Chapter 34
34
The problem, apparently, is that after everything in the last few months, Dad thinks they should just sell.
“You have got,” Becca says, “to be kidding me.”
Aaron grimaces, accepting a glass of bourbon from Jonathan—the good stuff, brought up from Jonathan’s liquor cabinet downstairs, not the burn-your-lungs whiskey they have up here. “Wish I were.”
Laptops and tablets and printed spreadsheets lie scattered and abandoned on every available surface, with everyone clustered on the couches and chairs dragged over from the dining room and, in Noah’s case, sprawled out on the floor, which is his default even when there is room on the couches. Even Sappho seems to have figured out that it isn’t playtime anymore, and after a few hopeful loops around the room with her fraying multicolored rope in her mouth and finding no takers for tug-of-war, she retreats glumly back to her bed in the corner of the room, chewing mournfully on one end of the toy.
Jonathan leaves the bottle on the coffee table, generous soul that he is, and comes back to the couch. Ezra slides down to the floor so Jonathan can have his seat, leaning back against his legs once he’s settled. “I’m confused,” Jonathan says. “Since when was that even an option?”
“Since always, honestly,” Aaron says, taking a grim sip. He pauses to give the glass a considering look, then shoots Jonathan an approving nod before putting the glass down and rubbing his eyes. “We’re a family-owned business with a multigenerational name and reputation; there have been corporate funeral homes trying to buy us out since—God, I don’t even know. Years. Probably since we were in high school, maybe longer.”
“But Dad hates the corporate system,” Becca says, leaning forward with a frown. “Like, hates them. I’ve literally seen him rip up a business card directly in front of the person who handed it to him. ”
“I know,” Aaron says. “But with everything going on…maybe it’s just too much for him. I mean, I’ve seen some of the offers, and they’re not insubstantial. Not buy-an-island money, but definitely how-much-do-you- really -care-about-those-principles money. I think he always turned it down before because he thought he did enough good to balance out the places where he wasn’t brilliant, with the numbers and the tough business calls, but…”
Dad’s always been calm and steady around clients, has always put on a good face at home, but he’s not, at heart, a deeply confident person. It would have been one thing for him to know about the accounts Mom was hiding from him, to keep that secret shame tucked away while acting like everything else was fine, but for Ezra and his siblings to know, on top of Mom leaving, and now the fire—
Ezra can’t blame him for wanting to take a shortcut to retirement.
“Okay,” Lily says slowly. “So…what? We’re giving up on this? Your dad sells, someone else takes over, and that’s it?”
“No,” Ezra says immediately. It comes out with an odd little echo, and he belatedly realizes that both Aaron and Becca had spoken in unison with him.
“No,” Aaron repeats. “I’ll offer to take over for him and go through with”—he gestures at the detritus around the room—“with all of this myself, if that’s the other option.” He takes a long drink of bourbon, clearly steeling himself and wincing when he swallows, but his eyes are clear when he puts the glass down again with a delicate clink of crystal on wood. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to until I was, like, forty, but if it’s that or selling out to a body farm? Fuck no.”
It’s the surest Ezra’s heard him sound about anything, maybe ever. If it weren’t for the circumstances, he’d be proud.
“Does he have an actual offer?” Max has her chin pillowed in one hand, her socked feet tangled up with Nina’s on the love seat. “What kind of timeline are you looking at?”
Aaron shakes his head. “He wouldn’t say.”
That’s not good. Ezra rubs his eyes. “Would he sign a contract without talking to you?”
“Six months ago, I’d have said there was no way. Now?” Aaron’s mouth twists into a bleak, humorless smile. “I don’t know.”
Which might as well be a yes. Fuck.
“Okay,” Nina says, breaking the anxious silence. “Here’s what I think. It’s one in the morning. No one’s going to finish anything useful tonight. We should break this up. In the morning, one of you can go talk to your dad and try to talk him off this cliff—”
“I’ll do it,” Ezra hears himself say.
