Chapter 9 #2
We ate on the porch in the warm midday sun, the valley below us, the creek running, the jays screaming over territory in the canopy.
The stew was good. I knew it was good. I’d made it a few times now, tweaking the recipe, getting the balance right.
But I’d never made it for someone else. The simple act of feeding another person, of watching him enjoy something I’d prepared, reached into a part of me that had been dark for a long time.
After lunch, Arek helped me wash up. We stood side by side at the kitchen sink, him washing, me drying, our elbows bumping in the small space. It was domestic and mundane. The kind of thing people did without thinking. Yet here I was, thinking about it so hard it hurt.
He left around two. We stood by his car, and he said, “Same time next week?”
“I’ll be here.”
“I know you will.” He paused. “Hey, Mac? Come to dinner this week. The boys keep asking about you.”
“I’m not good company for kids.”
“You’re better than you think.”
I looked at him. The green eyes were steady and certain, the way they always were when Arek said something he meant. He didn’t push further. He just got in his car and drove down the mountain, leaving the invitation sitting in the air like a door left open.
The debating started before he’d even disappeared from my sight. Would I take him up on his invitation?
Yes, I would.
Hell no, what was I even thinking?
I wore myself out, my brain fighting and arguing and reasoning and countering every minute of the day. Not even sanding floors made it stop.
By Wednesday, I was too exhausted from it to fight any longer.
I changed into clean jeans and a Henley, then drove down the mountain at five-forty-five and parked outside the craftsman with the porch that needed painting.
I sat in my truck for three minutes before I managed to talk myself into getting out.
The porch light was on, and through the kitchen window, I could see movement. Shadows passing back and forth. The muffled sound of music and someone laughing—Kace, probably.
I knocked.
Arek opened the door in a flour-dusted apron, and his face did something I wasn’t prepared for. It opened up. It wasn’t the social smile, the town smile, but something unguarded and surprised and warm in a way that reached through my ribs and grabbed hold. “Mac. You’re here.”
It only now hit me I hadn’t even texted him I was coming. “I can come back—”
“Get in here. We’re making pizza.” He stepped aside, and the warmth of the house hit me like a wall as I walked inside, following Arek into the living room.
The smell of dough, tomato sauce, and garlic.
Music from a speaker in the living room.
A basketball wedged between the couch and the wall.
Books stacked on the coffee table. Shoes by the door.
A home. A real, living, breathing home.
“Mr. Heald!” Kace appeared from the kitchen, hands covered in dough. “Dad said you might come for dinner this week.”
“I didn’t say might,” Arek corrected. “I said I hoped.”
“Same thing. We’re having pizza, but you have to make your own. It’s the rule.”
“There’s no rule,” Jules said from the kitchen, where he was methodically laying pepperoni slices in a spiral pattern on his dough with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. “It’s a suggestion.”
“There is now. New house rule. All guests have to make their own pizza.”
I looked at Arek, who shrugged with a grin. “He makes the rules. I just live here.”
So I made a pizza. Arek gave me dough and showed me how to stretch it, his hands guiding the process with the same steady competence he brought to everything. I was bad at it. I’d never worked with dough before, and it ended up uneven—too thin in the middle and too thick at the edges.
“It kinda looks like a topographical map,” Jules said, studying my creation.
“It’s rustic,” Arek said.
“It’s a mess,” I said.
Arek patted my shoulder. “Rustic and mess are the same thing in pizza.”
I topped it with sauce, pepperoni, and cheese. Nothing fancy. Kace made his with approximately seventeen toppings thrown on top of each other haphazardly. Jules’s pepperoni spiral was a work of art. Arek’s was neat and balanced, like the man himself.
We ate at the dining table, all four of us, and the noise was unlike anything I’d experienced in years.
Kace talked about school, about someone named Tyler, about a basketball game he was playing that coming weekend.
Jules contributed occasional dry observations that were funnier than Kace’s full monologues.
Arek refereed, redirected, and occasionally stole a slice of someone else’s pizza under the pretense of quality control.
I watched them. The way Kace gestured with his whole body when he told a story.
How Jules rolled his eyes but never looked away from his brother.
The way Arek’s hand landed on Kace’s shoulder to settle him when he got too loud, automatic and gentle, the touch of a parent who’d calibrated his responses over nine years of practice.
The way Jules passed me the pepper shaker without my asking because he’d noticed I’d reached for it and missed.
