Twenty-Two
DINNER WENT FINE. Dinner went great.
It wasn’t until after dinner that all hell broke loose.
We went to an old-timey Italian restaurant with white tablecloths a few blocks from the Starlite. We ate bread and most of us drank buttery red wine, and Hutch, Cole, and Rue did what they always did on anniversary day: they told stories.
Everybody at the table took turns. The time in college when Robert stole a street sign and got chased by a Doberman. Cole and Hutch’s dad teaching them how to spin a basketball on their fingers—and their mom making pancakes in the shape of the boys’ initials. There were beach stories, and camping stories; stories about birthdays and loose teeth; stories about pets lost and found. Stories about ripped pants and forgotten keys. Some of the stories seemed well-worn and well-told, but others got unearthed in the churn of conversation. Either way, I came away feeling like I knew everyone—the whole family, past and present—a little better.
This was what Rue had been missing. This lovely way of remembering together, and holding on, and bringing the past into the present, even if only for a little while.
And at the end, they really did tip the waiter a hundred dollars. And he whooped with joy and hugged everyone.
But then dinner ended.
On the short walk back to the Starlite, the boys started arguing.
It was one hundred percent Cole’s fault. It was like he was trying to make Hutch mad. Just complaining and provoking and baiting him. He kept listing, for example, all the ways life kept being unfair to him but not to Hutch.
After a while, Hutch started pushing back. “Why are you keeping score? It’s like you want to be angry,” Hutch said then. “Like you’re looking for reasons.”
“I’m not looking for reasons,” Cole said. “You just keep offering them up.”
“Like what? I’m just living my life.”
“Like everything,” Cole answered. “You’ve got twice as much money in your savings account. You have the coolest job. You’re taller.”
“You’re mad at me for being taller ?” Hutch demanded.
“You got the best nickname, too,” Cole went on, undeterred. “You got Hutch—and I got nothing.”
“I didn’t take that nickname from you. It just happened!”
“That’s exactly my point. I don’t get a cool nickname because you got the cool nickname.”
“There’s more than one cool nickname to go around!”
“Apparently not!”
“Take it,” Hutch said.
“What?”
“Take the nickname. I don’t care. You be Hutch.”
“I can’t be Hutch,” Cole said. “It’s too late. You’re Hutch.”
“So pick something else! The world is lousy with nicknames.”
“What am I supposed to pick?” Cole demanded.
“I don’t know!” Hutch said, throwing things out. “Catfish! Lightning! Boots and Saddles!”
“Don’t ever call me Boots and Saddles.”
“I don’t know, man! Do an internet search! Pick something. I’ll call you whatever you want.”
“You can’t pick a nickname for yourself off the internet. That’s not how that works.”
Rue and I looked at each other. This conversation couldn’t really be about nicknames, could it?
Hutch was looking Cole up and down now, like Fine . “Ace,” Hutch declared then.
“What?”
“Ace. That’s your new nickname.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not an Ace at anything!”
“Better get on that, Ace.”
“Now you’re trying to piss me off.”
“No, Ace. That’s your thing.”
We’d made it back to the Starlite, and The Gals and Sullivan were out by the pool, holding little drinks with parasols. They started to greet us, but then they sensed the argument brewing and got quiet instead. Rue and I took chairs close enough to The Gals to look like we had joined them, but close enough to the boys to eavesdrop.
“Yeah. Fine,” Cole was saying. “Maybe I should’ve forgiven you sooner. But you never should’ve tried to make me come here and film a whole video about what a hero you are.”
“I was trying to see you,” Hutch said.
“There are lots of ways to see me.”
“Not really. But you know what? You could’ve just said no. Instead, you made me think you were coming. And Rue, too, by the way. And then you sent an underling instead.”
For the record, I resented being called an underling.
“Katie’s not an underling,” Cole said. “She’s a colleague.”
I was Team Hutch, but… point, Cole .
“A colleague,” Hutch countered, “is the last thing she is.”
“Our boss, Sullivan, is laying off half the staff. I was trying to do something good for someone. Isn’t that your whole thing?”
But Hutch shook his head. “You just didn’t want me to get what I wanted.”
“What did you want?”
“To see you!”
“But I sent Katie instead.”
Hutch glanced over my way. “Yes, you did.”
Cole was nodding now. “And then you fell for her.”
I waited for the denial, but it didn’t come.
Instead, Hutch said, “You never told me she was your girlfriend. I didn’t know anything about that. You can’t just send a woman like that down here, and make her spend every single second following me around, and tell me to let her sleep over at my house —during a thunderstorm—and think I’m not going to react to that. That’s on you. You should’ve said she was yours from the start! But you didn’t. And before I knew it…” Hutch rubbed the back of his neck. “Before I knew it, it was too late.”
The Gals all turned to check each other’s wide-eyed reactions.
No one, of course, was more wide-eyed than me.
But that’s when Cole said, “It’s not too late.”
Hutch shook his head. “What does that mean?”
Hutch looked around. He saw us all by the pool. The Gals raised their glasses as if to say Cheers .
Cole looked at me. “Should I tell him what it means?”
But I wasn’t prepared. “What—right here?”
“Three days ago you wanted to tell him right here.”
“It’s been a long three days,” I said.
“I think it’s been long enough,” Cole said.
“But”—I glanced over—“what about Rue?”
“Don’t worry about Rue!” Rue called.
Then, without any further discussion, Cole just turned to Hutch and said, “Katie isn’t actually my girlfriend.”
Oh, god.
Hutch held very still. “She’s not—what?”
“Or even my friend, to be honest. We barely know each other. I just needed somebody to come down here and take this job.”
Hutch stared at Cole, trying to read his face. “You’re not together?”
Cole shrugged.
