Chapter 12 Damian
I filled the mug before she was awake, which stopped being a decision and turned into a fact about the house. Earl Grey, milk in first, a method she had once called a war crime and then drunk every morning since without comment.
She found me at the dining table with it in both hands.
"You're up," she said.
"I'm always up."
"That's not a personality, that's a medical condition." She sat down across from me. "Okay. You've got the face."
"What face?"
"The one you make before you ask me something you've already decided I'm saying yes to."
She was not wrong.
"Come somewhere with me on Friday," I said.
"Where?"
"I'm not telling you."
"That's not how invitations work, Damian. You give a person a location. Sometimes a dress code. The good ones come with snacks."
"Will you come?"
She looked at me for a second too long.
"Yes," she said. "Obviously. You filled the mug. I'm legally obligated."
"Thomas and Brady are coming too. The thing I'm doing on Friday isn't a thing I've done by myself since the day I met them. I'm not starting now."
She reached across and put her hand flat on the back of mine for a moment, then took her mug and let me be.
Friday, Thomas drove. He always drove when it was going to be a long quiet. Brady rode shotgun and would not allow the silence to exist.
"So this guy," Brady was saying, twisted halfway around to face the back seat, "this guy at the farmer's market, he's got a stall that's just jam.
That's it. Forty kinds. And he looks me dead in the eye and tells me, and I want you to really hear this, he tells me his fig jam is, quote, life-altering. "
"It's just jam," I said.
"That's what I said. And he goes, you'll see. Ominous. From a man in an apron." Brady spread his hands. "So I buy the jam. Out of fear, mostly."
"Was it life-altering?" Maren said.
"It was pretty good jam," Brady admitted.
"You file a grievance against a traffic light and you'll give a jam man a pass," I said.
"The jam man earned it. The traffic light insulted my mother."
Maren laughed, and I caught Thomas's eye in the mirror, and that was the point of Brady, the whole point, the reason a man like that is worth ten of any other man in a car going where this car was going. He filled the space with his silly humor so the rest of us could ride in it.
The carnations were across my lap. I held them the entire way without setting them on the seat.
Riverside Memorial was large, laid out in long flat rows. I knew the way without the map on my phone. I had not needed the map in years.
"It's flat," Maren said, when we reached it. She said it gently, like she was apologizing for noticing.
"The county does flat," I said. "Upright costs more. The system that buried her didn't pay for upright, and I was twelve, and I didn't know upright was a thing you could choose. I thought this was just what a grave was."
We walked. Thomas and Brady fell back two steps without being told, the way they had fallen back two steps at this marker before, more times than any of us counted out loud.
"When did you find out it was a choice," she said.
"Later. And I decided then I'd fix it the year I could afford to.
" I looked at the flat stone with my mother's name cut into it.
"I can afford to. I've had the order placed for a while.
Upright, granite, the good kind that doesn't streak.
I just kept not scheduling the install. I think I wanted to bring people first. I think I wanted her to meet them before I changed the room. "
I knelt in the grass and put the carnations down where I always put them.
"Hi, Mom," I said, out loud, because she liked it out loud, because the year she was dying she told me the machines made too much noise and a person's voice was the only sound in that room she could stand.
"I brought people this time. I brought the people I care about most in the world. I wanted you to meet them."
I did not look up. It was easier not to.
"This is Maren," I said. "She's the one I've been talking about. The one I told you about the last few times. She's…" I stopped. "She makes the house louder. In a way I like. You'd like her. You'd both gang up on me, which would be a nightmare, and I'd let you."
I heard Maren's breath catch behind me. She did not say anything. She let me have it.
"And these two you already know," I said.
"Thomas and Brady. They've been out here with me a lot.
I know I keep introducing them like it's new.
I just want it on the record, today, with everybody standing here, that they're not visitors.
They're mine. They're the family I got after.
" I put my hand flat on the cold flat stone.
"They're important to me. I don't say it to them enough, so I'm saying it to you, and they have to stand there and take it. "
"Low," Brady said, but his voice was not steady, and I loved him for trying anyway.
We sat down in the grass, the four of us.
"She was sick for a year before she died," I told Maren.
"She hid it. I figured out later she hid it on purpose, so I'd get one more normal year instead of a year of hospitals.
I was twelve. I didn't get a vote. She died in a hospital and then there was no one, because there had only ever been her, and then there were nine houses. "
"Nine," Maren said.
"Yes. Some of them blur. One of them I think about.
" I pulled a blade of grass and did not do anything with it.
"The family that sent me back at fourteen.
They had a baby. They ran out of bedrooms, and a bedroom is a real thing, and a baby is a real thing, so they did the math and I was the number that didn't fit.