The way Kace said, “Dad, Mr. Heald’s pizza is actually good,” with genuine surprise, after I’d offered him a slice.
Arek said, “Of course it is.”
Like there had never been any doubt.
The way this table held four people and felt full. Not crowded, but the right number. The right noise. The right temperature. It was all of it and none of it specifically. Just the texture of family, the dynamics of people used to sharing a space.
I used to know this. I used to be part of such a dynamic.
Boden had been ten the last time we’d sat at a table together.
He’d been going through a phase where he wanted peanut butter on everything—toast, apples, celery, hamburgers.
Fay had drawn the line at peanut butter on pasta, and Boden had argued his case with the conviction of a trial lawyer.
I’d laughed so hard I’d choked on my water.
He was turning sixteen in three weeks. I didn’t know what he ate anymore. Didn’t know if he still argued for ridiculous food combinations. Didn’t know if he laughed at dinner or sat in silence or ate alone in his room the way teenagers sometimes did.
I didn’t know anything.
I put my fork down. The pizza was ash in my mouth, and I needed a second. “Bathroom?” I asked, keeping my voice level.
“Down the hall, first door on the left,” Arek said.
His eyes caught mine and held, and in that single look, I saw him read me, the things I wasn’t saying. He gave me a fractional nod, so small the boys wouldn’t have caught it, and then turned to Kace and asked him something about the basketball game that pulled the conversation away from my exit.
In the bathroom, I gripped the sink and breathed.
I had no right to this. No right to sit at this table, eating pizza with someone else’s kids, pretending I was part of something when my own son was hundreds of miles away in the house I’d walked out of. I’d chosen this. The leaving. The silence. The solitude.
I’d chosen it for Boden’s safety, and I’d choose it again because the alternative was worse.
The alternative was my hands on Fay’s arms in the dark.
The alternative was that next time, it might very well have been Boden.
But standing in Arek Jacobson’s bathroom, with the muffled sound of Kace’s laughter coming through the wall and the smell of pizza still in the air, the choice felt less like protection and more like punishment.
I washed my hands, dried them on the towel, and went back to the table.
After dinner, I helped clean up. Arek washed, and I dried, a mirror of Saturday’s routine but in his kitchen instead of mine, with his sons drifting in and out and the house settling around us into its evening rhythms.
“You should come to my game on Saturday,” Kace said, stretched out on the couch, doing something on his phone.
“Kace,” Arek said.
“What? He should! We need fans! Our fan section is depressing!”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, the answer coming out before I could stop it.
Arek looked at me sideways, the dish soap running over his hands. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
At the door, the boys said goodnight. Kace with a wave and a grin. Jules with a quiet, “Thanks for coming, Mr. Heald.”
Polite. Genuine. The kind of thing a kid said when he meant it and hadn’t been coached.
Then it was Arek and me on his porch, the night settling over Forestville, Main Street a few blocks away with its dark storefronts and the distant glow of the Double F.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said.
“Thank you for coming. It meant a lot to the boys.”
“And you?”
The question came out before I could vet it. Direct, unfiltered, the kind of thing I didn’t ask people because I didn’t usually care about the answer. I cared about this one. I cared a lot.
Arek looked at me with those green eyes in the porch light, and the mask was gone, the performance was gone, and what was left was the man I’d met on my porch and at the waterfall and in the grocery store a lifetime ago. “Yeah, Mac. It meant a lot to me too.”
I nodded, then turned to drive back to my mountain, to the silence of my cabin.
At home, I sat at the kitchen table. The single chair. One mug on the drying rack instead of two. The silence that used to be enough and wasn’t anymore.
I picked up my phone. Not to text Arek. Not tonight.
I scrolled through my contacts, down to a name I hadn’t tapped in five years: Fay. It was still there. I’d never deleted it because deleting it felt like a final act I wasn’t ready for.
Boden was turning sixteen in three weeks. My son was becoming a man while I was hiding on top of a mountain, but also making pizza with someone else’s family because I was too broken and scared to make it with my own.
I didn’t call, but I looked at the name for a long time. My thumb hovered over it, and the distance between hovering and pressing was smaller than it had ever been.
I put the phone down. When I went to bed, I lay in the dark in a house built for dozens and occupied by one and thought about a kitchen that smelled like pizza and a table that seated four.
And then my thoughts drifted to a boy in San Francisco who was turning sixteen and didn’t know his father sat in the dark and missed him with a violence no mountain could contain.
Three weeks. Sixteen years old. My son.
I was running out of silence to hide in.