Chapter 3 #2
Frankie looked over. Didn't jump on it. Just left the door open, the way Malcolm had done to him in the shop, and Malcolm understood, distantly, that he'd been handed the same courtesy back and that he could walk through it or not.
He walked through it.
"I was married," Malcolm said. "Twenty years, near enough.
College sweethearts. She's a good woman, we were good together, and I mean that — no story there, nobody cheated, nobody yelled.
We just ran a whole life that was fine." The word sat wrong in his mouth, the way it always did.
"Divorced three years ago. Amicable. Everybody kept asking what happened, and I kept saying nothing happened, that's what happened, and nobody understood that, including me, for a long time. "
Nigel found a leaf of towering significance. They stopped for it.
"The short," Malcolm went on, because he'd started now, "the laundromat one.
Everybody in Atlanta thinks I lost my mind.
Producer with a nice quiet slate of commercial work, suddenly he's putting his own money into an eleven-minute film about a woman in Macon that'll never make a dollar.
My father — my father asked me, direct, what the return was.
" He huffed, not quite a laugh. "And I didn't have a number for him.
I just wanted to make it. First thing in my whole life I wanted for no good reason at all.
" He shook his head. "Anyway. That's what I'm doing in your city.
Chasing the one thing I ever picked with my gut, and finding out my gut is very loud and forty-four years late. "
For a while there was just the leash creak and Nigel's snuffling and the city humming orange behind the trees.
"Forty-four's not late," Frankie said, finally.
"It's just late enough you know it's real.
People who figure out what they want at twenty-two don't want it — they want to have wanted it.
Different thing." He shrugged, already annoyed at himself for saying something with no armor on it.
"The wanting-it-for-no-reason part is the only part that counts. Everybody else is just doing math."
"That's a generous read of a midlife crisis."
"Didn't say it wasn't a crisis. Said it counts." He toed a pebble off the path. "You're allowed both."
And that — a stranger of five days handing him permission he hadn't known he was starving for, in between insults to a French bulldog — landed somewhere in Malcolm he'd have to examine later, in private, with the door shut.
Then Frankie breathed out, like he'd lost some quiet argument with himself.
"My last shop was called Paws and Effect," he said.
Malcolm did not laugh, because the way Frankie said it made clear it was not, currently, a joke.
"Twice the size of this one. Fancy. 'An experience.
'" The quotation marks were audible and bitter.
"I built it with someone. He was — he was like you, actually.
Warm. Easy. Made the whole room feel like the good part of your day.
" He kept his eyes forward. "Turns out that's a thing some people just do.
It doesn't mean anything. It's not a promise.
I learned that the expensive way, with my name on the lease and his nowhere, and now I've got a smaller shop I like better and a rule about warm easy men who are only passing through. "
There it was. Not the whole thing. An inch of it, handed over in the dark, and Malcolm had enough sense to know an inch from this man was a mile from anyone else.
"That's a good rule," Malcolm said, carefully.
"It's an excellent rule."
"I'd probably tell you to keep it."
Frankie glanced at him, wary, like he'd expected a counteroffer and gotten agreement and didn't trust it. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." Malcolm looked at him — the copper hair gone dark in the low light, the rings, the sharp tired unguarded face — and felt the thing he'd been not-naming for two days shift, quietly, into a shape he could no longer pretend not to see. "Rule's sound. I'd keep it."
He meant it. That was the maddening part. He wasn't arguing with the rule. He just wished, with a specificity that startled him, that he weren't the exact thing it was built to keep out.
***
Malcolm walked back toward King West alone, because the streetcar had come and Frankie had gotten on it with a nod and a "thanks for the boring," and the doors had closed, and that had been that.
He put his hands in his pockets. The night had gone properly cold.
Somewhere behind him a groomer was riding a streetcar home to demat a terrified dog in the morning for free, and Malcolm was standing on a corner in a city he'd be leaving in nine days, running diagnostics on himself like a man checking an engine that had started making a new noise.
Let's be reasonable about this, he told himself.
He was a reasonable man. It was his whole brand.
He liked the guy. Of course he liked the guy — the guy was funny and good at a difficult thing and kind in a way he'd clearly decided to be ashamed of.
You could like a person. Liking a person was allowed.
This was just a strong case of liking a specific, interesting person, which any reasonable man might—
He stopped walking.
He ran it again, slower, the way you re-read a contract when a clause won't sit right, and this time he let himself get all the way to the end of the sentence he'd been carefully not finishing since a grooming shop full of skunk on Friday night.
"Oh," Malcolm said, out loud, to a closed dry cleaner on Bathurst.
Huh, he thought, which was the same thing he'd thought on the sidewalk two nights ago, except that this time he knew exactly what it meant, and that was going to be a genuine problem for a man with a plane ticket.
Because here was the shape of it, laid out clean the way he'd lay out a budget.
He was a man who had spent forty-four years being reasonable — who had built a whole life out of wanting the sensible thing, or wanting nothing much at all — and he'd flown to another country to show off the first exception he'd ever made.
And now, apparently not satisfied with the one, he'd gone and grown feelings for a guarded Canadian who groomed dogs and kept a standing rule against precisely, specifically him.
You picked a fight you can't win, he told himself, and heard it in his own voice from Friday night, the words he'd aimed at the dog. Family trait.
Nine days. He had nine days, a full slate of meetings, a buyer to close, and a flight home. Every reasonable cell in his body knew what a reasonable man did with a feeling like this on a clock like that.
He was going to the shop tomorrow anyway. He already knew it.
He started walking again. He was smiling. He couldn't have said why, except that all of it was ridiculous, and forty-four, and true.