Chapter 8
Rock Bottom
The thing about running was that Theo's body knew how to do it without him.
He'd packed in the dark, the same as he'd left Portland, the same as he'd left everywhere — the practiced economy of a man who traveled light because light was faster to leave with.
Two bags. He'd owned more, once. He'd owned a restaurant and a apartment with a view and a person who'd stayed until the money didn't, and now he owned two bags and four hundred dollars of Verne Doucette's dead brother's pickup, which Verne had sold him yesterday with a handshake and a look Theo couldn't stand, because the look had said don't go, and Theo had smiled and taken the keys.
He carried the bags down the narrow back stairs — the fourth tread creaked, the one he'd memorized, the one that had told him for six weeks exactly when Rory was coming and going — and he did not let himself listen for sounds through the ceiling, because for the first morning since he'd arrived there weren't any.
Rory hadn't started the bread. Theo had lain awake on the bad couch all night in a silence so total it had its own weight, listening to a man downstairs not-bake, the two of them awake in the dark six feet of floorboard apart and further than Portland, and Theo had understood that he'd broken something even Rory's grief hadn't managed to break.
Nineteen years of four-a.m. bread, and Theo had been in town six weeks and stopped it.
He'd almost left the photograph.
He'd stood in front of it in the dark — Carol on the boat, young Theo furious on her hip, the frame he'd sworn six weeks ago he'd turn face-down and never had — and he'd built himself a whole practical argument about traveling light, about not needing it, about how it was Eddie's really, it belonged to the apartment, to the town.
And then he'd taken it off the shelf and packed it between two shirts anyway, because it turned out there were two or three things in the world Theo Vann couldn't perform his way out of wanting, and his mother's face was one of them.
The rest he left. The reading glasses on the side table. The face-down western. The one washed mug in the rack. He left Eddie's whole waiting life exactly as he'd found it, because straightening it would have meant admitting it was over, and Theo had done enough admitting to last a decade.
He put the bags in the truck. He got in. He put his hands on the wheel.
Drive, said the body. You know how to do this. Point it at Portland, call Colson from the road, take the deal, pay the man, disappear. You'll feel better in an hour. You always feel better in an hour. The trick is the first hour.
Through the windshield the diner sat dark.
No light over the pass. No shape moving behind the glass at the hour a shape had moved behind it every morning for nineteen years.
Somewhere in there Rory was awake — Theo would have bet the truck on it, bet Bud Doucette's four hundred dollars, that the man was standing at a cold clean grill in the dark not-baking, having gotten exactly the solitude he'd demanded and hating every second of it, too stubborn to turn on a light.
Twice in the night Theo had put his hand on the door to go down and — what.
Beg. Explain. Perform one last miracle. Both times he'd taken his hand back, because there was nothing left to say that Rory would let land, and because a man who'd been told get out of my diner didn't get to walk back into it and make it about his own need to be forgiven.
His phone was on the seat. Colson's number was two taps away — the offer was torn up on Rory's counter, but Wade Colson would re-paper it before Theo hit the town line, developers didn't tear up over torn paper — and all Theo had to do was drive and dial and it would be over, the debt, the town, the man, the whole impossible ache of having, for six weeks, almost had a life.
He didn't drive.
He sat in Verne Doucette's dead brother's truck in the gray morning with his hands on the wheel and found that he could not, for once in his life, make the first hour start.
Because there was one thing left he had to do that he had never, in fifteen years of leaving, managed to do properly, which was say goodbye to the last person alive who'd known his mother.
He turned the key. But he turned the truck up the hill, not toward Portland.
Not yet, he told himself. One goodbye. Then the first hour.
***
June Vann's house sat above the harbor where it had sat for fifty years, a small weathered Cape with a garden gone half to seed and a view of the whole working waterfront, the diner small and stubborn down at the water's edge with its crooked sign.
She was on the porch when Theo's borrowed truck came up the drive, wrapped in one of Eddie's old flannel shirts against the morning cold, and she watched him park and get out and come up the walk with two bags' worth of leaving all over him, and she did not get up, and she did not smile, and she said:
"So he ran you off. Or you're running. Hard to tell with a Vann. We look the same doing both."
Theo stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
He'd met June twice as a boy and not at all as a man, and he'd built a plan for this — warm, brief, the good grandnephew paying respects, I just wanted to say goodbye before I head out, take care of yourself — and it died in his mouth, because June Vann was looking at him the way Rory looked at a delivery, the way Dee had looked at his chin, the way this whole terrible town looked straight through the shine to the thing underneath, and Theo was so tired, suddenly, so completely out of road, that he didn't have the strength to get the plan up.
"I came to say goodbye," he said. It came out true and small.
"I heard you the first time." She patted the porch step beside her. "Sit down before you fall down. You look like your mother did the week before she left, and she was seventeen and stupid, and you're thirty-one and ought to know better."
He sat.
The harbor lay out below them, the tide coming in, the boats swinging. June didn't say anything for a while. She let the quiet do what the quiet did in this town, which was more than words managed most places.
"He told you to take the money and go," she said finally. Not a question. "Rory."
"How did you—"
"Because I know that boy, and I know exactly what he does when something gets close enough to matter.
He decided you were going to leave, so he made you leave, so he'd be right.
He'd rather be right than happy. Been that way since Eddie dragged him off the dock.
His father did a number on him no child recovers from clean.
" She sighed, a long sound with forty years in it.
"And you, being a Vann, took the door he opened, because an open door is the only thing your family has ever been able to resist. So here you are.
On my porch. With your bags in Bud Doucette's truck. About to prove him right."
"He doesn't want me here, June."
"Oh, he wants you here so bad he can't breathe. That's the whole problem. Don't insult me."
"He might reject me again," Theo said. Quiet.
The real fear, out loud at last. "I could go down there and put everything on the table — all of it, no performance — and he could look at me and say get out of my diner a second time.
And then I've got no bags packed and no truck pointed anywhere, and I'm just standing in it.
That's worse than leaving. Leaving, at least I'm the one who—"
"There it is." June almost smiled. "Spoken like a true Vann and a true Nash both, God help you.
You and that boy are the same animal, you know that?
He'd rather leave than get left. You'd rather leave than get rejected.
Two men so scared of the door that neither one of you will walk through it and just stay.
" She shook her head. "Yes. He might say it again.
That's the real risk, and I won't lie and tell you it's safe, because it isn't, and Eddie knew it wasn't when he tied you two together.
Love was never going to be safe. The question is whether you'd rather be safe or whether you'd rather be home — and you've tried safe for fifteen years, baby. How's safe been treating you?"
She turned and looked at him, and her eyes were Eddie's eyes, sharp and unfooled. "You want to know why my husband did it? The will. The year, the no-buyout, the whole impossible knot he tied the two of you into? Because I'll tell you, and then you can go or stay, but you'll do it knowing."
Theo couldn't speak. He nodded.
"Eddie knew he was dying for two years before he went," June said.
"The heart. He had time to think, which for a stubborn man is dangerous.
And what he thought about, mostly, was those two boys.
" She nodded down at the diner. "Rory, who he loved like a son and could never once say it to, who he watched turn himself into a stone so nothing could ever leave him again, who was going to inherit that diner and keep the doors open and the heart shut for the next forty years and die alone in a kitchen at four in the morning.
And you." Her voice changed. "Carol's boy.
Who ran the day we buried her and never stopped running, who Eddie watched from four hundred miles away make himself into something shiny and empty because the shine was armor, who was never, ever coming home, because home was where it hurt. "
The tide came in. Theo's eyes were streaming and he let them.