Chapter 12
“They were fishing,” Jem said as he pulled the truck into their driveway.
He’d insisted on driving because Tean had looked like a zombie when he’d finally reached the lobby—his color gone, his eyes empty, his steps slow, almost disconnected.
And now, in the weak light from the dash, he didn’t look much better.
He slumped in the passenger seat and stared out the windshield blankly.
“That’s all it was,” Jem said. “They don’t have anything, so they’re just throwing stuff out there to see if they get a bite.”
He killed the engine. The heat from the vents died, and the cold immediately started to work its way in—the floorboards freezing under Jem’s feet.
“Hey,” he said softly, taking Tean’s hand. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
He waited until Tean nodded.
“They don’t have anything on us. Jesus, Tean, there’s nothing to have.”
“Right,” Tean said after too long a pause. “I know.”
“They’re a pair of assholes, and they wanted to work us over because they know Ammon’s confession is bullshit and they’re trying to figure out what’s really going on.”
Tean nodded, but it was the kind of nod Jem recognized—after having dealt with a year of them—as a leave-me-alone kind of nod, not a yeah-Jem-you’re-right.
For a moment, something Jem didn’t quite understand rose up inside him: something wild and huge and flailing, like he wanted to shout, grab Tean by the shoulders, shake him, do something.
Anything. It was scarily close to anger.
More than anger. Rage. And so he had to be careful, smile, squeeze Tean’s hand with gentle pressure, while this voice inside his head screamed, Stop it, stop acting like this, I know you’re in there!
“Things are going to look better in the morning,” Jem said.
Another of those nods, the kind like Tean was shutting a door.
It was strange how life crept up on you, Jem thought as he got out of the truck and went around to the passenger side. LouElla used to say that, about things looking better in the morning. Usually after she’d done everything she could to make things worse.
He didn’t have to help Tean out of the truck or carry him inside, but he shut the door for him, and he walked behind him. Like he might put a hand on Tean’s shoulder, if Tean needed him to. If Tean wanted him to. Like he might hold his hand.
Tean opened the front door, and then Scipio was there.
And Scipio was like this third point of a triangle where they could do things and talk about things—dinner, walks, the Lab tearing the stuffing out of a brand-new toy shaped like a pumpkin spice latte—even when it felt like the two of them were miles apart.
“Hi,” Jem said, crouching to accept slobbery kisses. “Hello, yes, hello, yes, we’re home.”
After big stretches, lots of wiggles, and knocking one of Tean’s books off the coffee table with his tail, Scipio informed them he needed to go outside.
When Jem opened the storm door, cold air met him with a whiff of rot.
He’d have to check the yard the next day; it was squirrels, usually.
Sometimes birds. And Scipio didn’t know enough to leave them alone.
Tean moved around the living room, straightening up. When he reached for a glass Jem had left on the side table, Jem said, “I’ll get that.”
“I got it,” Tean said.
When Tean picked up a pair of LA Gear low tops—the ones with the light-up soles—Jem said, “I’ll put those away.”
“It’s fine.”
When Tean grabbed a Team USA windbreaker off the back of an armchair, Jem said, “You don’t have to do that. I’ll clean up my shit.”
Tean just gave a weary shake of his head and kept moving.
The click of nails from the patio told him Scipio was coming back. The dog snuffled at Jem’s hand, accepted a quick pet, and made his way over to Tean.
“Hi, boy,” Tean said and stepped around the dog and into the hallway.
Scipio trotted after him. Sometimes, Scipio had no fucking idea what was going on.
Jem locked up, heeled off his ROOS, and put them in the closet. He was going to start putting everything away. No more doing it later. He was going to do everything right. Tean was already in the bathroom, the door shut, water running.
Flopping onto the sofa, Jem dug out his phone.
For a while, he scrolled mindlessly. Instagram had been a godsend for when he wanted to turn his brain off.
Ninety percent of the time, he didn’t have to read anything, and he could just look at pictures of dogs, pictures of clothes, and pictures of hot guys with nice clothes walking dogs.
After a while, he flipped over to TikTok, which was even better in some ways.
