Chapter 9
Off Leash
The Monday meeting was a triumph, and it tasted like nothing.
They said yes to the feature. All of them, everyone who mattered, in a room that smelled of good coffee and money, nodding along while Malcolm walked them through the Macon film he'd been too scared to say out loud for three years, and by the end of it there was financing on the table and a producer credit that was going to change the shape of his career, and Malcolm shook every hand and said every right thing and drove home to his big quiet house in Buckhead and sat in the dark and felt absolutely nothing at all.
Nigel wouldn't eat. That was the first week.
The dog sat by the front door of the Buckhead house with his flat ridiculous face pointed at it like a man was going to walk through, and he did not touch his dinner, and when Malcolm picked him up he stared past Malcolm's shoulder looking for someone who wasn't there — a gray senior rescue, maybe, or a copper-haired man in an apron who'd said there, monster, try not to die — and Malcolm understood, holding his heartbroken dog in a house he'd bought because it was sensible, that the two of them were in exactly the same shape and only one of them had the excuse of being a dog.
He texted Frankie every day. He never got an answer. He hadn't expected one. He'd earned the silence; he'd built it himself, with his own careful hands, in a shop that smelled of oatmeal, and he wasn't going to whine about the wall being up when he was the one who'd handed the man the bricks.
"You look terrible," Renata told him, the second week, over a lunch he didn't eat. "You closed the biggest deal of your life ten days ago and you look like something the cat gave up on. It's unseemly. People are asking."
"Let them ask."
"Malcolm." She put her fork down. Fifteen years, and she'd never once used that voice on him, the one without any strategy in it.
"I told him to be careful with you, you know.
Your groomer. At that party. I did the whole speech — good men who get attached on location, don't make a mess.
I was protecting you." She studied him. "I was wrong.
You weren't the one who was going to get hurt, and it wasn't a mess.
I've watched you be smooth and fine and sensible for fifteen years, and I watched you for one week up in that city be something I'd never seen, which was happy, and I've spent the two weeks since watching it drain back out of you meeting by meeting.
" She spread her hands. "So I'm going to say the opposite of my party speech now, and then I'll never mention it again.
Since when do you get shy about wanting something?
Go get it. The feature can be run from anywhere. You taught me that, actually. You. Go."
His father called that night. Malcolm almost didn't pick up. Then he did, because he was done not picking up.
"Your mother says you got the movie financed," his father said, in the baritone that had run Malcolm's whole interior life. "That's real money, they tell me. Finally. So you'll be busy down here, then. Good. Get your head back in the game, son, you've been off somewhere all month."
And Malcolm — forty-four years old, standing in a house he'd bought to be solid in — heard himself say the truest thing he'd said to his father in a decade.
"I met someone, Dad. In Toronto. A man." A pause on the line; he let it sit and did not fill it, for once.
"He grooms dogs. He's the best in the city at it, and he's funny, and he's guarded as a bank, and he made me feel like a whole person instead of a reliable one for the first time in my life, and I got scared and I left, because you raised me to be solid, and solid was the wrong thing.
I don't want to be solid anymore. I want to be his.
" He breathed. "I'm going back up there.
I'm going to base myself out of Toronto and run the feature from there, and I'd like it if you and Mom were happy for me, but I'm going either way. "
The silence went on a while.
"Well," his father said, finally. Gruff. Something moving under it that Malcolm had never once heard. "Your mother'll want to meet him."
It wasn't everything. But it was more than solid, and it was the first thing Malcolm had ever wanted out loud to that man, and it turned out the sky did not fall. The sky, in fact, did nothing at all. It just let him want the thing.
He stood in the dark kitchen a while after, waiting to feel the old thing — the vertigo, the sense of having done something unforgivably selfish, the certainty that wanting the loud thing would cost him everything he'd built.
It didn't come. He'd braced against that feeling his whole life, leaning all his weight on a door that, it turned out, opened outward.
He'd only ever had to stop pushing on it.
