Chapter 8
Clean Break
The rescue dog's demat took another forty minutes, and Frankie did every minute of it, because the alternative was stopping, and he could not stop.
So he worked. He freed the last mats from the little gray flank, gentle as ever, murmuring the low nonsense that was for the dog and had never once been for him, and the dog leaned into his hands and trusted him, because Frankie was very good at being trusted by things that had been left.
By the end of it the little guy was clean and light and blinking, twelve years old and brand new, and Frankie held his stupid grateful face in both hands and discovered he couldn't quite let go.
The shop was very quiet. It was the specific quiet of a room that had, an hour ago, held one more person than it did now — a quiet with a shape to it, a Malcolm-shaped absence sitting up on the counter he wasn't supposed to sit on.
Frankie became aware he'd been crouched on the floor holding a senior dog's face for a while now.
He made himself stand. His knees objected.
Everything objected. He was thirty and felt about two hundred, the way you do after an hour of holding yourself very carefully still so you don't spill.
The two coffees Malcolm had brought were still on the counter. Gone cold. Frankie looked at them for a while and did not throw them out.
"Frank." Dez was in the doorway of the back room. She'd been there, he understood distantly, for some of it. Long enough. "Frank, what happened."
"Nothing happened." The shop voice came out smooth and level, the good one, the one that could sell you a nail trim. "He flew home. That was always the plan. Sunday. It's Sunday." He set the dog down and it stayed pressed to his ankle. "I'm going to finish up here. You can go, it's slow."
"Frankie."
"I'm fine, Dez."
"I know you're fine," Dez said, and her voice cracked on it, because she'd known him nine years and I'm fine out of Frankie was the worst thing she could hear. "That's what I can't stand. You're always so fucking fine."
"One of us has to be." Frankie started sweeping a floor that was already clean.
Dez watched him do it for a second. Then she crossed the shop and did the thing they almost never did — because theirs wasn't a hugging friendship, it was an insult-each-other-with-love friendship — and took the broom out of his hands and put her arms around him, hard, and held on.
Frankie stood stiff as a board in the middle of his own shop and did not hug her back, because if he did that he'd come apart, and he had a dog to finish and a shop to close and a whole life to keep standing upright.
"Okay," Dez said into his shoulder, letting him keep it. "Okay. I'm here. Whatever you need. Even if what you need is to pretend you don't need anything — which, knowing you, it is."
"I'm fine," Frankie said again, to the top of her head.
"Yeah," she said. "I heard you."
***
At 6:04 his phone lit up with a text he didn't answer.
I'm so sorry. I did that all wrong. Can I call you.
At 6:20, another. Frankie. Please.
Frankie looked at the two little gray bubbles for a long time.
I did that all wrong. As if there were a right way to say let's let it be what it was to a man who'd just, for the first time in two years, put his whole chest on the table.
As if sorry did anything but confirm there was something to be sorry for.
He wanted to answer. That was the humiliating part.
Sixteen minutes after the man had gutted him, some idiot animal in Frankie was already leaning toward the phone — ready to make it easy, ready to say it's okay, I get it, no hard feelings, ready to help Malcolm feel better about leaving, the way he'd once helped Damien pack his half of a life into boxes and carried them down to the car himself.
He turned the phone face-down on the counter and finished closing the shop, and did not do the math on where a 6 p.m. car got you by 6:20, or which terminal, or how long the security line ran on a Sunday in September. He was excellent at not doing math when the math would kill him.
He knew the red-eye left at ten. He knew it the way you know a bruise is there without pressing it.
At ten o'clock Frankie was up in his apartment with the lights off and the little gray dog asleep in the good armchair and a record he hadn't put on, because Malcolm had put on the last one, and Frankie couldn't look at the wall unit without hearing Bill Withers and a man moving around his kitchen like he lived there.
The plane would be pushing back from the gate right about now.
Somewhere over the lake, then Buffalo, then the long dark run south to a life with a slate and a father and a feature and a Frenchie named Nigel who'd fallen asleep on this bed a dozen times and would never do it again.