Nina’s eyelids don’t so much as flutter. “Color me shocked. Sure. Ezra will talk to your dad. And then we just need to…I don’t know, move our timetable up.” She leans around Max to look at Becca. “Is there a good time you could hit him with this? Maybe zero in on the sentimentality?”
Becca wrinkles her nose, but she pulls out her phone, presumably swiping over to her calendar. “Huh,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “Maybe, actually.” She waves her phone slightly, as if any of them can see what’s on the screen, and looks thoughtful. “WaterFire opens later this week. We’ve always gone to opening night as a family. I kind of figured we wouldn’t, this year, but—”
“I don’t know.” Aaron sounds doubtful. “We tried that with Lag BaOmer, and look how that turned out.”
Becca shakes her head. “This is different—public space, so he can’t make a scene, and it leans into the whole Look how important community is thing, since half of Providence is going to be out there.”
That’s kind of what Ezra hates about it, ambience or not. “But,” he says, a little weakly, “people.”
He can’t deny that it’s a good idea, though.
Damn it.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll get him there.”
“Great,” Becca says, all false cheer. “I’ll try not to start any more unsanctioned fires.”
Aaron snorts. “L’chaim,” he says, and downs the rest of his drink.
—
The evening breaks off after that, the night’s momentum decidedly stalled, everyone going their separate ways. Ezra doesn’t fail to notice that Nina, for all she says she’s going to take his bed since he’s going downstairs with Jonathan, slips out the door with Max, but he’s too tired to give her any shit for it.
From the gleeful look on Ollie’s face, though, he’s got it under control.
Jonathan’s brushing his teeth when Ezra gets back from taking Sappho on a loop around the block. She hops onto the bed and immediately starts turning in circles to find the ideal spot, and has spread out across half the surface area of the comforter by the time he finishes washing up and turns out the hall light. “You’re spoiling her,” he says, taking in the way Jonathan’s wedged himself into a corner of the bed so he doesn’t have to move her over at all.
“Look at her face, though,” Jonathan says, as Ezra scoops her up with a grunt and deposits her at the foot of the bed, pausing briefly to pepper kisses over her nose and ears before he crawls under the covers. “Cruel. Absolutely brutal.”
“Tell you what,” Ezra says, adjusting the pillow and dropping onto it with an exhausted sigh. “When she takes up all of your legroom at three in the morning, she can spread out.”
“Deal.” Jonathan leans over and kisses him, then reaches to turn off the lamp, plunging the room into quiet darkness. His arm slips around Ezra’s waist, and Ezra shifts automatically to curl up against him. “Hey. Don’t worry about this, all right? It’s going to be fine.”
“You’re more of an optimist than I am.”
“Maybe,” Jonathan allows. “Or maybe I just think you deserve a break.”
Ezra makes a face, even though he knows Jonathan won’t be able to see it in the dark. “I don’t get breaks,” he says.
“Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve one.” Warm lips press against the back of his neck. “Go to sleep, Ezra.”
He doesn’t.
Despite the heaviness in his limbs and Jonathan’s soft, even breathing behind him, Ezra feels wide awake, anxiety making his skin tingle. He’s spiraling and he knows it, and he isn’t quite sure how to stop. Running through the logic of everything they’ve been working on doesn’t work, and neither does reminding himself that his worth doesn’t depend on how well he knows how to take care of other people or whether or not the Chapel goes under or goes corporate or doesn’t go anywhere at all. He can’t do anything but worry, pouring almost all his energy into lying still so he doesn’t fidget Jonathan awake.
He considers, briefly, waking him up on purpose. An orgasm or two will probably knock him out, but on the off chance it doesn’t help, they’ll both be awake, and that won’t do anyone any good.
