Chapter 6 Last Call
Luke
Two in the morning, and the light was still on under our door.
Five nights of overtime had worn a groove in me, and every one of them I’d come home to that door dark and shut and been glad of it, because dark and shut meant he was asleep and asleep meant I didn’t have to find words I didn’t have.
Tonight the strip of light lay across the landing like a thing waiting up for me.
I stood with the key in the lock a second longer than a tired man should and then I went in.
The flat had given up on itself.
I clocked it in the order a room gives you bad news.
The curtains drawn against a week of daylight.
Dishes past stacking in the sink. Takeout gone over on the counter, the lids off, a smell in the air that had stopped being food.
And him at the kitchen table in a shirt he’d slept in more than once, a bottle by his elbow with a hand’s width left in it, no glass anywhere I could see.
“Carlson.”
His head came up slow, like it weighed more than it had this morning.
His eyes found me on the second pass. Then he gave me the smile, the polished one, the one that had sold a hundred rooms on a man who wasn’t in them, and seeing it switch on over a face with nothing behind it was worse than if he’d wept.
“The Bear comes home,” he said. The words slid at the edges. “Long shift?”
“You’re bleeding.”
He turned his hand over on the table and considered it like a curiosity somebody had left him. The cut on his finger had scabbed and he’d picked it raw again, the skin around it angry, a thread of dried red down to the knuckle. He’d been worrying at it for hours. I could read the hours in it.
“Would you look at that,” he said.
I crossed the kitchen.
The bottle first. I lifted it out of his reach, capped it, set it up on the high shelf over the fridge where a sober man would have to want it and a drunk one would have to climb.
He watched it go without a flicker, which told me how far down he’d got, because the Carlson I knew would have made it a bit, turned the taking-away into a routine to walk us both off the moment.
“That’s the good stuff,” he said. Mild. A flag stuck in soft ground and abandoned.
“It’s not, and you’re done with it.”
The kit was in the drawer by the sink. I’d put it there the morning after the glass, against a night I’d hoped not to have.
I wet a cloth at the tap, warm, and crouched in front of his chair and took the hand.
He let me. That was the measure of him tonight too.
Carlson sober would sooner bleed than be tended.
This one gave me the hand like it belonged to somebody he’d stopped speaking for.
I cleaned the cut. There’s a way that doesn’t drag, and a man taught it to me a long time back, in the third house they put me in, where he patched people for a living and showed a kid with split knuckles how to leave a wound better than he found it.
The skin was hot. The hand shook, a small constant tremor he didn’t know he had, and I knew it now, and I pressed the cut shut under my thumb a breath past what it needed and held it there because the next thing wasn’t ready and the holding was.
He smelled of whiskey and a week of himself and, underneath, the cheap soap we both used, and that last one got in somewhere I didn’t have a guard up.
“You don’t have to,” he said, to the top of my head.
“I keep being told that.”
I wound the gauze on neat. Taped it. Set the hand back down soft, like it might come apart on the table, and got up off my knees before kneeling there turned into a sentence I’d have to finish.
Standing put a yard of air back between us, and the yard was nothing, the way it had been nothing for six weeks while I called it professional distance.
Up close he was all wrong. The careful hair shoved up on one side.
The gray worn in under his eyes. The mouth I’d spent a month teaching myself not to look at, gone soft and unguarded with the drink.
I looked at it anyway. One second, maybe two.
Then I made myself look at the kettle, which had never once made my chest do anything.
He looked at the white of the tape for a while.
I pulled the second chair out and sat. Slow, so the sitting wasn’t a thing.
You keep a frightened man talking by giving him a quiet to talk into and staying clear of the middle of it, and I’d learned that the hard way in more rooms than I’d care to count.
So I sat across from him at his ruined table and gave him the quiet, and he walked straight into it.
“I could just go,” he said, and the words came loose, unmoored, like he’d forgotten there was anyone to hear.
“There’s a door. There’s always a door. Somewhere warm, my whole life in a bag by the weekend, and they’d take me back.
