Chapter 3 A Home That Works
Ryan
The blanket wasn’t mine.
My hands knew it before my eyes were good for anything. A thick navy fleece, smelling of a detergent I didn’t use, tucked up under my chin. Not my blanket. Not my bed either, when I cracked an eye and got a couch instead. Narrow and honest about being one. In a room I’d never been inside before.
For one bad second none of it had a name.
Then the headache arrived to collect what I owed it, and the night came back in the worst order.
The bar. The count I’d quit keeping around the fourth.
Reid in the doorway in a puffer jacket. A cab.
The river going by black. A name I’d almost said into the back seat and swallowed instead.
My body filed its report and the report was grim. My skull had a pulse of its own and it didn’t match the one in my chest. My mouth tasted like the bar had closed inside it. Light came from somewhere it had no business being this bright. Every degree of it cost me.
I’d done this on purpose. Gone the wrong direction on purpose.
The on-purpose was the part I couldn’t dress up this morning.
I hadn’t been drowning the suspension. The suspension I could have sipped at one beer at a time.
I’d been drowning a kitchen floor, and the weight of him coming down beside me, and the sound the door made when I pulled it shut.
There was no number of beers that got a man under that.
The apartment wasn’t mine. My eyes settled on that much and were sure of it.
Too bright. Too clean. The light lying across the floor in a way ours never did, where everything came secondhand and gray and the place stayed dim at noon.
Somebody had decided to live here, on purpose, and it showed.
I was on the wrong side of the city on a stranger’s good couch.
The stranger was Reid. And the dim box I couldn’t make myself walk back into was the only place in this city I’d started to think of as home.
Which made no sense at all, the morning after I’d run out of it.
A kettle clicked off behind my head.
“You’re alive!” Jordan Reid said it like good news. Far too much voice for the hour. “I checked on you twice. You snore like a screen door in a wind. I’ve got coffee on. Do you do eggs? You look like an eggs man. I’m doing eggs.”
He was up and dressed and scrubbed and moving around the kitchen with an energy it took me a second to place through the jackhammer behind my eyes.
When I placed it I almost wished I hadn’t.
He was happy. Helplessly, transparently happy to have me laid out on his couch on an ordinary Tuesday.
Working hard to play it down. Losing all over the kitchen.
“That’s slander,” I managed. My voice came out wrecked, a stranger’s voice, lower than my own by a register. I got upright by degrees. The room swung once and settled. My back had a complaint to file about the couch and I let it. “All lies. I’ll deny it in court.”
He laughed from the kitchen. A real laugh, easy, the laugh of a man at home in his own place on a day off, and I lay there a second longer registering how foreign the sound was.
Not the laugh. The ease in it. I’d spent thirty-one years in rooms and never once been at ease in one the way this kid was at ease in his own kitchen at eight in the morning with a hungover detective bleeding gray onto his couch.
“Sure you do.” He came around the half-wall fast, a glass of water in one hand and two pills in the other, and set them on the table. “Drink all of it. Both of those. There’s more where that came from. Whole municipal supply, turns out.”
I took the pills. Drank the water in one pull and felt every cell that had spent the night marinating put its hand up.
He watched to be sure I’d done it, then went back to the stove and left me to gather the rest of myself in private.
A small mercy. He had a gift for the small ones.
I was running a tab of them I’d never square.
I took stock while he clattered something domestic out of sight.
My mouth was still sour. My shirt had slept in itself and looked it.
The cut on my finger had bled in the night and crusted the gauze to itself.
I picked at the edge of the tape and left it.
Under the tape was a thing I’d done to myself on a kitchen floor and I wasn’t ready to look at it in daylight.
My phone was on the side table, screen down, plugged into a charger that wasn’t mine.
He’d done that too. Found the cord, matched it, plugged it in, set it face-down.
I turned it over far enough to see there were missed calls and turned it back without counting.
Whatever the family had decided overnight could keep until I had a stomach for it.
The bookshelf gave him away while I gathered my spine.
