Chapter 4 #2
"Duke Anthony Rhodes, if you touch that bread before we sit down."
"I'm not touching the bread."
My mother turned from the stove with a serving spoon and a look that had been settling arguments in the Rhodes household for thirty-two years. I put the bread down. Reese, at the table with her phone, laughed without looking up.
"He always does this," Reese said.
"He has always done this," my mother confirmed. "Since he was four."
"I was hungry when I was four."
"You're hungry now. Sit down."
I sat down.
My father came in from the living room. Ray Rhodes, early sixties, big man, big voice, the whistle from Hartsdale High's sideline still audible in how he called the room to order even when the room was his own kitchen.
He took the head of the table. Caroline was already seated, Henry on her hip, working a sippy cup into the high chair's tray with one hand while holding her son with the other.
My mother brought the chicken. My father carved.
Reese quickly put her phone away because my mom, Diane Rhodes, didn't allow phones at the table, and Reese had been testing that boundary for a decade without success.
Caroline got Henry settled, and I poured the water.
The choreography was automatic—six people in a kitchen they had been eating in together for thirty-odd years, moving around each other without thinking about it.
"So," my dad said. He had a fork in one hand and the expression he wore when he was about to be proud of somebody. "Nepal."
"What about it?"
"The training. How's it going? You still doing the elevation runs?"
"Every other weekend. Did Mount Washington last month."
"Mount Washington." He nodded with the slow satisfaction of a man who had been tracking his son's accomplishments since pee-wee football and had never run out of room on the refrigerator. "That's serious elevation."
"It's a good test. The summit altitude isn't the problem—it's how your body handles the oxygen debt on the way up."
"When do you hear about the expedition roster?"
"Few months. They're putting the final team together in the fall."
"My son," he said to the table—the same easy, proprietary pride he carried into every room, a man who had never doubted that the highlight reel would keep going. "Climbing in the Himalayas."
Reese looked at me across the table. "Are you bringing back something for Henry?"
"I'll bring back a yak."
Caroline, cutting Henry's chicken into pieces the size of her thumbnail, didn't look up. "Henry doesn’t need a yak."
Henry slammed his sippy cup on the tray in protest. The table laughed.
My father was proud of Nepal. He was proud of it because Nepal was the next line on the list—the quarterback, the scholarship, the firefighter, the mountaineer. Each line earned and real and mine, and each one placed in a frame my father had built before I was tall enough to see over the counter.
I looked at my mother across the kitchen.
She was at the counter. She was reading me.
She did it quietly, without drawing attention to it, from a position that looked like she wasn't paying attention at all.
Thirty-two years of teaching second grade had given her a diagnostic eye that missed nothing.
She could tell when a seven-year-old was lying about the homework, and she could tell when her thirty-two-year-old son was performing at his own family's dinner table.
I looked away.
She didn't say anything. She picked up the serving spoon, brought the salad to the table, sat down beside my father, and asked Caroline about Henry's new teeth. The moment passed, and nobody at the table noticed it except the two of us.
Mid-meal, Caroline turned to answer something my father asked about the contractor's schedule for the deck project. She passed Henry to me without asking. The toddler went from her arms to my chest. Her hand was back on her coffee cup before the transfer registered.
Henry settled against my chest in about four seconds.
His head went to my collarbone, his fist closing in the front of my shirt.
He smelled like baby shampoo and the Cheerios he'd been crushing into his high chair tray for twenty minutes. He was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with his weight—the particular heaviness of a child who trusts you completely, whose entire body goes slack because he decided you’re safe.
I sat with it. I didn't think about why it landed so hard.
When the dinner wound down, I helped clear the table. I dried the dishes while my mother washed.
She looked at me. "You'd tell me," she said. "If something was going on."
"Nothing's going on, Mom."
She held my look for a moment, then kissed me on the cheek and went to join my father.
I drove home alone.
The truck was quiet. The road from Cedar Lane to my place was a ten-minute drive through the dark that I'd done a thousand times, past the fire station, past the high school, past the turn for Main, where the diner lights were still on, and the last of the Saturday crowd was filtering out.
The windows were down. The air was cool and still held the end of summer in it, the smell of cut grass and river water, and the faint sweetness that meant the season was about to turn.
The warmth of Henry was still on my chest. The weight. The memory of a small body trusting mine with its full heaviness, the fist in my shirt, the slow breathing against my collarbone. My body was still holding the shape of him.
I'd done casual my whole adult life.
Casual was what I did. It was a system that worked—like the firehouse routine, like my father's highlight reel—a thing I'd built and maintained, and never had to question, because it never cost me anything.
A woman came and went, and I was the same man on either side of her, and the sameness was proof that casual was the right word for what I was.
The pact with Audrey Callahan was the most casual agreement I'd ever made. Two adults, one night, move on. On paper, it was the easiest thing I'd ever agreed to.
It was the hardest thing I'd been carrying in a week, and I didn't know what to call that.
I'd done this before. The drive home, the quiet cab, the end of a night where a woman was somewhere else, and I was here.
It had never felt like this before. No hospital hallway I stood in deciding whether to walk down.
No morning-after voice in my head that I replayed while checking the rig.
No weight on my chest that made me think about someone who wasn't in the room.
I didn't know what this was.
I didn't know what to do with not knowing.