When the clock on his phone reads three in the morning at his next miserable check, Ezra gives up. Carefully, he slips out of bed, shushing Sappho quietly when she wakes up with a snort at his movement, reaching out to scratch her ears until she snuffles and lays her head back down. When her breathing returns to its gentle snores, he bends down to kiss her nose, then gathers up his phone and his clothes and tiptoes out of the room. He gets dressed in the bathroom, then slips down the hall on cautious footsteps, pulling on his shoes and collecting his keys and wallet from the bowl next to the door. He remembers at the last second to scrawl a quick note on the whiteboard in the entryway—he’s not going to give Jonathan a panic attack by leaving without a trace in the dead of night—and leaves the apartment as quietly as he can.
—
The Chapel is dark and silent when he pulls into the parking lot and lets himself in through the employee entrance, turning off the alarm. There’s probably someone sitting shmira overnight upstairs—they rarely sit down here when the rest of the building is empty, for obvious creepy-as-hell reasons—and he pauses, just in case they call out, but he doesn’t hear anything. Flicking on the hall light, he makes his way down to one of the taharah rooms, not really sure what’s bringing him there until he’s closing the door behind him.
It’s too quiet. Ezra turns on the sink and lets his hand rest against the tap as the sound of running water fills the room, then sits down on the tiled floor, leans his head back against the wall, and closes his eyes.
The skin on the back of his neck prickles. A familiar voice says, “So, this is a little weird.”
Reluctantly, Ezra opens his eyes. Ben, sitting on the floor next to him, raises one eyebrow.
“I mean,” he continues. “Not that I have much ground to stand on, given everything, but still. There’s wandering around in the middle of the night because you can’t sleep, and then there’s sneaking out of a perfectly nice bed to sit in a cold storage unit full of bodies. So. What gives? I thought you weren’t doing this anymore.”
“Doing what?”
Ben gestures at their surroundings. “You were doing such a good job,” he says. “With the asking for help and the letting people in. What, you get one piece of bad news and it’s back to the avoidance game? Jon’s going to kill you, by the way. That wasn’t a comprehensive note.”
Ezra rubs his eyes. “Why are you here?”
“In general, or right now?”
“Either.” Ezra looks down at the floor. The running water isn’t making him sleepy or soothing the buzz in his head, not like he’d half hoped it would. “Both.”
Ben doesn’t answer. When he shifts slightly, stretching his legs out in front of him, Ezra can almost imagine that he hears the rustle of fabric, that he can feel the physicality of him, almost close enough to touch.
“I don’t really know anymore, honestly,” he says at last. “It’s not like I got an instruction manual. I was here, so I stayed. I thought it was for Jon, you know? I wanted to know he was okay. And then I thought, maybe my parents, or”—he waves one hand to indicate the room—“even this place. I spent a lot of time here, over the years. I cared about it. Still do. Maybe I thought that if I could make sure everything would be okay without me, that I’d leave. But the longer I’m here, the more I feel like maybe there’s a part of me that can’t deal with the idea that they will be. No one wants to think their whole life will be fine without them around, you know?”
“Just because people can survive without you doesn’t mean they’re okay,” Ezra says. “And even if they’re not, you can’t—you can’t hang on to that. No one holds being gone against you. You did more than your best. You deserve to just…rest.”
“And you think you don’t?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Why? Because you’re still here, and I’m not?”
No. Yes. Ezra looks at the floor again, and Ben sighs, a whisper of nonexistent breath.
“Ezra,” he says. “What are you still afraid of?”
His whole world has been tied up in taking care of other people since he was too young to understand what he was doing until he’d built his entire identity around it. If he doesn’t have that—if he can’t fix things for the people who need him—he doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t understand why anyone would want him, if not for that.
But he wants that. He wants it more than he’s ever been able to admit.
If he can’t say it to anyone else, maybe he can say it to Ben, here in this almost silent building, nothing but the sound of the water and the bodies of the dead, no one else around except the single person sitting a quiet vigil upstairs.
He lifts his head, steeling himself for the confession, but the room is empty.
Ben is gone.