10. Jett #2
I had not been expecting that question.
I'd been expecting did something happen.
I'd been expecting are you sleeping with her.
I'd been expecting what's going on between you two, all of which I had answers prepared for, all of which were lies wrapped in technically-true sentences.
I had not been expecting Brynn to skip every layer and go straight to the load-bearing thing, the only thing about it that actually mattered to her. The safety of her best friend.
The honest answer came up out of me before I could decide to give it.
"No," I said. "Bry. No. I'm not going to hurt her. I would not do that."
She watched my face a long moment. The lemon scent was up between us, sharp and clean and out of nowhere.
"Okay," she said. The good okay. The one I'd been hoping for.
The one that meant I believe you and we are moving on.
She picked the knife back up. "Then sit there and drink your Coke and watch the tennis and don't bring this up again until you actually have something you want to tell me, and I'll return the favor on her end. Deal."
"Deal."
She finished her lemons. Put them in the well. Wiped her hands on a bar towel. Then she paused, looked at me sideways, and added the thing the way she added the dangerous things. Casual. Light. Like she was just thinking out loud.
"You're being a lot like her right now, by the way."
"Like who."
"Like Dani. The both of you doing the same version of fine.
The both of you not telling me what's actually going on.
The both of you coming into rooms after spending time with each other looking like you've been hit by a small truck.
" She shrugged. "I'm just saying. The pattern's interesting. From the outside."
"Bry."
"Drink your Coke, Sturgill."
I drank my Coke.
She turned to the four guys at the other end and brought them another round and chatted about the tennis, and I sat at the corner of her bar and tried to feel less like a man who'd been read top to bottom by a woman who'd just promised not to read him.
Which was the trick of Brynn. That was always the trick of Brynn.
She could put you back together and let you know she could take you apart again any time, and she'd respect you enough not to.
I drove home around five.
The house was quiet the way it always was.
I went out onto the deck and called my sister back, which I hadn't planned to do, which I'd been refusing to do for three months.
But somewhere between The Hideout and my own driveway something had shifted.
I'd decided that the door I'd been welding shut on my mother and the door I'd been welding shut on Ashley Hartley were the same door, and they were both already cracked, and I might as well crack the easier one a little wider while I was at it.
My sister picked up on the second ring.
"Jettson."
"Mary Beth."
A long silence. There always was. We were not people who knew how to talk to each other, my sister and I.
We grew up in the same house with the same parents and shared exactly no language for the things we'd both survived, because the only language we'd ever been given was the language of the church, and the church didn't have words for any of it.
"Mom?" I said.
"She's not great, Jettson."
"How not great."
"She had a thing in October. Didn't tell me about it for two weeks. The doctor said it's the kind of thing that's a warning, that the next one will probably be worse. She's seventy-three. She's been smoking since she was fourteen. She's not going to listen to anybody about any of it."
"Okay."
"She wants to see you."
"Mary Beth."
"I'm just telling you what she said. I'm not asking you to do anything. I know we don't do that with you. I know the deal. I know the rules. She just said it and I told her I'd tell you."
The deal was that I didn't come home and they didn't ask.
The rules were that I sent money, a quiet amount, untraceable, through a foundation in my sister's name that she pretended she didn't know about, and they didn't come looking, and the family kept on being a family without me in it.
Which was the way I'd needed it to be, and the way I'd carefully arranged it at eighteen, and the way it had stayed for eight years.
The rules were, in other words, the same rules I'd been operating with about Ashley Hartley. And they appeared to be falling apart along the same fault line at the same time.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"That's more than I expected."
"Don't get excited."
"Jettson."
"Yeah."
"You sound different."
"I know."
She let that go. She was good at letting things go, my sister.
It was the most useful thing she'd ever been to me.
She'd been the one who let me leave at eighteen without trying to stop me, and the one who kept my number from our father in the months after, and she'd earned, in the silent unrewarded way certain people do, an absolute permanent pass from me for the rest of our lives.
"I'll call you next week," I said.
"Okay."
We hung up.
I sat on the deck a long time after that.
The sun went down on the valley. The lights came up.
I drank a beer and I didn't think about Dani Hartley, and then I thought about her, and then I didn't, and then I did, and the pattern was the same as it had been at three in the morning.
Except now it was sitting on top of a conversation with my sister I hadn't had in three months, and a Coke at Brynn's bar, and the small unwelcome fact that I appeared to have decided, somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, that I was no longer in the business of welding shut.
I was going to have to figure out what I was in the business of instead.
I went inside the empty house and tried to figure it out. Made it about half an hour before I gave up and went to bed.
Tuesday was three days away.
She was three days away.
I shoved that out of my head, turned off the light, and lay in the dark counting my way to sleep the way I'd learned to count when I was a boy.
Twenty heartbeats with the breath in. Twenty heartbeats with the breath out.
A trick from the church, ironically. A thing they'd given me without meaning to.
A thing I'd taken with me when I left, the way I'd taken so few things, and held onto.
I slept eventually.
In the morning Tuesday was a little closer.
It kept getting closer all weekend.