Chapter 13 Maren
Breakfast was a contact sport in my house now, and I had learned to eat with my elbows in.
"Okay, I need the origin story," I said, pointing my fork at the three of them. "Damian I get. Thomas's parents, four chairs, I cried about it for an hour, don't bring it up. But how did Brady happen? Who let Brady in?"
"Nobody let me in," Brady said, scandalized. "I arrived, like weather."
"He's not wrong about the weather part," Damian said.
Thomas set down his coffee, the strong kind he made on purpose to out-strong Brady's.
"It was a few weeks after my parents took Damian in," he said.
"There was a cookout for the program. Damian and I show up, and there's this loud sixteen-year-old running the grill like he owns the county.
Nobody put him in charge. He just took the tongs. "
"Excuse you. I was asked to take the tongs," Brady said.
"You were not."
"I was asked by the situation. The situation was that the burgers were a disaster and a leader was needed."
"He fed us," Thomas said to me, ignoring him. "That's the real story. He fed two feral teenagers who didn't trust a free plate, and he didn't make it weird, and he came back the next week, and the week after, and at some point we just stopped counting him as a guest."
"That is not how I tell it," Brady informed me.
"How do you tell it?"
"I tell it," Brady said, leaning in, "that I found two half-starved street urchins at a community function.
Damian had the eyes of a Victorian child.
Thomas had clearly never been hugged. And I, a hero, looked upon them, and I said, these are mine now, and I fed them my legendary cheeseburgers, and they wept. "
"We did not weep," Damian said.
"You wept on the inside."
"Thomas's version is more accurate," Damian said, to me, flatly, the way he confirmed everything, like a man reading a verdict. "Brady didn't find us. Brady was standing at a grill and we were hungry. That's the whole event. He has spent fifteen years adding a soundtrack."
"There was a soundtrack," Brady said. "In my heart."
"Your heart doesn't have a soundtrack. It has a jingle, for sandwiches."
"Hey, you take that back."
"I will not. You're a sandwich with a personality and we all live with it."
"Thomas," Brady appealed. "You're the mediator. So mediate. Tell him I'm a full meal."
"You're a small plates situation," Thomas said, not looking up from his coffee. "Shareable, and best in a group."
"That's worse." Brady pointed his spatula at me. "Maren. Tiebreaker. Am I a sandwich or am I an entire feast?"
"You're whatever gets me fed fastest," I said, "so this morning you're a feast, and tomorrow when I'm mad at you, you're a gas station hot dog."
"I'll take it," Brady said, wounded and delighted at the same time, which was his natural resting state.
I laughed so hard I had to put my fork down, and across the table Thomas watched me do it with a look I was choosing not to examine before noon.
"We should go," Thomas said, standing. "You've got a call."
He walked me out to the car, and at the door he handed me the travel mug without a word.
I took it on reflex now. That was the thing. I did not even look. Damian filled it in the kitchen, and somebody carried it to me, and lately the somebody was whoever was closest to the door, and the mug just appeared in my hand like the house had grown it.
"This mug has a whole life," I said, getting in. "It gets filled by Damian. It gets carried by you, or Brady, or once, alarmingly, by the dog, who had it in his mouth, and I will never know why. It's a relay. There's a baton and the baton is my tea."
"It's efficient," Thomas said, pulling out.
"It's a love language with a lid, is what it is." I said it as a joke. I watched his hands not react on the wheel, which was its own kind of reaction.
He drove the way he did everything, smooth and aware, eyes moving without looking like they moved. After a couple of blocks he said, out of nowhere, in the careful voice he used when he had decided to try being a person for a minute, "Can I ask you something that isn't in the file."
"Those are my favorite kind."
"If you could only keep one of your own movies," he said. "Every other copy on earth gets erased. Which one do you save?"
"Oh, that's a mean question." I thought about it.
"The indie. The one I made for no money when I was twenty.
Everyone's seen it on a bad print and they still cry.
I'd save that one." I turned in my seat.
"Why do you ask? Are you going to erase the rest?
Is this a threat? Are you the stalker? Plot twist! "
"Too soon," he said, but the corner of his mouth moved.
"It's never too soon. It’s coping." I drank the tea, which was perfect, which it always was, because Damian was incapable of making it wrong. "Okay, my turn. Does it get boring? The job. Standing in doorways watching a woman pretend she isn't checking her own locks… Is it like watching paint dry?"
"It's never boring when it's the right principal.
" He said it plainly, eyes on the road, and then seemed to decide that was too much and reached for a story to cover it.
"But the job has its days. There was a summer in Italy.
A town called Crema. You'd hate the client, he was a hundred years old and made of money and complaints, and he wanted to spend a few weeks at his sister's place out in the countryside.
So it's me, Damian, Brady, and this ancient millionaire, in olive country, with almost nothing to do. "
"That sounds like heaven."
"It was. That's the part nobody tells you about this work.