Nigel padded in, still not eating, and sat on Malcolm's foot and sighed the sigh of a dog whose entire life had been ruined by a groomer. "Yeah," Malcolm told him. "Me too. We're going to go fix it, both of us. Pack your baguette."
He booked the flight before he hung up.
***
He flew up on a Tuesday, for no reason at all except one, and he did not tell Frankie he was coming, because I'm coming was a text, and Frankie was done with his texts, and this had to be a thing done in a room with a locked door and no way to leave the heat out.
Clip Joint's bell chimed cheerful and oblivious when Malcolm walked in at ten to closing with a French bulldog under one arm, exactly the way he had eleven days and a lifetime ago, except this time the dog was clean and the man wasn't ruined, only terrified.
Frankie looked up from the counter. Went very still.
And Malcolm watched the whole argument cross his face — the flare of hope, then the wall slamming down over it hard, harder than Malcolm had ever seen it, because a wall that's been breached once braces twice as hard the second time.
"We're closing," Frankie said. Flat. The shop voice. "You can't just— what are you doing here. There's no festival. It's October."
"There's no festival," Malcolm agreed. He set Nigel down, and the dog immediately went looking for Baxter, snuffling toward the back, and something in Frankie's flat face cracked at that and re-sealed.
"I flew up on a Tuesday. For no reason except you.
That's the first thing I need you to hear.
I'm not passing through. There's nothing to pass through to.
I came for exactly one thing and it's standing behind that counter looking at me like I'm about to rob it. "
"Malcolm—"
"Let me. Please. I did this so wrong the first time that I get to do it right, out loud, and you get to throw me out after, and I'll go, but I'm saying it first." He didn't move closer.
He'd learned that, at least. You don't grab the frightened thing.
"Two weeks ago you stood right there and did the single bravest thing I've ever seen a person do.
You asked. You, who built a whole life around never asking, and I know what it cost you, and you handed it to me anyway, and I—" His voice caught and he let it.
"I flinched. I did the reasonable thing.
Forty-four years of being told the only love you earn is by being solid, by not making waves, by not wanting anything loud — and the second you gave me the chance to blow up my whole careful life for the best thing in it, I reached for the exit, because the exit was familiar.
And I dressed it up as respecting you. I handed you your own words back and called it kindness.
It was the cruelest thing I've ever done and it was cowardice wearing a nice coat, and I have hated myself for it every single day since. "
"Stop." Frankie's voice came out sharp, and his hands came up like he could physically hold the words off.
"Stop doing this. You don't get to fly in here and be — eloquent at me.
You don't get to make a speech. People make speeches and then they leave, that's what a speech is for, it's the nice thing you say on the way—"
"I know what it's for. This isn't that." Malcolm didn't raise his voice.
"Time me, if you want. I'm not going anywhere at the end of this sentence, or the next one, or next week.
Throw me out and I'll be back tomorrow with the dog.
I've got nothing but time and a lease three blocks away.
That's the whole difference. A speech ends. I'm not ending."
Frankie's mouth closed. His eyes stayed wary, but he stopped trying to bat the words out of the air, and Malcolm took it as the almost-permission it was.
The shop was very quiet. Behind the counter, Frankie's knuckles had gone white on the edge of it.
"You told me once," Malcolm went on, "that I don't get to do the warm thing on my way out the door.
That it's the one that costs. And you were right.
So I'm not doing the warm thing on my way out.
I'm doing it on my way in." He took one step.
Just one. "I'm moving to Toronto. I told my father tonight — first true thing I've said to the man in ten years.
I'm basing the feature here, running it from here, building my whole life around a city instead of around wherever the next room full of money is, because I spent forty-four years letting the work decide where I lived and I am done.
I want to live where you are. Not visit.
Live." He swallowed. "I signed a lease this afternoon.
Three blocks from here. On Logan. It's real, Frankie, it's got my name on it and a year on it and everything.
I didn't come to promise you a maybe. I came with proof. "
Frankie wasn't breathing right. "You— a lease. You signed a lease."