Rhodes #2
I pick up the coffee and take a drink that has gone cold.
"You talk to anybody back home?"
"My dad, Sunday. He said Easter was rough. They stayed at the house instead of going out to Oak Moss. Birdie cooked, everybody came over. Sounds like they mostly missed Mom and tried to make the best of it."
I look down at the coffee in my hand. I'm not sure how to respond to that. I want to ask how Tallulah is, but I stop myself.
"Libba said Til was pretty quiet, but I think they all were. First holiday without Mom and all."
"I'm sorry, Bro. That's hard."
"Then I talked to Til Thursday. Actually, she sounded a little down. She chalked it up to school and finals coming. She seem okay to you?"
"I think we're all just ready for summer," I say, finding another answer that is technically true and completely useless.
"Everything still okay on the home front?"
Goddammit. I look out over Creston's porch. More than a month here, and Coop still thinks Tallulah is sleeping down the hall from me. Fucking peachy keen.
"Yep. All good."
"Yeah. She's carrying a lot with that Oak Moss thing, on top of missing mom and exams." He goes quiet a second.
Water slaps a hull somewhere near him. "Hey.
Do me a favor. Make sure she isn't taking on too much with Oak Moss.
It sounds like she got them to shelve the development plans, for now, anyway. It's a lot for her to take on."
My fingers stop against the coffee cup. She did it.
"Yeah, course." I haven't heard her voice in more than a month. Until thirty seconds ago, I didn't even know she'd stopped the development.
The lie sits in my mouth like something I swallowed wrong.
Four months ago, I'd have done exactly what he asked.
Now Tallulah has made the boundary pretty damn clear. Coop sure as hell falls inside it.
"You're the best, man," he says. "All right, they're waving me down. Talk soon."
The line drops.
May twenty-ninth. That's when Coop comes home. I can dodge him over the phone. I won't be able to do it with him standing in front of me.
It’s stupid I haven’t told him. All of this didn’t go any way I thought it might.
Whatever is left of our friendship will probably not survive him coming back home. The guilt alone is enough to end it.
Reeves comes through the gate a little before dark with a six-pack in one hand and no explanation for why he's here.
I'm already on the front gallery with my feet on the rail, watching a delivery van squeeze past a parked car under the oaks. He takes the steps two at a time and drops into the chair beside mine.
"You planning to live here forever?"
"Rent's good."
"Ridge says you missed dinner Sunday."
I take the beer Reeves holds out and twist the cap off. "Tell him I'm alive."
"He knows. He sent me."
"Of course he did."
Reeves drinks and settles back. He's been in and out of Creston for weeks now, mostly before work when he comes to swim. The first few times, he knocked. Now he lets himself in, swims, takes whatever leftovers I have in the fridge, and leaves without asking when I'm going home.
I appreciate him for that more than I've said.
The street is quiet except for somebody dragging a trash can over concrete half a block down. Creston's wrought-iron gate throws long bars of shadow over the front walk as the light drops behind the houses across the street.
"You talk to her?" he asks.
"Not a word."
He rolls the bottle between his palms. "You tried?"
"At first. She made it clear, so I stopped. It's been over a month."
Reeves nods like that's enough. I take another drink.
"I saw her good friend a few weeks ago to make sure she was okay."
His eyes shift to me. "Good."
"Yeah."
I prop my feet up on the banister.
"She did exactly what she said she would do," I say. "She handled it, from what I can piece together."
"You surprised?"
"No."
That almost gets a smile out of him. I turn the bottle in my hand. "I never told you, but she took the blame for the Corps review."
His brows pull together, but he stays silent.
"She told her family she made the call."
"Jesus." He doesn't ask why she would do that, which, to me, is the obvious question, so I don't go into detail.
I watch a woman walk a little white dog down the opposite sidewalk. The dog stops at every iron fence and lifts its leg.
"I keep wanting to do something," I say.
Reeves looks at me now.
"Not the Corps thing. I know better than that. I mean anything. I want to show up for her, let her know I'm here."
"But she told you not to."
"Yeah."
"So don't."
"I haven't."
I set my beer on the little table between us.
"That's the whole fucking problem. I thought I was helping her. I thought I could take one thing off her plate, and I never stopped to think that it wasn't mine to take."
Reeves goes quiet. Not normal Reeves quiet. He can sit beside somebody for an hour without talking and make it seem natural.
I look at his hand, then at his face, because I can tell there's something there.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Bullshit."
He takes another drink.
Something old moves up through the last month of my life, something I've looked at a dozen times and never pushed hard enough.
The weeks’ difference between when Ridge told us Vin died and the death certificate that Saturday in his office has been nagging me ever since. And I can't explain why, but something in my gut tells me Reeves knows.
"Do you know why Ridge waited three weeks to tell us Vin was dead?"
"Fuck Vin. Who cares, Rhodes? Let that go.”
"I care because the whole situation is shitty. Why did he lie, or wait, or whatever the fuck shady thing is going on?”
"He didn't lie."
Reeves takes another drink like we’re talking about which Mardi Gras parade we’re going to. Heat rises up my neck.
"You know something."
He doesn't answer.
"Were you there when Vin died?"
"Yeah."
"What happened?"
Reeves looks at me. The silence goes on too long. "You killed him."
“You already know the answer to that.”
My mouth goes dry.
Vin's face comes back exactly wrong for this moment. Not the man who had Dad executed in a dirty warehouse, or the one who lied to Ridge for years and moved all of us around like pieces on a board.
He's thirty-five again, sitting beside me on the back steps with a socket wrench, showing me why I keep stripping bolts.
He's wrapping my thumb against my fist before teaching me to throw a punch and showing up because Dad is working, Ridge is at college, and everybody else has somewhere they're supposed to be.
Then the other man comes back, the one who upended our family.
"How?"
"No."
“What the fuck, Reeves?”
"You don't need that," he says matter-of-factly, then finishes the rest of his beer. He drops it in the carrier and pulls out another, opening it with a twist.
"Don't tell me what I need."
His jaw flexes. "You asked if I did it. I answered. I'm not putting the rest in your head. Fucking leave it alone, Rhodes.”