12. Jett
JETT
She came to the house on a Tuesday and a Thursday, and the second time she came she laughed.
I'd been doing my job for two and a half weeks by then.
The job of being the polished, sanded-down, cold-war version of myself across a kitchen island from a woman I had not figured out how to be in a room with otherwise.
I gave her hockey. I gave her quotes. I gave her the precise rationed amount of myself I'd decided, in the players' lot a week and a half ago, I was willing to give her.
Which was not much. Which was holding the line between her and the kid in the suit by exactly the muscle I'd built at twenty-two in order to leave Tennessee and never look back.
The line was holding. The job was holding.
The thing I hadn't factored in, when I designed the line, was the laughing.
The thing about Dani Hartley laughing was that I'd never heard her do it.
Not at seventeen. Not back home. I'd been three years in her orbit at school, and the closest I'd come to her actual laugh was the long mean trilling sound she used to make in the hallway with her friends when somebody walked past in the wrong shoes.
The sound she'd aimed in my direction at least a hundred times.
The sound I'd heard in my head for years afterward when I couldn't sleep.
That was the only Ashley Hartley laugh I had on file, and I'd filed it under do not play.
She made a different sound on a Tuesday at my kitchen island when she misread one of her own notes.
She'd been asking me about the second-line forecheck and gotten the names wrong, called Tank "Moose" and Moose "Tank," and looked down at her notebook and made a small horrified noise, and then a slightly larger noise, and then a real one.
An actual laugh. Head down, hand over her face, shoulders going.
The entire animal sound of a person who'd genuinely amused herself in spite of herself and was not in control for about three seconds.
I sat across the island holding the bottle of water I'd just refilled for her and forgot, for the whole duration of those three seconds, what I was doing in the room.
She caught herself. Looked up. Saw me looking. Her hand went flat against her notebook and her face shut down, the soft animal thing of her laughter gone in a tenth of a second, and she said, Sorry. Where were we, and I said Tank, and we kept going.
But I'd heard it now.
And it wasn't the trilling thing from the hallway in 2015. It was an entirely different sound, made by an entirely different woman. Smaller. Plainer. A sound that came out of her chest and not her throat. That surprised her. That she didn't want to be making in the room with me.
The first time she'd laughed in my hearing in nine years, and it had been at her own notes.
I spent the rest of that session looking at my own glass of water and not at her.
Thursday she came back.
Second week of her being at my place for the interview.
Fourth session overall. The rhythm had become almost something.
We didn't talk before the recorder was on.
We didn't talk after it was off, beyond the small careful polite things people say when one of them is about to leave the other one's house.
In the middle we did the interview. Forty-five minutes, an hour, ninety on the day she was deep into the line-change material and lost track of time.
She pulled apart the championship season for me one game at a time and I gave her back what I could, which was the hockey of it, and we both held the line, and the line was, on Thursday, three feet of polished concrete countertop between her elbows and mine.
I made dinner that night without quite planning to.
I hadn't invited her to dinner. I had no business inviting her to dinner.
What happened was the session ran long, and at some point past six I said, I'm going to eat something.
You want anything, and she said, I should get going, and I said, Hartley.
It's seven-thirty. You drove forty minutes to be here.
Let me make you a goddamn sandwich, and she sat very still on her stool and looked at me with an expression I was learning meant she was overruling something she'd decided in the car on the way over, and she said, Okay.
I made her a sandwich. Then, because the sandwich wasn't actually enough food for the size of the day I'd been having, I started making spaghetti.
On the principle that boiling water in the same room as another person wasn't the same as inviting them to dinner, if both people had already agreed it was just a sandwich.
She watched me boil the water from her stool at the island.
I had a stove with six burners I'd used maybe twelve times since I moved in, because cooking for one in a kitchen built for ten was the kind of indignity I tended to skip in favor of takeout.
I knew how to make spaghetti because my sister taught me when I was thirteen, so I wouldn't burn my own dinner the nights our mother wasn't speaking to either of us.
I made it the way Mary Beth taught me. Salt the water like a sin.
Oil at the end. Garlic browned in butter for the sauce.
No fancy bullshit. I cooked in silence. Dani sat at the island in silence. The recorder had been off for an hour.
At some point I tossed a noodle at the wall to check if it stuck, the way Mary Beth had also taught me, and it stuck, and Dani made the smallest sound from the stool.
I looked over.
"That was a sound," I said.
"It wasn't."
"It was. I made spaghetti. You made a sound. I'd like a report."
She was looking at the wall, where the noodle hung on, slightly limp, defying physics in the specific way a properly cooked piece of pasta is supposed to.
"My grandmother did that," she said. Quiet. "She threw noodles at the wall. I have not seen a person do that since I was nine years old."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Who taught you to cook."
"Nobody. I don't cook. I edit other people's recipes and think hard about how I'd have written them and then I order Thai."
It came out of her almost involuntarily, the dry quick wit she had, and I almost laughed before I caught myself.
She watched me almost laugh and not laugh.
"You can laugh, Sturgill," she said. "I'm not going to put it in the article."
"I know what's not going in the article."
"That's a different sentence than the one I just said."
"I know."
She held my eyes a second too long. Then she looked down at her wine, which I hadn't yet given her but which had appeared on her side of the island at some point, which I now didn't remember pouring.
The cabernet I'd been letting breathe since five.
I hadn't invited her to drink wine at my house on a Thursday night.
The wine had just sort of arrived, the way the spaghetti had just sort of arrived, the way she had just sort of stayed.
I served her a plate.
She ate.
We didn't talk about the interview. We didn't talk about the article.
We didn't talk about her work or my work or what either of us was supposed to be doing in this house at this hour.
She told me about the noodle her grandmother had thrown at a kitchen wall in Knoxville thirty years ago.
The kind of kitchen it had been. The linoleum.
The rooster clock above the stove that clucked every hour on the hour, that her grandmother refused to take down the entire eight years Dani spent staying there in the summers.
She told me her grandmother's name, which was Iris, which was also the name of the street the house had been on, and which was the title of the only piece of writing she'd let anyone see in four years.
She told me she'd been a writer once.
She told me she'd stopped.
She didn't tell me why she'd stopped. The why was in the room with us. The why was a man in middle Tennessee with a Bic pen, and we both knew it, and she didn't say it and I didn't ask.
I told her about Mary Beth teaching me to cook.
About the way our father had taken cooking away from our mother in some essentially permanent fashion that bled out into all the smaller things, until my sister became the keeper of food in the house, which also made her the keeper of small kindnesses, which also made her the only person in that family I still spoke to.
I told her about salt and water and oil and the small mechanical things you can control when nothing else in your life is yours.
I didn't tell her about the money. I didn't tell her about the company. I didn't tell her that the kitchen we were sitting in had cost more than the entire town we'd grown up in. The line was holding. The line was just holding through other doors than it usually held through.
We ate. We drank one glass of wine each, and I poured her a second she didn't finish, and at some point past ten she looked at the clock and made a small noise that was almost the laugh from Tuesday and almost not.
"I should get going."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stay this long."
"Don't apologize, Hartley. You're not under arrest. You're allowed to eat."
She got up. Gathered her notebook, her recorder, her bag. Slung the laptop bag over her shoulder, and I watched the strap settle across her chest, and I made myself look at the floor instead of the strap.
I walked her to the door.
This was the part I'd been keeping the line for.
The moment, every previous session, when I'd stopped six feet behind her in the entryway and let her see herself out, because keeping six feet of space between her body and mine in my own house was a discipline I'd built over four sessions and gotten extremely good at.
I did not stop six feet behind her on Thursday.