4. Tilly
FOUR
Tilly
The Shotgun House: Rooms open directly into one another with no hallway, so there is no way to reach the back of the house without passing through every room in it. Privacy in a shotgun was never a matter of architecture. It was an agreement between the people living there.
Coop has been standing in my kitchen for ten minutes explaining why moving in with a man I want to push into traffic is a great idea.
"What about your apartment?"
"I'm graduating after Spain, so I don't need to keep it. This saves money and lets you spend time with Rhodes. You have a plan to live with Jo in the fall, so it's perfect."
"You don't need to save money. We both know that isn't what this is about."
"It's a good setup, Til. That's all I'm saying. It's a good setup and you're acting like I'm shipping you off to boarding school."
"I'm already leaving one bad roommate situation. I was really looking forward to having my own place until Jo and I find something for next year."
"Rhodes isn't a bad roommate. He's practically your brother."
"Exactly. I don't need a babysitter, Cooper. I know what you're doing."
He opens my fridge, looks at the sad contents of it, and closes it.
He's been doing that since he got here, moving around my kitchen, touching things, because Coop can't have a hard conversation standing still.
"Nothing changes. You go to class, you go to your lab, you do your reef thing, you go to your meeting. "
"I knew something was up when I talked to Dad on Friday. I knew y'all were going to pull something."
"Tilly." He pinches the top of his nose. "It's about me getting on a plane Wednesday and not lying awake for four months in a different time zone wondering if my little sister's okay by herself. You've got to understand where I'm coming from. I can't go if you're in this city alone, with no one."
"I'm not by myself. I have tons of friends, I have school, I have my reef projects."
"Please don't fight me on this." He says it gently, which is like salt in my guilt wound.
"Say the real thing," I tell him. "Just say it. You want somebody watching me."
"I want somebody who'd know," he says, and doesn't flinch, which I'll give him, because at least he isn't gaslighting me the way Dad does.
"Yeah. I do. Somebody who's family. Somebody who'd call me if it was bad.
Is that so insane, a month after we buried Mama, that I want to know there's one person who sees you regularly who'd pick up the phone if you needed help?”
I don't have a clean answer for that, because when he puts it that way, it isn't insane. It's love. The only problem is it's love with a leash built into it. Those two things have been the same thing in my family for so long that I've stopped being able to pull them apart.
There's one thing I could say right now that would end this conversation.
All the way through the end of Mama's life, there were bottles of oxycodone in that house.
On her nightstand, in the bathroom she and Daddy shared, and out on the counter next to her water glass some days.
I slept twenty feet from them, and there was nothing.
Not a pull, not a bad hour, not one time I had to get up and leave a room.
Nobody knows that. Every one of them was in that house with me, and not a single one of them acknowledges that I didn’t slip while around all of that.
I don't say it, though, because the second I hold a thing like that up as proof, it stops being true and turns into a girl arguing. So I go at the part I can actually win.
"Fine. A witness, sure. But of all of them, Coop, you think Rhodes is your guy?” I pick up a flattened box and set it back down without folding it, my one small flag still flying.
"Your genius plan is to pair me with the biggest adult kid you know, the guy who's on the payroll of a company he's never worked a day for?
That's your idea of a responsible person?”
"I want one person in this city I can call and trust him when he says everything is copacetic. That's it."
Coop is quiet for a second, and then he stops fiddling with the paper towel roll and goes still. He leans back against my counter and folds his arms, and looks at me. It's the look our dad has, the one Grandbank has, the Maybank look that means the joking part is over.
"You've always had him a little wrong. He does the whole nothing-matters thing real good, I'll give you that.
He's been doing it since we were kids. Hell, he hasn't had a mom since he was four.
But I have known that man my entire life, and I'm telling you there is nobody, and I mean nobody, I trust more than him.
Not our cousins. Not Libba. Him." He lets that sit.
No one else, including Libba? That's dramatic. Libba is perfect.
"When Mama was sick, you know who flew me home every single weekend on his family's jet so I could sit with her so Dad could sleep? He didn't do it because anybody asked him. He's got a way of acting like he doesn't care about anything so you won't notice he cares about everything."
