Chapter Sixteen Jase
It’s the kind of Tuesday that makes you forget Tuesdays can be like this.
No calls since seven this morning. The engine is clean, the equipment checked, the paperwork filed.
Weston did his walk-through at nine, found nothing to complain about, which from him is practically a standing ovation, and then disappeared back into his office.
Rory is doing something with his phone in the common room.
Evan is in the basement. Max is at his desk going through budget paperwork with the focused intensity of a man defusing something.
It is, in other words, the kind of shift where the hours move slowly, and everyone finds something to do with their hands.
Weston calls me into his office at half past ten and tells me the supply run has been pushed back twice already and can I please go today. I say yes because I always say yes, and because honestly a Costco run beats staring at the ceiling for another three hours.
He nods, then leans back in his chair and calls out through the open door. “Hayes.”
A beat. Then her footsteps in the hallway and she appears in the doorway, slightly wary the way she still gets when Weston calls for her, like she's running a quick mental inventory of whether she's done anything wrong.
“Sir?” she says.
“You've been in that office since you got here,” Weston says. “This station is more than paperwork. Thibodeau is doing the supply run today. Go with him. See how things work outside these walls.”
She blinks. Then the wariness leaves her face, replaced by something warmer. “Thank you,” she says. “Really. I appreciate it.”
Weston waves his hand like her gratitude is a minor inconvenience and looks back at his desk. We're dismissed.
We walk down the hallway side by side and she pulls on her jacket and after a moment she looks at me.
“Where are we going?” she says.
“Costco.”
Something moves through her face. “I’ve never been to a Costco.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m asking.”
She is silent for the entire drive, which I don’t take personally. I put music on low and drive and let her be quiet, and when I pull into the Costco parking lot, and she sees the building for the first time, she says, simply, “It’s enormous.”
“It’s a Costco,” I say.
“I knew that intellectually,” she says. “This is different.”
We get a cart at the entrance, one of the large flat ones, and I watch her take in the interior of the store like she’s landed somewhere foreign and is trying to recalibrate their understanding of what the word large means.
The ceilings are twenty feet high. The shelves go back further than seems reasonable.
A man pushes past us with a cart containing what appears to be an entire pallet of bottled water.
“Jase,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Why is everything so big.”
“Bulk purchasing,” I say. “Economy of scale. You want a forty-eight pack of paper towels, or you want to go back to the store every week?”
She watches the forty-eight pack of paper towels land in the cart and then looks up at me with an expression I can only describe as genuinely moved by this information, and I decide that bringing her here was one of the better decisions I’ve made recently.
We move through the aisles slowly, which is not how I usually do supply runs, but which feels right today.
She asks questions about everything, not performatively but actually wanting to know, why do they buy this brand over that one, how often do the guys go through coffee, is there a system for tracking what needs replacing, or does someone notice when it runs out.
I answer all of them, and somewhere around the coffee aisle, she picks up a bag of something and turns it over to read the back, and I watch her and think about the version of this woman who was supposed to be on a honeymoon right now and feel a complicated thing that I put away without examining.
We’ve turned down the snack aisle, which is approximately three hundred meters long and contains every food item known to humanity, and she’s reading the back of a protein bar, and I am pretending to look at the granola bars while actually watching her read.
“Do you have family nearby?” she asks, without looking up.
“Queens,” I say. “Most of them. My dads are still in Boston, but everyone else ended up here eventually.”
She looks up at that. “Your dads?”
“Two of them,” I say. “They've been together since before I was born.” I put another box in the cart. “They worked hard to make sure I never lacked anything. Not the practical stuff. Everything. I didn't always make it easy for them and they never made me feel it.”
She's quiet for a beat.
“They sound like good people,” she says.
“Everything good about me came from them,” I say, which is more than I usually give that sentence but which is also true.
She puts the protein bar back and picks up a granola bar instead, and puts it in the cart without asking, which I note because it’s the kind of small, unselfconscious thing that means someone has stopped performing comfort and is actually comfortable.
We keep moving.
The freezer aisle hits us like a wall of cold air, and she crosses her arms over her chest immediately, pulling herself in, and drifts closer to the cart without seeming to notice she’s doing it. Her shoulder is almost touching mine.
“What was it like?” she says. “Growing up in Boston.”