The first video up was a girl showing an amazing meal hack at McDonald’s—a double cheeseburger, plus nuggets, plus barbecue sauce—and then there was a video about a man who liked to go swimming with his fourteen-year-old Lab, because the water made the dog’s old joints feel better.
That one he had to flip past quickly because he was fucked-up enough already, thank you.
And the next one was a White girl who had to be all of twenty years old talking about quitting her job to follow her dream.
There wasn’t really anything useful in the video—she used the phrase work-life balance at least four times—but a couple of videos later, he came across a young Black guy talking about what to wear for a job interview, and a few videos after that, a White guy giving salary negotiation tips.
That one was kind of a bust, but the guy did have awesome hair, and Jem thought about leaving a comment to ask what kind of product he was using.
He closed the app without really thinking about it and brought up the browser.
Writing was actually harder than reading sometimes, which was seriously messed up, but this kind of stuff he could do.
He started with a single word: jobs. He had to blink and concentrate to read, and after the first four results, he was ready to give up because they were so bogus.
Then he went back and added Utah to the results. This time, it was a little better. He passed up the link for jobs with the state government, but he checked out a couple of online recruiters and, obviously, KSL.
What he saw was…mixed. A job as a full-time server on a cruise ship sounded dope except Jem wasn’t a great swimmer, he wasn’t sure they’d let him bring Scipio, and oh yeah, what about Tean?
Next was a concrete ready-mix driver, which was seriously badass, except he didn’t have a CDL B license, whatever that was, and he didn’t have any experience using an air brake, whatever that was.
There were a bunch of people who wanted administrative assistants, and that actually sounded like it might be interesting—Jem was pretty sure he’d have to buy himself a pair of glasses—but it would probably be too much reading and writing.
He spent a lot of time on the listing for a skid steer operator, which was apparently something they used to blow snow during a storm.
Tossing his phone on the table, Jem tried not to groan. At least, not out loud. He put his arm over his eyes and stretched out and—
It was just such bullshit. He was good at stuff; he knew he was.
Tean was always saying how smart he was, and that was nice of Tean, because Jem wasn’t any smarter than anybody else.
But he was good at what he did. Which was, if you wanted to be specific, running games on people, and bullshitting, and general jacking around, but he could be responsible—ish—and he was a hard worker.
Well, he wasn’t lazy. He’d get the job done—that was the important part.
The problem was—the problems were that you couldn’t put tricked people out of their money, 2015-2019 on a resume.
And if you made up jobs, people actually checked, something he’d found out the hard way.
Which was so stupid, when you thought about it, because why would someone even make up something like that?
And if you didn’t have a college degree, and you didn’t have any work history, most people didn’t even want to interview you.
Which was how you ended up working at Little Dick’s Chevrolet, with fucking Little Dick getting in your face, making sure you knew he had you by the balls.
Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes—sometimes it made Jem want to scream.
And tonight, overlaid on this, Tean moving around the house, picking up the empty glass, the sneakers, the windbreaker. The silence as he moved off toward their bedroom. The closed door. I was going to pick all that stuff up. You didn’t have to do it.
How long now before Tean got out of bed, left the house, wandering the streets because he couldn’t sleep?
He wouldn’t talk to Jem about it. He’d just say he was having trouble sleeping.
Yeah, for a fucking year. Because of Jem.
It was Jem’s fault; he knew that. But every time he tried to talk about it, he got an answer that didn’t actually say anything. Or he got silence.
The silence was the worst part. There had been so much silence.
It had taken Jem a long time to realize what he wasn’t hearing.
Those disturbing facts Tean seemed to have stored up for every occasion, statistics about horses injured in movies and the environmental impact of jockstraps and people getting mashed in industrial machinery.
And what Jem thought of as doom spirals, when Tean cranked himself up and up imagining the worst possible scenarios.
What he called catastrophizing. At first, after everything that had happened the year before, Jem had been on high alert.
He’d waited for what he figured would be an excess of depressing shit.
He’d listened for the signs of spiraling, sure that it would be worse, that it might even be out of control, and he couldn’t joke about it anymore, couldn’t help Tean by letting it be cute and funny, and that he’d have to step in and do something.
And then, instead, nothing.
No facts.