They’d be glad. They’d never let me forget the gladness, but they’d take me. ”
He swept a hand at the room without lifting his head. The dishes, the dark, the cupboard the bottle had gone up into.
“A week of this,” he said. “You come home to a week of this and you’re too decent to say what you actually think of it. Of me.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
“I know what I’d think in your shoes. They handed me a problem with good hair and called it a partner, and the hair’s the only part still holding up.
” He almost laughed and didn’t quite get there.
“Don’t correct me. You’ll only lie to be kind, and you’re a terrible liar. It’s the best thing about you.”
I was, right then, lying to him about a folder across the city with his name turning the right way through it. I let the compliment stand.
I held still. The family was a country he’d never handed me the map to.
Six weeks of partnership and all I’d had were the edges, the watch he played down, the shoes that gave the lie to the rest of him, things I’d filed and never opened.
Now here was the border of it, slurred out at a wrecked table to a man he wasn’t sure was in the room.
“My father doesn’t push,” he said. “That’s the trick of him.
He pulls. You don’t feel a hand. You feel the floor tilt, slow, year on year, and one day you look up and you’re standing exactly where he wanted, in the suit he wanted, and you can’t name the step where you agreed to it.
” His good hand pressed flat to his sternum, like he was checking something still ran under there.
“I got out once. It cost me everything I had to get out. And he’s pulling again and I am so tired, and the part I can’t say, the part that’s true.
I’d lie down in the ground before I’d sit in that office.
Some nights the ground’s ahead on points. ”
The cold went down my back fast.
“No,” I said. Low. “You don’t get to put that in the room and have me sit across from it.”
“Relax. Figure of speech.” It wasn’t, and we both knew it wasn’t, and he batted it off with the bandaged hand. “Don’t do the face. I can’t see it but I can feel you doing it. The grave one.”
“You can’t see my face because you won’t look up. I’m right here.”
“Are you, though.” He squinted at me like the question had stakes.
“Nobody’s here at two in the morning. Two in the morning is when the true things come out, because they think nobody’s awake to hold them to it.
” The smile came back, smaller, the sell gone out of it.
“You’re a very good hallucination. The others never bandage anything. Cheap of them.”
“I’m not a hallucination, Carlson.”
“That’s the kind of thing a hallucination says to keep its job.”
On any other night it would have been funny. Part of me wanted to hand him the laugh he was angling for. I kept it, because the laugh would tip him back into the man who performs, and the man who performs had finally, terribly, clocked out.
Then his face did the thing it never did in daylight. The tears came up and stood in his eyes without falling, and he looked at me through them like a man at a window watching a season he couldn’t get out into.
“I broke it,” he said. “The one decent thing. You.”
“You didn’t break anything.”
“I kissed you.” A confession to a priest he’d decided wasn’t real.
“On the floor, in the glass. You were kind to me and I put my mouth on you and then I bolted out my own front door like the place was alight, and stayed gone a day. And you must have thought. God. You must have thought I was having a laugh at you. The pretty one slumming it, making a fool of the big quiet man and running before you could call it. It wasn’t that.
That’s what I can’t get out from under. I don’t know what it was.
I’ve no drawer for it, I’ve no read on it, I’ve no read on you, and it is eating me where I live. ”
I sat there and let him be wrong in front of me, because the true thing, that I’d lain awake on the far side of that wall every one of those five nights wanting exactly the thing he was apologizing for, was not a thing you hand a man this far gone.
He’d drop it before morning, or worse, keep a corner of it and build the rest crooked.
“You read me wrong,” I said. It was as much as I’d let out the door.
“Maybe you should hate me.” He wasn’t hearing me now.
He was down inside it. “It’d be cleaner.
You’d keep your distance and distance is the only safe place to stand near me.
They get to everyone in the end. My father gets to everyone.
And you’re the one person who never wanted a thing off me, so you’re exactly the one he’d.
You should hate me. Do us both the favor.
” A wet sound aiming for a laugh and missing.
“I’m a jinx. Everyone who trusts me ends up holding the bill.
Ask Daniel. Ask the last poor soul who thought I was worth the trouble. ”