Chapter 22
IAN STANDS IN THE DOORWAY of the storage room Friday, eyeing me. “That’s it, by the way. That’s your I’m-going-to-fuck-with-you face.’ You have one now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, but I can’t get the words out without laughing.
He grunts, smirking, and joins me at the table I use for folding laundry. “Should I assume it’s related to why Helen couldn’t look at me on her way out just now, and why Babs was very much looking at me?”
“May I remind you that you gave me total access to everything in the bins for pro shop decor,” I say.
I spent the past hour going through the bins of Ian’s accolades for inspiration.
He’s given me the go-ahead to take on that entire section of the lobby, and the Coffee Coup has agreed on a Saturday early next month to tackle everything he’s approved on the wish list, with a grand reveal that evening.
I’d asked Helen and Babs back here to see if they’d be interested in taking on one particular element of my vision.
I’ve ceded total control to them, which I think shows tremendous personal growth on my part.
Ian grins, and there’s a feral edge to it that makes my toes curl. “You found the nudes.”
“Babs did. She found the file while we were talking. You should have warned me.”
His smile dares me to ask why he hadn’t. “And ruin the surprise? Where’s the fun in that?”
I told up an outtake from the series. The photo I have dubbed The Roar remains the indisputable winner of the day, and while there was no shortage of quality runners-up, the most delightful discovery had been among the candid shots. “Mr. Hammond, might one call this a cock sock?”
He laughs. “If only they’d printed it in color. It was highlighter pink.”
“Oh, Babs would have loved that,” I say.
He’d been captured in conversation with another man, who’s holding some kind of reflective screen.
The resulting light has washed out the definition in Ian’s abdomen, but the contrasting darkness of his chest hair is stark, as is the apparatus over his penis.
The length being suggested by the sock varied from shot to shot, leaving the ladies and me no choice but to speculate how accurately it portrayed the resting state of Ian’s unit.
There’s no question that the man is, as Babs put it, “proportional,” though there were some shots where the sock was stretched to an inhuman—but entertaining—size.
“I suspect she loved it anyway,” he says, and moves on to the other photos from the shoot.
He pushes through the stack, laughing when he gets to a shot of himself in a squat, the sock obscene.
“I put an empty Dr Pepper can in it at one point. Which ended up being pretty humbling once I took it out. It was a little roomy in there after that.” I laugh, and he reaches for another stack of photos.
“Did you get anything done back here, or did the cock sock derail you?”
“I’ve been very productive, thank you. Those are the ones I’d like to use out front,” I say, indicating the pile he’s flipping through, then tap the papers beside it.
“And I’ve compiled some newspaper clippings and articles, but let me know if there’s anything I missed that you’d like up.
Or”—I point to the nudes—“anything you’d rather we not include. ”
“Thank you for that. What’s—” He plucks a stray photo from the table. It’s of a family of four standing on a beach, smiling as the sun sets behind them. The outfits speak of a mother with specific aspirations. “Was this in with the others?”
I nod, watching for his reaction. “It was stuck to the side of one of the bins.”
Ian lets out a little laugh. “The Hammonds do Hawaii,” he explains, but it’s obvious.
Grant can’t be more than twelve in the photo, but he already has the bright smile I know so well, his hair sun-bleached, nose and cheeks the faint pink of almost-sunburnt.
Ian also looks like himself; not as broad as he is now, but filling out that flowered shirt in a way no Trader Joe’s employee ever has.
However, when Helen found the photo, it was the seniormost Hammond who had us fanning ourselves.
Talk about impact. Their dad is like a window to future Ian, the laugh lines around his eyes a hint of Man Mountain to come.
He’s not as brawny as his son, but they’re matched for height.
I’ve never been drawn to facial hair, but the familiar smile peeking out from beneath the mustache makes a compelling case for broadening my horizons.
“Did this end up on a Christmas card?” I ask.
“It was our last one,” he says, the words carrying a note of surprise. “How’d you know?”
I can’t help smiling. “Did your mom pick your shirts?”
“Yeah?”
“They’re complimentary enough that nothing clashes, but aren’t so coordinated that you look like servers at a tiki bar. Classic vacation-mom move.”