Sometimes the threat assessment is low and the location is a postcard and you just get to live in it.
" He almost smiled. "Brady lost his mind.
In a good way. Every morning he'd have somewhere we had to go.
A bakery two towns over. A lake. A field with a specific tree he'd decided was the best tree. He dragged us everywhere."
"Let me guess. He ranked the trees."
"Of course he did." Thomas shook his head.
"He ranks everything. And here's the thing I still think about.
Damian and Brady did not bicker in Crema.
Not really. For three weeks. I kept waiting for it and it didn't come, because they were both too busy being amazed.
You take two men who fight about a thermostat and you put them in front of something genuinely beautiful and they just go quiet next to each other and look at it. "
"Give me one more. The first thing you see when somebody says Italy."
He thought about it. "Damian took a photo, the second week.
He'd have denied it if you asked. He'd have said he was checking a sightline.
But I caught him. We were up on a stone wall over the valley, the client was napping, and there was this light coming sideways across all of it, the olives, the roofs, the whole bowl of the place gone gold.
And Damian, who pretends he doesn't own a single soft part, took out his phone and took a picture of it.
Just for himself. Nobody in the frame. Just the light. "
"He kept it?"
"Yes. I've seen it on his laptop. A man who maps exits for a living, holding onto one photo of a thing that was only beautiful and nothing else." Thomas's voice dropped. "That's the image. That's my Italy."
"You love him so much you just described his screen saver to me at a stoplight."
"He'd hate that you know," Thomas said. "Don't tell him I told you."
"It's in the vault," I said. "I have a whole vault now. It's filling up faster than I can label things."
"Then we flew back to LA with the old man," Thomas said, "and we landed, and we were not on the tarmac ten minutes before Damian told Brady he'd packed the cases wrong.
And that was that. Vacation was over, and the bickering resumed.
I've never been so relieved to hear two grown men argue about a duffel bag. "
I was laughing again, but quieter now, because the story had a thing underneath it, the way his stories always did, and the thing was that he loved them, and that watching the two of them be happy was the closest Thomas let himself get to being happy out loud.
"You really love them," I said.
"They're the company. The company's the thing."
"That's not what I said and you know it."
He didn't answer. He turned us onto the long stretch toward the studio, and the conversation changed temperature without either of us touching the dial.
It just warmed. He asked me what I was like when I was a struggling actress.
I told him, the real version, the broke and stubborn and terrified version.
"You'd have liked me back then," I said. "I was a disaster. Disasters are very charming for the first few months."
"I like you now," he said.
He said it to the windshield. Not to me. Like if he aimed it at the glass it wouldn't count. But it counted.
"You're not allowed to do that," I said.
"Do what?"
"Say a thing like that to the windshield and then keep driving like you didn't. That's a hit and run. There are laws in this nation."
"I'll file a report." The corner of his mouth moved. "Brady taught me the forms."
"See, that's the problem with you three. I say something real and I get a joke. I make a joke and one of you says something real. We are completely out of sync and somehow it works."
"It's a rotation," he said. "We cover each other's posts."
"Is that what I am? A post?"
He was quiet for a second, hands easy on the wheel, the ocean somewhere off to the right where he'd routed us on that very first drive because I'd asked for a view of the water.
"No," he said. "You're not a post. A post is a thing you stand at so nothing gets past you. You're the thing I keep catching myself wanting to get to instead of guard." He shook his head once, like he'd surprised himself out loud. "That came out... I'm blaming the ocean."
"Blame the ocean," I said softly. "I won't tell. It goes in the vault."
The studio gate came up ahead, the long line of palms, the security booth where they knew my plate. Thomas pulled in, put the car in park, and we were early, and neither of us reached for the door.
We looked at each other for a length of time that became a decision.
I leaned across the center console and kissed him. He went still for a moment. And then his hand came up to the side of my face, and he kissed me back.
I pulled back an inch. Just enough to see him.
"I've been thinking about that," I said, "since the patio. Since I watched you let Brady that close and figured out it wasn't a haircut, it was the bravest thing I'd seen you do."
"Since the hallway at Aegis," he said, low, rough, not careful anymore. "The day you signed. You walked past Daniel's photo and you didn't ask. I've been thinking about it since then. I just decided I wasn't allowed."
"Who said you weren't allowed?"
"Me. I'm very persuasive."
"You're overruled," I said, and kissed him again.
We made out in a parked car at a studio gate like two people half our age, his hand in my hair and my hand fisted in the front of his shirt, the perfect tea going cold in the cupholder, and I did not care, and he did not check a single mirror, which for Thomas was the most romantic thing he could possibly have done.
When I finally got out, my legs were not fully on my side, and he was looking at me through the open door with an expression I had never once seen on him, loose and undefended, a man whose wall had a door in it now whether he liked it or not.
"Go to work," he said.
"Notarize this in your little book," I said, walking backward toward set. "Time, date, location. It happened. You can't unwrite it."
He watched me until I was through the gate.