CHAPTER 7 JORGE—WHAT SHAWN DOESNT SAY
The ramen buys something Jorge didn't expect it to buy.
Not gratitude, exactly. Something looser than that. Shawn's talking again, easy the way he was before the GTA answer put a wall up between them, except now there's a version of him underneath it Jorge hasn't met yet.
"You didn't have to do that," Shawn says. Third time he's said some version of it since Thursday.
"Already told you. Don't care to hear it again."
"I'm just saying."
"Say something else."
Shawn goes quiet a second, like he's deciding whether that's an invitation or a warning. Jorge's not sure himself which one he meant it as.
"My mom's not gonna send anything," Shawn says finally. "Ever. That's not a maybe."
Jorge doesn't push. Learned that much already, that pushing gets him a wall, waiting sometimes gets him a door.
"She's got a problem," Shawn goes on, voice flatter than Jorge's heard it. "Had it since before I can remember. Whenever she gets ahold of any money it goes to that first. Always has. Wasn't ever gonna be different for me being in here."
"That’s why juvie?"
Shawn's head comes up at that, surprised Jorge remembered a detail he'd barely let slip days ago. "Some of it."
"Rest of it?"
"One of her boyfriends. Guy named Marcus, I think, hard to keep them straight after a while. Showed me how to get a car going without a key when I was thirteen. Said it was a trick. Said every man should know it." Shawn laughs, short and ugly, nothing funny in it. "Didn't say it was also a felony."
Jorge doesn't say anything to that. Doesn't trust what would come out if he opened his mouth right now, somewhere between anger at a grown man handing a kid a skill like that instead of an actual trade, and something closer to grief for a version of Shawn that never had a chance to be anything else.
"Wasn't like I had a lot of other options," Shawn says, like he's reading the silence and deciding to fill it before Jorge can judge it. "Everybody else's dad's teaching them Little League. Mine taught me how to pop an ignition column in under a minute."
"Not your dad."
"No. Never had one of those. Just a rotating cast of guys who thought they were gonna be, for about six months at a time, until they weren't."
Jorge's jaw works. He thinks about Rubén, about a father who'd been solid ground under both their feet until cancer took him out when Jorge was nineteen, and feels something close to guilt for how much he'd had that Shawn never got a single day of.
"So I got good at it," Shawn says. "The car thing. Wasn't proud of it. Wasn't ashamed either, not for a long time. Just was what I knew how to do that put something in my pocket when nothing else would."
"And now?"
Shawn's quiet a long moment. "Now I'm twenty-two and looking at real time for the only trade anybody ever bothered to teach me."
The words sit heavy in the cell, heavier than anything that's passed between them since the magazine.
Jorge doesn't offer him anything soft. Doesn't know how, and wouldn't trust it even if he did. But he doesn't say anything hard either, doesn't remind him what that trade cost somebody else, cost Jorge himself. Not tonight.
"You ever think about doing something else with those hands?" Jorge says instead. "Something that pays without a judge involved."
Shawn looks over at him, something careful in his face, like he's not sure if it's a real question or Jorge just filling space.
"Never had anybody ask me that before," he says.
Jorge doesn't answer. Goes back to his book, or pretends to, same as always.
But he's still turning the question over himself long after the lights go down, and he doesn't have an answer he trusts enough to say out loud yet either.