“She did that every family trip.” His voice is distant with recall. “The last night, we’d go out to dinner somewhere kind of fancy. She’d tell us, ‘Wear something nice,’ and when we griped, she’d throw shirts at us and we’d put on whatever it was.”
I grin. Stealthy. Exactly how I’d go about it.
It makes me feel a distant camaraderie with this woman I’ve never met.
I return to the photo, and my smile fades.
A woman I never will meet. I search for signs of her sickness.
She’s as tan as the rest of the family, with shoulder-length brown hair streaked with sunshine.
She’s on the slimmer side, but I wouldn’t suspect that she was harboring a fatal illness.
“You said it was your last Christmas card?”
“She was gone the following spring.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never lost anyone close. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. Or how it still hurts.”
“Those first few months are a blur. We kept moving, literally. Always in action, finding things to do. That’s Dad’s default, ‘go, go, go,’ and structuring everything to the point that he can’t even stop to think.
Or—” His eye twitches slightly; a subtle wince that screams for me to wrap myself around him.
“Hurt. The day after we lost her, he was packing up her closet.”
His voice thins with pain, and it’s like that moment making meatballs with Grant all over again. I want to offer some kind of creature comfort, but I don’t know what would be appropriate. So I just listen.
“I hated him for it. But even then, I saw it for what it was. He needed a project. He handled all the funeral arrangements, wrote the obituary, called the people she’d wanted to eulogize her, showed us what book passages she wanted read—”
“Book passages?”
“Some quotes she liked. Poems. My reading compared loss to a break that doesn’t heal properly, and learning to dance with the limp.” He frowns, but the expression is more thoughtful than discontent. “I hadn’t thought about that in years. It’s… accurate.”
I look pointedly toward his right knee. There’s a faint red mark left from Tuesday’s abrasion, blurring the white, barely there scar from his old injury. “You’d know in more ways than most.”
“I… do.” He half smiles. “I hadn’t made that connection. My knee thing wasn’t until way later, but…” He shakes his head, gaze going inward. I wait, selfishly cheered that I’ve contributed.
“Goddamn Christmas cards,” he says. “She was really good about those. Always did the ‘year in review’ letter, too. Grant lost four teeth in two months, and Ian had a pregnancy scare with his college girlfriend. Not grandparents yet, but there’s always next year!”
Ian shakes his head as I choke on my laughter.
“She held nothing back. It was mortifying. At the time,” he adds.
“Now they’re kind of nice to look at. She kept track of everything.
Everything important. Dad was the organized one, kept the day-to-day moving.
Mom never got us anywhere on time, and dinner was always incredible and overengineered and way later than anyone would have preferred, but it’s like she couldn’t help herself from doing one extra thing, just to make it perfect.
We never asked for it, but she lived for that stuff. ”
I smile and look up at Ian, but his eyes are distant again, his jaw tight.
“The first time she got sick, it was a total upheaval. Grant was four, and between him and her doctor appointments, I had to do a lot on my own. And I was such a dick about it.”
He pulls off his hat, raking his fingers through his hair. His stress behavior. I wonder if he knows he does it. “When she relapsed, she and Dad didn’t tell us until it was clear that she wouldn’t make it.” He tugs the cap back on.
“Did it progress quickly? Not that you got to know.”
“It was fast. She chose not to do chemo. It wouldn’t have given her much more time, and I get why she didn’t want to spend what little she had left feeling like shit.
Not that it kept me from being mad at her for not fighting,” he grumbles.
“I was hurt that she didn’t tell us. Grant and I, we had no idea how bad it was.
He was still just a kid. But I…” Another micro-wince, and this time, I can’t help it.
I place a hand on his, where it rests on the table.
He rubs his thumb along my pinky, absently.
“I know she didn’t want me to lose any time worrying about something I couldn’t control, but if I’d known, I would have made it a priority to get more time with her.
She shouldn’t have taken that choice from me, I guess.
” His shoulders rise and fall as he shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
I nod. Her reason for keeping her sickness quiet resonates with me, but I can see Ian’s side of it, the unkindness of her denying him and Grant the chance to come to terms with it. They would have felt helpless in the face of it—anyone would—but they deserved to know.