4. The Man Who Drove Away #3
My little brother picks up on the sixth ring with a wall of noise behind him, glass, chatter, somebody tuning a guitar badly on purpose, the whole warm racket of The Driftglass on a music night.
"Well, hell," Theo says. "Los Angeles. You know it's Tuesday here, right? Real people are asleep."
"You're not asleep."
"I'm running sound check for open mic and a bachelorette party just found the tambourines, so no, I'm having a worse night than sleep.
" A door thumps, the noise drops, and he's out back in the alley.
I can picture it exactly, the kegs, the string lights, the smell of low tide and fryer oil that I would not admit under oath I miss.
"You never call during my shift. Who died? "
"Nobody died. I might have a job out there. Fall."
The alley goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with sound.
My brother is twenty-nine, tends bar like it's a calling, and has never once in his life let me get away with anything, which is why he's the call I saved for last.
"So it's true," he says. "Whole town's been buzzing for a week. Somebody big, wedding at the Lantern House, nobody's got a name yet, but Dot Pearson's already speculating, and you know how that goes, by Friday it'll be royalty." A beat. "You'd be working it. Here. With her in charge of it."
"If she allows it. It's her call, all of it, I made sure—"
"Good." Flat, immediate, no negotiation, and God, I've missed him.
"How is she?" I ask, and I hear my own voice do the thing it never does in Los Angeles, come out with nothing on it, no shine, no bit, just the question I've wanted to ask a safe person for five years. "Honest version, Theo. Is she happy?"
My brother takes his time because he knows what he's holding.
"She's the best thing in this town and the town knows it," he says finally.
"She fixed the Harvest Festival when the committee imploded.
She got Mrs. Okafor's daughter married in a hurricane, indoors, dry, dancing.
She tips my staff like she's laundering money and remembers every birthday at the bar.
She does all of it with the drawbridge up, and you three are why the bridge got built.
So. Happy?" The guitar sound bleeds through the door behind him.
"She built a good life, Cade. A really good one.
Don't you dare confuse that with a life that's been waiting for you to come back to it. "
"I wouldn't—"
"You would. Not on purpose. You'd do it the hopeful way, which is worse.
" A shout from inside, his name, the tambourines escalating.
"I gotta go rescue a microphone. Two more things, and then you can go back to your beautiful nonsense.
One, if you take the job, you're staying with Mom.
Don't even try the hotel thing. She found out Marcy at the front desk holds rooms for you, and there was an incident, you're staying home, eating her cooking, and that's federal law now. Two."
His voice does the thing mine did a minute ago, drops the shine, and underneath it, my kid brother sounds glad and scared at once.
"Come home anyway, man. Job or no job. It's been long enough that missing you stopped being interesting."
He hangs up on the tambourines.
I sit in the beige for a long time, and then I write to Nolan's people, one paragraph, the deal as stated. I accept, conditional, in writing, on Golden Hour Vows' documented approval of my involvement, revocable by her at any point, no questions billed.
I copied Paloma's office. I book the Thursday red-eye through Boston before the courage wears off, aisle seat, no bag but the two suitcases, one of which has been packed since March, which I'm choosing not to examine.
The car comes at nine Thursday night, and halfway down the 105 with the airport lights coming up I lean forward, actually lean forward, my hand on the seat back, the words turn around sitting loaded behind my teeth, because this is what I do, this is the one move I'm famous for in the only room that matters, and the driver's eyes flick to the mirror, and I look at them, and I sit back.
"Terminal seven," I say. "Sorry. Thought I forgot something."
I didn't forget anything.
I remember all of it.
That's the whole problem, and it bothers me: no fee for the extra weight, and I'm in the jet-bridge line with four hundred strangers when the phone buzzes against my chest.
Paloma Crane's office, three lines, no greeting, the syntax of expensive certainty.
Planner consultation confirmed.
Honeybell Harbor. Forty-eight hours.
The line shuffles forward.
I put the phone away and hand the agent my boarding pass with the smile that works on everyone, and she smiles back, four great seconds, and then I'm walking down the tunnel toward the one town on earth where everybody already knows what's under it.
Home, then.
Where the drawbridge is up, where my mother is airing out my old room, where a woman with apricot in her scent holds a pen over my whole future, and where charm, the only currency I've ever carried, has never once been legal tender.