That lands somewhere I wasn't guarding.
"That's not fair," I say. "Bringing Mama into it."
"I'm not bringing her into it. She's already in it. She's in everything right now." His voice goes rough on the last word, and he looks at the ceiling for a second, and I have to look away, because if he cries, I'm done.
I'll agree to anything, and he knows it. The worst part is he's not even doing it on purpose.
"Look. Here's the deal, and then I'll shut up.
You take the room at Rhodes' place, or I don't go.
That's it, plain and simple. I'm not getting on a plane to Spain and leaving you to live alone in a foreign city with no family.
So if it's not Rhodes, it's me. I stay, I defer the program until after graduation, we live together in my place, and I hover so hard you'll wish you'd taken the irresponsible trust funder. "
"You can't defer. Mama made you promise."
"Then help me keep the promise." He spreads his hands. Checkmate, and he knows it. At least he has the grace to look a little sorry about it. "Take the room. Let me go. I'm begging you."
I can fight being managed all day long. I've got years of practice fighting being managed. What I can't do is be the reason my brother breaks a promise to our dead mother.
"For the record," I say, "this is emotional blackmail."
"For the record, I learned it from you." He almost smiles. "Is that a yes?"
I look at the empty canvas bag on the floor, the flat boxes, and the unfolded sheets in the laundry basket and sigh.
"Do I have to stay there over the summer too? I had planned to stay here for the summer to keep my meetings, work on the reef. I hadn’t planned to go back to Charleston in May to be everybody's project for three months."
“When does your lease start with Jo?”
“August.”
“Let’s tackle one thing at a time. My program is over at the end of May, and I don’t have a clue what I’m doing yet. Can we commit to the semester and then talk about summer? You never know, you may love living with Rhodes.”
It comes a half second late. My father did that same thing to me on the phone Friday about Oak Moss, blowing me off and not committing to anything. I make a mental note.
"Fine," I say. "I'll do it. But know I'm not happy about this. I'm begging you all to stop acting as if I'll break. Eventually, you have to trust me."
Coop lets out a breath like he's been holding it since the funeral.
Then he crosses the kitchen and pulls me into a hug I don't want and need, and he smells like our dad's boat and the same soap he's used since he was fourteen.
For one second I let myself be his little sister instead of his problem, and I hold on a beat too long.
Rhodes's place is one of those old Uptown shotgun houses off Audubon Street with a full, New Orleans front porch stretched across the entire side elevation of the house. A huge live oak that's buckled the sidewalk out front into something you could break an ankle on sits off to the right.
Coop parks at the curb and I stay still in my seat for a second, looking at it while the engine ticks. I've been at Tulane for six months, and this is the first time I've ever seen where he lives.
My whole life for the next four months is reduced to two boxes, my bookbag, a milk crate of books, and a laundry basket in the trunk of the car.
"It's a nice place," Coop offers.
"It's a frat house on a fancy street."
The door opens before we're even up the walk, and there he is, filling the frame of it in a gray T-shirt and bare feet, hair doing whatever it wants. Why does he have to be so damn good-looking?
I've known that face since before I could talk, and it has stopped matching the one I've always associated with the boy I grew up with in the marsh grass and making tree forts with.
Somewhere in the last couple of years, he picked up four inches on Coop and the shoulders that go with them.
The same light hazel eyes are now more vibrant, framed by thick, dark eyelashes and high cheekbones.
It's a good face. It has always been a good face.
Right now I'd like to close the door on it, though.
He lifts a hand at Coop like this is the most normal thing in the world, like he didn't just agree to warehouse his best friend's damaged sister for a semester.
"You ready to go to Spain?" Rhodes asks him as they do the handshake-hug thing men do, the back-clap. He makes eye contact with me over Cooper's shoulder, and I look away.
"I think so. As ready as I'll ever be," Coop says, turning back to me, grabbing for my duffel.
I keep it on my shoulder because I'll be damned if either of them is carrying it.
I feel exactly like what I am: a piece of furniture being delivered between two men I love but am currently extremely annoyed with.