The apartment was full of him and empty of him at once, which Frankie hadn't known was a thing that could be true until tonight.
The good coffee machine sat on the counter where he'd hauled it down for a man who was gone now — so he could have real coffee, for two days.
There was a second toothbrush in the cup by the sink that Frankie would have to do something about eventually and was absolutely not doing tonight.
The bad instant coffee Malcolm had made that first morning, so pleased with himself, was still in the cupboard.
Everywhere Frankie looked was the ghost of a man who'd moved through this small space like he'd always been in it and always would be, and had folded up and flown south on schedule — exactly like Frankie always knew he would, exactly like Frankie had told him to.
Frankie lay down on the too-big bed, on the side that was his, and left the other side alone, and let himself — for exactly as long as the wheels took to leave the ground, which he timed, because he was insane — feel the entire size of it.
It was very large. He'd been right about that. He was right about all of it. That was the thing nobody understood about being right: it didn't feel like anything except being alone with the proof.
He'd wanted him to fight. That was the part he'd never say to anyone, would never say to Dez, could barely say to the dark — that some stupid unkillable piece of him had wanted Malcolm to plant his feet in that shop and refuse to be sent, to be as unreasonable as Frankie couldn't let himself be, to want it loud enough for both of them.
And Malcolm hadn't. Malcolm had found the door Frankie built and walked politely through it.
The good ones always did. They respected your wishes right onto the plane.
Then he got up, because ten minutes was all he'd allotted, and he splashed water on his face and fed the dog a second dinner it didn't need and did the dishes from a breakfast two people had eaten, and that was the day Malcolm left, and Frankie survived it, because surviving the after was the one thing he was truly, world-class good at.
He'd told Malcolm that. I've done the after. It's really long.
He hadn't mentioned that knowing exactly how long it was didn't make it one minute shorter.
***
The week was very long.
The regulars came in and he was charming at them.
Mrs. Osei's poodle, the confident schnauzer, the greyhound whose owner needed to hear she wasn't a bad mother — Frankie gave them all the whole show, the sparkle turned up bright to cover the place underneath where the pilot light had gone out, and none of them noticed, because he was the best in the city at that too.
Only Dez noticed, and Dez had stopped saying anything, which was worse than when she'd said things.
Malcolm didn't stop. That was the part Frankie hadn't braced for.
He'd have bet the shop the fancy man would send two apologetic texts and let the distance do the rest, the way they always did — but the messages kept coming, once a day, never pushy, always short.
Thinking about you. No need to answer. Is Baxter still with you?
Nigel keeps looking for him. I keep looking for— never mind.
I know I did it wrong. I'm not going to pretend I didn't, and I'm not going to disappear, unless you tell me to. Just say the word and I'll stop.
Frankie didn't say the word. He also didn't answer. He read each one and put the phone face-down and sat in the exact hell of a man who's been handed the thing he wanted — someone not leaving quietly — and is too scared of being wrong twice to reach back for it.
Because that was the trap inside the trap.
Malcolm not disappearing didn't prove a thing.
Damien hadn't disappeared right away either; the warm ones lingered, that was what made them warm, and then the festival ended or the better city called and they went, and the only difference was how much more it cost you for having let yourself hope in between.
Frankie had paid that exact tuition once.
He wasn't re-enrolling on the strength of a nice text.
The little gray dog didn't leave. The rescue called Thursday about a foster placement that had opened up, a nice retired couple in Scarborough, perfect for a senior, and Frankie heard himself say, "No, actually — he's staying.
With me. I'll do the paperwork." And hung up, and looked at the dog, who looked back at him with the flat unbothered trust of an animal who had decided, against all available evidence, that this was his person now.
"Don't get comfortable," Frankie told him. The dog got comfortable. "Yeah. Okay. Fine."
It was, he was aware, a deranged time to adopt a dog.
He'd just spent a week proving to himself that letting things stay was a mug's game.
