoughts belong! I have a very good grasp, okay, usually, on that line, and I don’t want you to think this is like—my vibe—oh, God.
” Ben stares, despairingly, up at the ceiling. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” says Pete, “one sec,” and, muffled as though he’s covered the speaker with one hand, Ben hears him order a cup of black coffee from what must be a newsstand.
After barely a minute, he’s back, and now that Ben’s had a second to wake up, he can tell from the background noise that Pete must be walking, on his way to whatever his Sunday morning entails.
“Sorry; I have to undo my sister’s purchasing spree this morning, and I can’t face that without caffeine. ”
“God knows I get that,” says Ben, who, now that he is fully conscious, is already considering the fastest route to coffee.
“I’m reasonably sure that at this point what’s running through my veins is more dark roast than blood.
” As always when he comes back to Michigan, he remembers too late that he should have packed some of those awful canned lattes, or even some chocolate-covered espresso beans—anything to ensure that his path to caffeination doesn’t have to run through either parent.
Lucia’s coffee is punishingly strong, even for Ben, and Daniel’s might as well be tar.
Ben will drink either if he has to, but he won’t be happy about it.
He’s distracted from this utterly when Pete says, “Okay, you wanted something else to talk about, right? How about this: Is it too early to ask what you’re wearing?”
Ben both flushes with pleasure and, grimacing down at himself, wonders if this is the sort of situation in which a man is supposed to lie.
Honesty has worked out inexplicably well with Pete so far, so he sighs and says, “Uh. The same undershirt I had on last night and… a pair of my sister’s Hello Kitty pajama bottoms from like 2004?
” Ben glares accusingly down at the pants, which had been sitting on the top of a basket of Renata’s laundry when he’d stumbled inside, and which he’d unhesitatingly swiped on the theory that he was too tired to dig his own out of his suitcase. “Uh. In a hot way?”
Pete laughs again, warm, almost musical against the sounds of the city behind him, like a lifeline back to the world Ben chose.
In spite of himself, and his pajama bottoms, and the room full of tiny bottles of paint and weird miniscule airplane parts and so many sticks of balsa wood that Ben half wants to call the fire department on his own father, he starts to feel like maybe his toast is finally going to start landing buttered side up.
It’s not what Ben would call a good week, the next week of his life.
He’s not sure he and his family have ever spent an entirely good week together, at least not since he and Renata hit adulthood.
It’s never an entirely bad time, either, what time they manage to spend as a family these days; it’s not as though they’re cruel or hateful to one another, driving each other to tears or screaming.
It’s just that each one of them seems, in whatever undefinable way, to be designed to subtly irritate the others, like a small-scale pearl farm.
On Mondays, for example, the restaurant is closed, so they agree on Sunday morning they’ll all go out to dinner the following evening, as a family.
Then they spend all day Sunday and most of Monday morning going back and forth about the place—Renata wants to go to the Chinese place downtown, but Daniel has some long-standing personal beef with the owner there (one which is, in Ben’s opinion, Daniel’s own fault), and couldn’t it be a steakhouse?
He gets one night out a year, basically, it couldn’t be a steakhouse?
But then Lucia’s offended—one night out a year?
How could Daniel say that? Does their monthly bridge night mean nothing to him?
The salsa lessons they took last winter?
And, also, she doesn’t want steak or Chinese, she wants a good sandwich, doesn’t anyone make a good sandwich anymore?
And Renata says a sandwich isn’t dinner food, and Lucia says she didn’t raise her children to be too good to eat sandwiches for dinner, and then Daniel says he didn’t raise his children not to offer an opinion, and everyone turns, expectant, to stare at Ben.
But when Ben shrugs uncomfortably and mutters, “I honestly don’t care what we eat?
I just don’t want to argue about it,” Daniel huffs out an annoyed breath, and Lucia rolls her eyes, and Renata gives him a look that clearly communicates, “Ooof, a swing and a miss, you hate to see it,” which is…
great. It’s juuuuust great. It makes Ben feel totally awesome.
The truth is, in a perfect world, things would have worked out differently in Ben’s family.
In a perfect world, after they made their little deal—Lucia would name any daughters, and Daniel any sons—and then, by luck of the draw, had one of each, his parents’ favoritism would have broken out more evenly.
Perhaps Lucia would have preferred Renata, having named her, but Daniel would have focused his attentions on Ben, committed to building a strong bond between father and son.
Or, equally acceptable, it could have gone the other way, with Lucia preferring Ben, and Daniel preferring Renata, each enjoying the reflection of the other they saw therein.
In a truly perfect world, of course, they would have simply loved both of their children equally.
Even in his fantasies, though, Ben can never quite imagine that.