CHAPTER ONE #3
He said the things you said — that he'd call Jodie tonight, that he was sorry, that the season was mad at the moment, all of it true and none of it addressing the actual shape of what she was really telling him, which was the same thing she'd been telling him since he was nine years old without either of them ever using the words for it: that his usefulness was expected, assumed, priced in, and that the version of him who simply rang to say hello for no reason at all had never really been given room to exist in that house.
He didn't resent her for it. He'd turned the thought over enough times over the years to know, with some confidence, that resentment wasn't the right shape for what he felt — it was closer to a kind of settled sadness, the specific flat ache of understanding exactly how you'd been built and knowing the builder hadn't meant any harm by it.
"You still there?" his mother asked, when the pause ran a beat too long.
"Yeah. Just setting up for the gathering. Big one this year."
"Oh, that thing. You still doing all that yourself?"
"Someone's got to."
"You always say that." There was something almost fond in it, this time, a flicker of the woman underneath the busy distracted one, the mother who had, in her own overstretched way, genuinely loved all five of her children even if she'd never had quite enough of herself left over at the end of a day to show it in any way that didn't look like a task assigned.
"You're a good boy, Renzo. Always were. Don't work yourself into the ground for people who don't say thank you. "
"They do say thank you."
"Do they, though," his mother said, and it wasn't really a question, and he didn't have a ready answer for it, and the call ended a minute later on the usual practical notes — he'd ring Jodie tonight, he'd come up for Christmas if the roster allowed it, she loved him, mind how he drove.
He put the phone away. There was ice to check, and a cray pot delivery running late, and forty-odd people about to need someone to have thought of everything before they'd thought to ask, and Renz Kowalski did what he always did with a feeling too large to sit with in the middle of a job: he set it down carefully, and went and did the next useful thing.
? ? ?
He found himself thinking, while he checked the eskies for the third time that morning, of the first gathering Pip had ever come to — four years back now, though it felt both longer and shorter than that depending which part of the memory he examined.
She'd arrived with Dom, actually, a workmate's plus-one nobody had quite known what to make of, standing at the edge of the car park for a full five minutes before anyone had gone over to introduce themselves properly, and Renz remembered noticing her before he'd had any name to put to the noticing — the particular watchful stillness of someone working out whether a place was safe to walk into, a stillness he recognised because some version of it lived in him too, though his showed up as motion instead of hers showing up as stillness, both of them managing the same wariness through opposite strategies.
He'd been the one to bring her a coffee that day, the same automatic reflex he brought to every stranger, and she'd taken it with a small surprised thanks, as though kindness offered without being asked for was a foreign currency she hadn't expected this particular economy to trade in, and he remembered thinking, with the mild curiosity he brought to most new information about people, that here was someone who'd clearly learned the same lesson he had from a different direction — that you didn't get handed things for free, that everything cost something, that the safest position in any room was the one where you owed nobody and nobody owed you.
She'd come back the next year, and the year after that, working her way slowly into the edges of the crew's ordinary life the way people did when they'd found something worth staying near even if they hadn't yet worked out how to stay near it properly, and somewhere in the second or third year Renz had noticed that he looked for her car in the car park before he looked for anyone else's, a small private fact he'd filed away without examining, the way he filed away most things about himself.
He remembered, too, the year she'd nearly stopped coming altogether — her third gathering, when some falling-out with Dom over an unrelated matter had left her without an obvious reason to keep showing up, and Renz had noticed her absence from the group chain planning discussion with a specific hollow disappointment, had simply rung Dom directly and asked, carefully, without quite admitting why it mattered, whether Pip still had the address for the headland.
She'd turned up anyway, that year, a few hours late, explaining she'd nearly talked herself out of it and then hadn't been able to shake the thought of missing it, and Renz had handed her a coffee, same as always, and said nothing about how relieved he was.
He went back to the eskies, ice exactly as it should be, third check complete, and got on with the cray pots.