But he couldn't do the thing where he handed the little guy to a nice couple in Scarborough and went back to an apartment with nothing in it but records and plants and no photos on the walls.
He'd reached his limit, apparently, on giving away the things that leaned on his ankle.
One thing was going to stay if he had to keep it by force.
He named him Baxter, for no reason, and Baxter answered to it immediately, like he'd always had it.
The lease renewal sat on the counter under a paperweight, unsigned, its deadline creeping up like a tide.
Thirty percent more for the same square footage, and Frankie kept not signing, and he told himself it was strategy — leverage, waiting them out — and knew, in the flat honest place he'd been visiting too often this week, that part of him was just tired.
That some small awful voice had started asking what the point of the shop even was: rebuild it again, alone, keep it alive alone, be the best in the city at it, alone, for what.
He didn't have a good answer handy. So he signed nothing, and Baxter slept on the lease like it was a mattress made for him.
It was Friday, closing, a week to the day since a skunk, when Dez finally said the thing.
"I'm gonna say one thing and then I'll never say it again.
" She had her coat on, keys in her hand, giving herself the exit.
"You keep saying he left. And he did, I was here, I saw the fancy man walk out that door.
" She looked at him steady. "But I also heard you, Frank.
Before. I heard you tell him not to make it real.
I heard you shut the door on the future thing days ago so it couldn't shut on you first." Gentle.
Merciless. "So I just — I need you to be honest with exactly one person about which of you closed it.
And it doesn't have to be me. But it should be somebody, because you're gonna carry this either way, and you might as well carry the true version. "
"He said let's let it be what it was, Dez."
"Yeah. After you spent a week teaching him that wanting more would get him thrown out."
Frankie didn't have anything for that. For once in his life the deflection wasn't loaded — no joke, no shop voice, nothing — because it was true, and true was the one thing he'd never learned to talk his way around.
"I asked him," he said finally, quiet. "At the end. I did ask. For once I actually—" His voice did something and he stopped it. "And he said no."
"He got scared and said the wrong thing," Dez said. "You've been scared and said the wrong thing every day for two years, and I never once wrote you off for it." She let it land. "I'm just saying maybe the two of you are more alike than you want him to be. That's the whole speech."
She opened the door. The bell chimed, cheerful, oblivious, the way it had for a fancy man in a ruined suit eleven days ago. "Night, Frank. Kiss Baxter for me."
And then it was just Frankie, alone in the gold-lit shop he'd built out of the last worst year of his life, with a senior dog named Baxter and a lease he still hadn't signed and a phone full of messages he hadn't answered, being right, being fine, being the best in the entire city at protecting himself into a life with nobody in it.
He turned off the lights.
The thing about the after, he thought, climbing the stairs to the apartment with Baxter clicking along behind him — the thing nobody told you about the after, the thing he'd somehow forgotten in two years of being so proud of surviving it:
You could survive it forever. That was the trap.
You could get so good at the after that you never let there be a during again, and you'd call it wisdom, and you'd be safe, and you'd be right, and you'd be alone in a very clean apartment with no photos on the walls, having never once lost anything again, because you never let yourself have anything to lose.
Malcolm had said it, that first night, without knowing what he was handing over.
I was in the wrong room my whole life. Frankie had a room too.
He'd built it himself, board by board, out of the wreck Damien left, and he'd made it so safe that nothing could get in to hurt him — and he'd been so proud of how safe it was that he'd never once clocked that it was also a room you couldn't be loved in.
You didn't get it both ways. He'd wanted the shop with no one's name next to his, and he'd gotten exactly that, and it turned out the thing about a life with no one's name next to yours is that no one's name is next to yours.
He'd done that. He'd been doing it for two years and calling it healing.
Frankie sat down in the good armchair, and Baxter climbed into his lap, and he looked at the blank wall where a normal person would have hung a picture of something they were scared to lose, and for the first time since Sunday, alone where nobody could see it cost him anything, he let himself cry.
It didn't fix anything. But it was, at least, the true version.