"Tallulah,” Rhodes says to me with a smile, not unlike the one he gave me at The Boot last week.
He's the only person in my life who calls me by my given name, not my nickname.
He always has, and I've never asked him why.
"Second door on the right is yours. Bathroom's across the hall. It’s all yours.
I use the one off my room. There's plenty of closet space in that room, too. I cleared it out myself.”
"You cleared out closet space,” I say sarcastically. It comes out flat and mean, and I don't soften it.
"Just for you." He says it very matter-of-factly and kindly, which is somehow worse than if he'd matched my tone.
I push past both of them into the house.
It's better inside than I want it to be. There are high ceilings and tall windows, wood floors gone soft and honey-colored with age. A couch that's actually decent faces the fireplace and TV, and a low table buried in dirt bike parts and a half-empty mug sits in front of it.
It smells like coffee and cut grass, not a dirty guys’ house. There’s something else, too, that I recognize, something I have smelled on a hundred summer afternoons in New Orleans with the Stones. My stomach turns over on itself, and I keep walking.
I head to the second door on the right, leaving them to talk about something I'm paying no attention to.
It's small and clean and completely empty except for a bed, a dresser, and a desk under the window that looks out over the side yard and the neighbor's satsuma tree. There's a folded stack of sheets on the white down comforter. They're navy and still creased from the package. He bought sheets.
"I didn't know what you had," Rhodes says from behind me. He's leaning in the hall doorway, arms crossed, watching me look at the room. "Figured you'd rather have your own than use whatever I have on there from God knows when."
"I don't need you buying me things."
"Well, technically, I bought them for the house. You just get to use them first."
"Cute, Rhodes. Thanks."
"Okay." That easy Stone nothing, that yeah-okay-whatever that slides off his tongue makes me want to karate chop him in the throat.
I want to get under his skin like he's under mine, because I'm standing in his spare room against my will, less than a month after my mother died, and he's being nice to me and I can't stand it.
I would so much rather he be a jerk, a jerk I could push against.
"I'm going to get your boxes out of the car," Coop yells from the front door right before it closes behind him.
"Let's get one thing straight," I say. "I'm not your job."
Rhodes doesn't move. "Good thing, because I have an aversion to work."
"I mean it. Coop asked you to do his bidding, and you're a good little soldier, so you said yes. I get it. That's between the two of you. But I am not a thing. I'm a person who is living here for four months because it makes my brother able to get on a plane, and that's the whole reason."
"While we're getting things straight, Tallulah," he pauses for effect. The way he says my full name makes heat rise along the back of my neck. "Your brother didn't ask me to do anything. I offered for you to crash at my place until you get your own. That's it."
"So generous of you. Back to what I was saying.
You don't watch me, you don't count anything, and you don't report back to Spain about how I'm doing.
And don't you ever do the thing you did at the bar again, where you look at what's in my hand and start making assumptions.
As my mom said, use your words. If you want to know something, you ask. Are we clear?"
He slow-blinks at me, his arms still crossed, leaning against the door frame.
"I wasn't making assumptions because I think you're weak, by the way," he says.
"I was caught off guard when I saw you there.
That's on me, not you. But don't stand there and tell me you're nobody's business, because you're Coop's whole heart and he's about to be four thousand miles away, and that makes you at least a little bit my business whether either of us likes it. "
I open my mouth, and nothing comes out, because that is not the answer I was set up to knock down. He watches me not have a comeback with something that is almost a smile.
"But no," he says, pushing off the doorframe.
"I won't count your drinks. You've got my word.
You want to burn this whole place down at three in the morning, that's your business.
I'll just make sure the extinguisher's charged.
" He nods at the mattress. "Sheets are yours if you want them. I'll help Coop with the boxes."
And he's gone down the hall. I hear him and my brother out front laughing about something, the two of them easy in a way I don't get to be easy with anybody anymore.
I stand alone in the little clean room he made for me and look at the desk sitting exactly where the light is and the navy sheets still creased in their folds. I have the sinking, unwelcome realization that this is going to be so much harder than living with somebody I could hate.