I look at the frozen vegetables. “Loud,” I say. “The good kind, mostly. Our house was always full of people. My dads knew everyone, and everyone knew them.” I pause. “School was different.”
“How?”
“I was skinny,” I say. “Late bloomer. Didn’t hit my growth until sophomore year.
Before that, I was just the kid who didn’t fit in anywhere obvious.
” I keep my voice easy, the way I always keep it when I talk about this, smooth on the surface.
“Kids are creative when they’ve decided they don’t like someone. ”
She’s quiet.
“I’m sorry,” she says. Not the reflexive kind. The kind that means it.
“It was a long time ago,” I say.
“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t count,” she says.
I look at her.
She’s looking back at me without pity, which is the thing I’ve always hated most about telling this to people. She’s looking at me like what I said mattered and like she heard it properly and like that’s enough.
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”
We stand there in the cold for a second, not moving.
“I learned to make people laugh,” I say. “It was the most useful thing I could figure out. If I could make someone laugh, they’d forget to be cruel.” I pull open the freezer door and grab the bag of peas from the list. “Still works, mostly.”
“I noticed,” she says quietly.
“You noticed what?”
“That you do it when things get heavy,” she says. “The joke. The deflection.” She tilts her head. “You’re doing it a little bit right now.”
I look at her.
“Occupational habit,” I say, which is what Evan says when someone catches him at something, and she recognizes it immediately and raises her eyebrows, and I laugh, actually laugh, caught at my own game by the woman who’s known me for a week.
“Okay,” I say. “Fair.”
She smiles, and we keep walking.
“My parents were never loud,” she says, after a moment.
“They were always there physically and somehow never actually there. My mother’s idea of showing up was making sure I was dressed correctly.
My father’s idea of a conversation was a series of evaluations.
” She pauses. “Nobody drove four hours for anything.”
I look at her.
“I used to think that was how families were,” she says. “That the warmth was something other people had, and I wasn’t made for it.” She glances at me briefly. “I’m starting to think I was wrong about that.”
I don’t say anything at first.
“You weren’t wrong about the family you had,” I say finally. “You were just wrong about it being the only one available.”
She smiles, and we keep walking.
We’re in the checkout line, the cart full and heavy, when two teenage girls get in the line behind us.
They’re sixteen, maybe seventeen, and they look at the two of us with the unconsciousness assessment that teenagers reserve for adults they find interesting.
There’s a whispered exchange between them that I catch the edge of but can’t fully make out, and then the taller one leans forward and says, with the bold confidence of someone who has not yet learned to be embarrassed by her own thoughts:
“You two look like you’re from a movie.”
Brielle turns around.
“Like,” the girl continues, apparently committed now, “like a prince and princess going grocery shopping. It’s very cute.”
Her friend covers her face with both hands.
Brielle stares at them for a full second. Then the color comes up in her face, starting at her neck and moving upward with impressive speed, and she turns back around to face the front of the line.
I look at the side of her face.
She is extremely pink.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I’m not saying anything,” I say.
“You’re thinking it very loudly,” she says.
“I’m thinking that those are very perceptive young women,” I say. “And that their aesthetic judgment is excellent.”
“Jase.”
“A prince and a princess,” I say thoughtfully. “That’s very—”
“I will leave you here,” she says. “I will walk out of this Costco, and I will take the car, and you can carry all of this back to the station yourself.”
“You don’t know where the station is,” I say.
“I’ll figure it out,” she says, and she’s trying very hard not to smile and failing entirely, and I watch it happen, the smile breaking through despite everything she’s doing to stop it, and I feel something in my chest that I have no practical use for right now but which I am going to have to deal with at some point.
Later, though.
***
On the drive back, she’s quiet again, but it’s a different quiet than before. Easier. The kind that happens between people who have said true things to each other and don’t need to fill what comes after.
We’re three blocks from the station when she says, without looking at me, “Thank you for bringing me.”
“The receipts needed handling,” I say.
She looks at me then, reading the deflection, and doesn’t call it out this time. Just looks at me for a minute with those eyes and then looks back at the road ahead.
“Still,” she says.
“Still,” I say back.
We pull into the station, and I park, and we sit there for a second before either of us moves, the engine ticking down, the street going about its business outside.
Then she opens the door and gets out, and I follow, and we carry the supplies inside together.