Chapter 11
The trouble with getting something you didn’t know you wanted is that it often comes with a clock attached.
I’m a man who has never in his life been able to ignore a clock.
Wes and I went back to the cove the next afternoon.
It was Friday, our last full day, though neither of us said that out loud, as if not naming it might keep it from being true.
Wes brought his camera this time but only used it to snap images of me when I wasn’t paying attention.
The snaps brought my head around, had my hands and arms flying up to cover my face.
He only laughed and insisted I let him capture the moment.
So I did. I would’ve given him anything he asked for in that moment.
I’d spent the morning before the cove doing math.
I hadn’t meant to. It just happened.
I’d woken up happy, which was its own kind of alarming.
Then my brain had done the thing it always did, the thing that made me good at my job and bad at most other things.
It started counting. First it counted hours, then miles, then the distance between a man who lived in two bags and a man whose entire life was bolted to the ground in Tampa.
When we got to the cove, my brain wouldn’t stop.
Wes felt me doing it.
He was better at reading me than a few days should have allowed.
“You’ve gone quiet today,” he said. “It’s not your good quiet; it’s your other one.”
“I have a good quiet?”
“You have several.” He picked up a piece of broken shell and turned it over in his fingers. He always needed something for his hands to hold. “This isn’t one of the good ones.”
I didn’t answer right away.
He let me not answer, which was one of the things about him I’d already started to enjoy, perhaps to need, even.
Then he asked the question I’d been doing the math to answer, “What happens Saturday?”
Saturday was when the shuttle came.
Saturday was when the parrot-seat van took Finn and me back to the airport.
Saturday was when I flew north to the Hargrove site and the framing inspection and Dave the electrician and the narrow channel of my life.
And Saturday was when Wes flew to Lisbon, and then somewhere after that, because he never looked too far ahead, because that was bad for him.
“I fly home,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Right.” He turned the shell over again.
“I’ve got a shoot the week after next, and somewhere after that.
I never look too far ahead, you know?” He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“So that’s the sensible answer, isn’t it?
You fly home, I fly on, and this was a good thing that happened at a ridiculous resort.
We’re both grown men who know how this works. ”
“That’s the sensible answer.” I nodded, suddenly very aware of the rolling surf against the rocks and sand.
“It is,” he said, drawing my gaze to his. All the easy grin had drained out of his face, leaving the serious thing underneath. “I’ve given that answer a hundred times, Mark. It’s the answer that lets me keep moving. I’m very good at it.” His jaw worked. “I’ve never once been sorry to give it.”
I grunted, because I didn’t trust my words.
“And I’ve been trying to give it to myself about you since yesterday.
It won’t go down, Mark. It keeps coming back up.
That’s never happened to me before. Frankly, it’s terrifying.
I needed to say it out loud to the one person who’d understand exactly how strange it is for a man to be afraid of standing still. ”
And here’s where I’d like to tell you I rose to the moment.
Here’s where, if I were a braver man, or a less careful one, I’d have said the true thing, the thing sitting right behind my teeth, which was, “Then don’t give the sensible answer. Give the other one, give the reckless one, give the one where we figure it out.”
But I’m not a brave man.
I’m a careful one.
I’d built a whole life out of being careful, and careful men don’t bet fifteen years of bolted-down certainty on four days and a feeling, no matter how much the feeling outweighs everything else they’ve ever put on the scale.
So I did the math out loud instead, because the math felt safer than the truth.
“I haven’t wanted anything I couldn’t measure in a long time,” I said.
My voice didn’t feel quite my own. “Maybe ever. I build things because they’re real.
I can stand in a finished house. I can put my hands on a wall and know it’ll hold.
People were always the part I couldn’t, the part where you have to trust the load without seeing the math.
” I made myself look at him. “And I’ve spent every hour of this week wanting something I can’t measure at all.
It scares me more than I know how to say.
And on top of that, I live in Tampa, Wes.
My company, my crews—hell, my whole life—it’s all poured into the ground there like a foundation.
I can’t pick up a foundation and carry it to Lisbon. ”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I know . . . I know you didn’t.” That was almost the worst part.
“You’d never ask that. You’re too kind to ask a man to tear up his life for something .
. .” I couldn’t finish that, though. I couldn’t define the undefinable.
I couldn’t make the math work. “So we give the sensible answer, don’t we? ”
He was quiet a long moment.
The water swirled and shifted and crashed.
A gull said something to another gull.
“You measure everything,” he said finally. There wasn’t any heat in it, just something tired and fond and sad all at once. “I noticed that the first day. I just didn’t think you’d use it to keep us at arm’s length.”
That landed somewhere under my ribs and stuck.
We stayed at the cove until the light went gold and then gray.
We didn’t fight, because there was nothing to fight about. There was no villain, nobody who’d done anything wrong, just two men sitting against a warm rock watching a clock neither of them could stop.
He took my hand at some point, lacing his fingers through mine. We sat like that and said nothing, and the nothing was the saddest thing I’d felt in years.
When we walked back up the path, he stopped at the top, where the light from the resort started, and he didn’t ask, “Same time tomorrow?” because tomorrow there’d be a van.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you’re wrong about the math; but you’re the only man I’ve ever met who’d be brave enough to be a coward out loud about it.” He kissed me softly, once, and it tasted like an ending. “Good night, Mark Apparently.”
I watched him walk off toward his room with his camera slung over his shoulder.
I stood at the top of the path a long time after he was gone.
For the first time all week, I had nowhere I wanted to be, because the only place I wanted to be was walking in the other direction, and I’d just talked myself out of it with a number.
Finn was waiting up when I got back to the room. He took one look at my face and every ounce of the giddy went out of him at once.
“Ah, no,” he said softly. “Mark, what did you do?”
“The sensible thing.”
“The sensible thing,” Finn repeated. There was no teasing now, none at all.
He set down the drink he’d been holding and looked at me the way he’d looked at me across that drag show table a lifetime ago, like a man getting ready to fight me for my own good.
“Sit down. We’re going to talk about the sensible thing, you and I, and you’re not going to like it. ”