And here is the part I could never explain to anyone.
They weren't bad. They were fine. They were adequate.
And adequate was worse than cruel, because if they'd been cruel I could have been angry, and there's somewhere to put angry.
There's nowhere to put adequate. You just have to carry it. "
"Oh, Damian," she said.
"There was a foster brother in one of the houses," I said, because I wanted to give her one good thing in the middle of it.
"Older. He gave me a paperback. One of those comedy memoirs, the kind a comedian writes about his terrible childhood, and I read it about a dozen times because it was the funniest thing I'd ever held and it was mine.
He's the only one I still look for. I run his name sometimes.
I hope he's out there somewhere being okay, with his own copy. "
Thomas picked it up then.
"I met him at sixteen," Thomas said to Maren. "My dad ran a program for kids aging out of the system, and Damian was in it, and he was the most arrogant sixteen-year-old I had ever met in my life."
"I was correct at sixteen," I said. "I'm correct now. It's consistent."
"My mom fed him dinner once," Thomas went on. "One dinner. And afterward she stood in the kitchen and told my dad that from then on the table had four chairs. Not three. Four. She didn't ask anybody. She just reset the number."
"That’s so sweet of her," Maren said softly.
"There was a road trip," Thomas said. "We were nineteen. Me, Damian, Brady, the Grand Canyon, in a car that had no business leaving the county. It overheated twice. Brady navigated us an hour in the wrong direction and called it scenic."
"It was scenic," Brady said.
"And his first Thanksgiving at our house," Thomas said, and here his voice changed, went careful, "he wouldn't eat.
We're all sitting there, and he won't touch the plate.
And my mom finally gets it before any of us do.
He's waiting to see if there's enough. Some house somewhere taught him to wait and find out if there's enough before he takes any, so nobody can take it back. "
I kept my eyes on the grass.
"So she made everybody go back for seconds first," Thomas said.
"Made a whole thing of it. Piled it on. And only when every plate had been filled twice did he finally eat.
He was the last one to eat at his own welcome dinner.
" He stopped. "He's my brother. In every way the word is supposed to mean.
I don't have the version of him that's a friend. I only have the version that's family."
Then he turned and looked straight at me.
"Men don't say this to each other," Thomas said.
"So I'm going to say it once, out loud, where it counts.
I love you, as my friend and as my brother.
And I know what you think. I know you've got it in your head that you're a weight people carry.
That you cost a bedroom. That you're the number that doesn't fit.
" His jaw worked. "It isn't true. It was never true. They were wrong on the form. I know bad things happened at those foster homes, and you don’t have to share it until you’re ready.
But you're loved now. You've been loved for twenty years.
I just never made you sit still and hear it. "
I did not answer right away, because I could not.
"They used some of us for the work at a foster home," I said finally, and I had never said this part to anyone.
"One house, I was labor. All day. Hard labor, the kind that's illegal for a grown man on a clock, and I was a kid with no clock.
Another one kept me in a room, locked. I have scars from those years.
Some you can see. Most you can't." I made myself keep going.
"I was scared the entire time. Every day.
And I still wake up some nights with it, the old scared, like no time passed at all.
" I looked at the two of them. "And then there was you.
And Brady. And a table with four chairs.
And for the first time in my life somebody showed me that family doesn't have to have anything to do with who you're related to.
That it can just be people who decide." My voice went somewhere I could not control.
"That I might have deserved to be loved the whole time, and the houses were just wrong. "
I was crying now. Thomas leaned over and kissed the top of my head, once, the way you do to a kid or a brother, and did not make it a thing.
Brady scooted across the grass and threw an arm around my shoulders, heavy and warm.
"For the record," Brady said into the side of my head, "I love you too, you joyless, correct, refrigerated man. And if you tell anyone I said it, I'll swap your IPA for the cucumber wheat for a month."
I laughed. It came out wet and broken and it was still a laugh.
Thomas laughed a beat after me, because he always needs the beat.
And Maren, last, closed the circle. She came around and got her arms around as much of the three of us as she could reach, her face somewhere near my shoulder, and she did not say anything clever, which was how I knew she had heard all of it.
"You'd have liked her, Mom," I said, to the flat stone, over the top of all those heads. "I'm getting you the upright one. I'll bring them when it's installed. I'll bring them every time."
Keith was not there, which is the only reason the moment stayed dignified. If Keith had been there he would have walked directly across the center of it and demanded to be told he was people.
We sat in the grass a while longer. Nobody rushed it. Brady eventually told the jam story again, worse and longer, and my mother got to hear it, and I decided she would have laughed at the part where he bought the jam out of fear.
That was the day I stopped keeping the count of what I had lost and started keeping a different number. Four chairs, and now four people.