Police-procedure manuals lined up by height.
A row of thrillers with cracked spines, read hard.
And a stack of DVDs, which nobody under forty owned anymore.
Cop procedurals, mostly. Tucked in at the end, defended by their position, two or three dramas with worn cases, the kind where people fall apart over love in the rain.
I looked at those a beat longer than the rest. There was a whole person in that shelf.
A serious young man who watched stories about serious men solving things, and, when nobody was checking, watched the other kind.
Above the shelf, one framed photograph. Reid in dress uniform, younger by a year and somehow by ten.
Two people beside him who had to be his parents.
The three of them squinting into the same sun.
The mother’s hand fisted in the back of his jacket like she might not get another chance to hold him in that uniform.
The father with a hand on his shoulder, a big man, a cop’s build under the good suit.
Graduation. The proudest day of somebody’s family.
The father gone three years now, he’d told me in the cab, which made the photo the kind a man frames and then has to walk past every morning.
I looked at it and felt the thing I’d felt in the cab. The envy with no decent shape to it. Somewhere across this city my own graduation photo existed, the day I put the uniform on, and there was no one standing beside me in it. I’d asked no one. I’d known what their faces would have done.
“That’s my dad,” Reid said. He’d come around with the coffee and caught me looking.
He set a mug down by my hand, milk already in it, because of course he’d guessed how I took it.
“The big one. He’d have hated the suit. Wore his dress uniform to my graduation instead of buying one. Mom was mortified.”
“He looks proud.”
“He was furious, actually.” Reid almost smiled.
“Stood up the front and cried like the suit had onions in it.” He looked at the photo a second, then away, the way you do with a thing you’ve made your peace with except for the mornings you haven’t.
“Anyway. He’d have liked you. He liked the ones who were good at it and miserable about it.
Said those were the only ones worth a damn. ”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I drank the coffee he’d made me exactly right and let it sit.
“Want anything else?” Reid called, already back at the stove, brisk again, the moment tidied away. “I do a passable egg. It’s the one thing. Don’t get excited about anything past the egg.”
“The egg will be the high point of my week,” I said. “Genuinely. That’s not even a joke, which is the sad part.”
He laughed. A pan started up. I sat on a stranger’s good couch in a part of the city I’d never had a reason to be in and let a rookie cook me breakfast, and tried to remember the last time someone had cooked me something without it being a transaction or a performance.
Or a man’s hands moving over a stove while neither of us said the thing in the room.
That landed wrong. I shut it off. The eggs spat in the pan.
He brought them over on two plates, with toast he hadn’t mentioned and a fork he’d clearly wiped on his shirt first. Sat in the chair across from me with his own. We ate. The eggs were good. Soft, salted right, folded by someone who’d made them a thousand mornings alone.
He talked while we ate. Easy and undemanding.
The way you lay a plank across a gap so somebody can get over it without looking down.
Some case file he’d been let near the edge of, all enthusiasm, a kid telling you about the big kids’ table.
A sergeant who pronounced “suspect” with the stress on the back end in a way that made him want to retire.
The streetcar that never came when you needed it and came in threes when you didn’t, and the specific betrayal of watching three sail past your stop full to the doors.
He told a small story like it mattered, leaning in, hands going.
The wanting-to-be-liked in it would have been transparent in anyone I trusted less.
He asked me nothing. Not why I’d been at that bar with my count lost. Not why I wouldn’t go home.
Not what I’d gone quiet over in the cab when he dropped a name into the dark and watched it do something to me.
He laid the planks down one after another and let me walk across them and never once looked down to where the drop was.
And I understood, eating a rookie’s eggs at nine in the morning, that Jordan Reid was a kinder man than the job was going to let him stay.
Give it ten years. Give it the things ten years do to a person in this work.
I hoped, with a sudden and useless ferocity, that he’d get to keep some of it.
“These are good,” I said. Because they were. Because it was true. Because I had so little true to give back.
“Told you. The egg, and then it falls off a cliff.”