Chapter 74 Whole — Ii
“I know,” he said. “I’ve met you.” Bone dry.
“I want the ninety percent. I want the wasp lady, I’ve wanted the wasp lady since roughly June.
I also happen to know for a documented fact that the wasp lady is the steadiest human alive on the actual worst day of somebody’s life, and I find that” — he paused, hunting for the word, like he does, and settled on a plain one, because the plain ones are the only kind he trusts — “restful. I find you restful, Birdie, which is a completely deranged thing to say about the jumpiest woman in the county, and it happens to be true, and I’m too tired tonight to pretend it’s anything else. ”
“Restful,” I repeated. “You looked at the jumpiest woman in the county and the word your brain reached for was restful.”
“I stand by it,” he said. “You want to know the actual moment? Founders’ Day.
The propane rig venting into that crowd, everybody’s face going the same wrong shape, and I look over and there’s you, gone flat and quiet and busy, walking people back to exactly the right distance like you were reading it off a card only you could see.
And I felt my own shoulders come down. In the middle of it.
Somebody was minding the store. That’s the feeling.
That’s the whole of it. I spent a decade being the person whose shoulders everyone else’s came down around, and I never once got to feel it from the other side until I watched you do it and pretend you hadn’t.
” He shrugged, the smallest possible motion.
“Restful. A man can want to be near that. A man can want it a lot and not have any smooth way to say so.”
I laughed, wet and startled, and it came apart halfway into something that was not a laugh at all, and he put his arm around me, finally, and I turned my face into his shoulder and I let it come — three years of it, the freight of it, in a kitchen that was not on fire, held up by a man who was not going anywhere.
I didn’t have to be steady. He’d said it and I decided, right then, to test whether he’d meant it, so I stopped being steady entirely, I fell all the way apart against his shirt, ugly and heaving and undignified, and he just held on and breathed and let me, and did not one time try to fix it or hurry it or turn it into anything but what it was.
When I could talk again I said, into his collar, “The medal goes back in the sock drawer.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Not to hide it,” I said. “That’s — I need you to hear the difference. Not to hide it. That’s just where it lives. I might take it out sometimes. On purpose. To look at. On a Tuesday, for no reason.”
“That’s allowed,” he said.
“And I’m keeping the store. And the two-flat.
And Theo is my — I still don’t have a word for what Theo is to me, but he’s it, and I’m not leaving him.
And I’m not the town’s calm one. I’ll teach a safety class, maybe, on my terms, where nobody’s actually on fire while I do it.
But I am not the emergency number, Wes, I can’t be the emergency number, if the phone rings at three a.m. it can’t be for me. ”
“You’re not the emergency number,” he agreed, easy.
“You’re just Birdie. Who happens to be extremely good at the worst day of a person’s life, and who is also allowed to have a whole life that isn’t only worst days.
” He tipped his head down against the top of mine.
“That’s the reframe, if you want it. It’s a gift you have.
It is not a bill you’re paying down. You get to just — have it.
Like somebody with a good singing voice, who doesn’t owe the world a free concert every time they walk into a room. ”
I sat with that a long moment, my ear against his chest, his heartbeat plain and slow and unhurried under it. Downstairs, faintly, Theo was demonstrating something at length and full volume to his mother, and Ren was saying no, absolutely not, put that down.
“I can’t sing, though,” I said. “Just so we’re clear. Genuinely awful.”
“Thank God,” Wes said. “One miracle per person. The town can’t take two.”
And I laughed again, and this time it stayed a laugh the whole way through.