“You lied to me?” Hutch said. “About Katie?”
Cole was maybe trying to shift gears a little too fast. “But that’s good news, right?” He gestured my way, like I was a brand-new car. “She’s available!”
If Hutch thought it was good news, he didn’t care. “You asshole!” he shouted, tackling Cole, and before the words were even spoken, the boys were on the ground.
I was on my feet in an instant, thinking I should stop them.
But Rue put her hand out to hold me back.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” I asked Rue.
“Let’s give them a minute.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We tried so hard to give you a good anniversary day.”
“This is more important than that,” Rue said.
We watched them on the grass. It wasn’t a choreographed fight like you’d see in a movie. It was messy, and sideways. And full of grunts and elbows and kicks. No satisfying SMACK! sound effects, either. Just breathing, and cursing paired with thuds, and cuffs, and gasps, over and over in that order.
“Should we call the cops?” I asked Rue.
She shook her head. “They’ll tire themselves out soon enough.”
“I do think Hutch could really kill Cole.”
“He could, but he won’t.”
I don’t think I’d ever seen grown men fight in real life. How did anyone even win? Did they just thrash in the grass until they got tired?
Whatever winning might be, it seemed like a foregone conclusion—just based on body mass alone. I mean, Cole wasn’t a weakling. But working out was part of Hutch’s job description .
They really were fighting. My money was on Hutch, of course, but we all watched as Cole landed punch after punch to his torso that didn’t seem to have any impact.
“This is good for them,” Rue said. “They’ve been ignoring each other for too long. They need to yell and wrestle and clear the air.”
“You’re not going to stop them?”
“Not unless someone bursts an artery.”
“But…” It felt so weird not to intervene. “Aren’t we all supposed to use our words?”
Rue nodded, watching the boys. “Sometimes words aren’t quite enough.”
THEY DID, EVENTUALLY, tire themselves out.
By the time they were done fighting—breathless and bleeding, ripped and grass-stained—Cole and Hutch were so exhausted, they wound up lying on their backs with their limbs splayed out, staring up at the starry sky.
And we all—Rue, The Gals, Sullivan, and I—got quiet to eavesdrop.
“What the hell, Cole?” Hutch said. “Why would you lie to me about Katie?”
“I regretted it as soon as I did it,” Cole said, “if that helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
“You’d said no over and over for the ‘Day in the Life’ thing. I wanted to get you to say yes. And I knew you felt so guilty about what happened at the wedding, you’d do anything I asked.”
“Two things,” Hutch said then. “I never felt guilty about what happened at the wedding—because I didn’t do anything wrong . And I have always been willing to do anything you asked, anyway.”
Cole nodded. “Maybe there was an element of revenge, too.”
“Because you knew I liked her? But how did you know? We weren’t even talking!”
“Rue knew,” Cole said. “Rue could tell.”
Hutch ran his palm over his burr cut and turned back to Cole. “So… Rue told you that she thought I liked the coworker you sent down here to do your job—and you decided to lie to me that you were dating her?”
Cole nodded. “When you put it that way, I sound like a dick.”
“You have got to stop competing with me, man,” Hutch said.
“That’s easy to say when you’re the reigning champion.”
“I’m not the champion of anything.”
“Spoken like a champion.”
“You must think I’m totally untouchable,” Hutch said. “Is that how you see me?”
But Cole was ready to own it. “Of course. Yes. That’s who you are. You’re Hutch. You’re perfect. And you get everything you want. If you want to make straight A’s, you just make them. If you decide to run a marathon, you just run one. If you want to be a rescue swimmer, you’re one of five guys total who make it through AST school. You’re a machine. You’re unstoppable. I’ll spend my whole life competing with you, and I’ll never win.”
Wow. That was a lot of self-disclosure.
“But none of that stuff about me,” Hutch said, “has anything to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me,” Cole said then. “Because you just had to be a hero and save me.”
For a second, everything went quiet.
Then Hutch sat up in the grass. “Do you mean,” he asked, not looking over at Cole, “the night of the accident?”
Cole sat up, too. Then, after a long pause, in a barely audible voice, he said, “You should’ve saved Mom instead.”
Hutch looked over at Cole like he was seeing him for the first time. “Is that—what this is?”
Cole kept his eyes on the grass.
Hutch was shaking his head at the revelation. “Is that why you’re so angry? Is that why you always want to prove yourself?”
Cole didn’t answer.
Hutch shook his head, still putting the pieces together. “No wonder. How could you ever measure up to that?”
“To what?” Cole asked.
“To what we lost.”
Cole looked away.
Hutch was studying him now. “Was that it? Was that what it’s been all this time? You thought you were the reason she wasn’t here? You thought I saved you instead of her? That if I had chosen differently, Mom would still be alive?”
Cole was blinking now, like he’d never expected that question.
“Because, Cole…” Hutch went on. “I didn’t make that choice.”
“What?”
Hutch swallowed. “Mom told me to get you.”
“She…”
“Even as I was climbing out, she was calling to me. ‘Get Cole! Hutch, go get Cole!’ I was so dazed right then, but Mom made her voice so loud and certain that it cut through everything. When I hesitated, she said, ‘Take Cole first, and then come back for me.’ And so I just… did it. I climbed back into the car, and I unbuckled you. You were dazed, too. And I said, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ You took my hand, and followed me, and I led you off to where the crowd was standing. To safety.”
“You took me away because Mom told you to?”
Hutch nodded. “Cole, I remember her face. I think about it all the time. She knew there wasn’t time for me to come back.”
Now Hutch wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was rough. “I didn’t save you, Cole. Mom did.”
There were tears on Cole’s face now, too.
But Hutch went on. “You weren’t the reason she died . You were her last wish.”