Chapter 4
Ty
Cal is strapping himself into a harness he has no intention of using when he turns to me. "Sunday dinner. Mom's making pot roast. Six o'clock. You're coming."
"Cal."
"Don't cancel on me."
"I have a shift."
"You don't have a shift. I looked."
"I was going to trade for a shift."
"You're absolutely not going to trade for a shift."
"Cal — "
"Ty. You've come to Sunday dinner at my mother's house on the first Sunday of every month since the year we graduated from the academy. You've missed two. One was when your grandma died and the other was when you had food poisoning from Derek's eggs. Do you have a dying grandma?"
"You know I don't."
"Have you eaten Derek's eggs?"
"Not today."
"Then I'll see you at six." Cal yanks the harness strap and doesn't look at me. "Hanna's going to be there. Yeah, she lives there till she finds her own place — that's why I want you to come. So it's not weird. So everyone's just — you know. Normal."
I close my eyes for a half second in the apparatus bay and I ask the ghost of my father, who died of a heart attack at fifty-six years old, eight years ago, and who would've found this entire situation hilarious, to give me strength.
My father isn't able to comply because he's dead, but the asking helps.
"Six o'clock," Cal says.
"Six o'clock."
"Don't bring anything. Mom hates it when you bring anything."
"I'm bringing a bottle of wine."
"She hates that. It's pretentious."
"She loves it. I've been bringing it for years."
"She hates it."
"Cal."
"Fine. Bring the wine."
At 5:58 p.m. on Sunday, I pull into the Larsen driveway behind Cal's truck, with a bottle of the exact Oregon pinot noir I've been bringing to Mom Larsen's house since 2019, and I sit in my truck for forty-three seconds, and then I get out.
The house is the same house it has always been.
Blue shutters, white siding, the porch swing that Mom Larsen hung herself the summer after her husband died because she said if she was going to sit out there crying she might as well have someplace to do it.
The porch light is on. The wreath on the door is the summer wreath — the one with the little yellow birds. She hangs it in late May.
Cal is already inside. I can hear him through the screen. Cal is always already inside. Cal arrives at his mother's house like he's trying to catch her with her guard down, which is a lost cause, because Mom Larsen was born on high alert and has remained there for sixty-four years.
I knock.
"It's open, honey," Mom Larsen calls from the kitchen.
"Coming in."
I push through the door. The house smells like pot roast, and something with rosemary, and the specific cinnamon apple candle Mom Larsen has been burning in the entryway since I was twenty-three years old, and for a full second I'm standing in the same doorway I've been standing in for a decade, and the familiarity of it is a physical thing, and it's also, as of tonight, a lie, because there's a woman at the kitchen island slicing tomatoes, and the woman isn't the woman I usually see in this house, and the woman, tonight, is Hanna.
Hanna looks up.
Hanna goes still.
Mom Larsen, who's been chopping onions and hasn't yet looked up, says, "Tyler, bring me that bowl on the counter, would you."
"Yes, ma'am."
I set the wine on the sideboard, cross to the counter, pick up the bowl, and carry it to Mom Larsen, who finally looks up, and she smiles the smile she's always smiled at me — the smile of a woman who knows she's my Sunday mother — and she pats my cheek and says, "You got thin."
"I didn't get thin."
"You got thin," Hanna says, without looking up from the tomatoes.
"I weigh exactly what I weighed last month."
"You're working too hard," Mom Larsen says.
"I'm working exactly the same amount."
"You need more pot roast."
"Yes, ma'am." Dry as chalk.
Mom Larsen pats my cheek again and releases me. I turn. Hanna is watching the exchange with the expression of a woman witnessing a diorama from her own life from the outside. She has a tomato halfway sliced. She hasn't sliced since I walked into the room.
"Hi, Hanna."
"Hi."
"Pot roast?"
"Evidently."
"Nice to see you."
"Mmhmm."
I stand there for a second too long. I move before she can start slicing again, because if she starts slicing while I'm watching, I'm a man watching a woman slice tomatoes, and that's a tier of observation I can't afford.
I pick the bottle of wine up from the sideboard and hold it toward Mom Larsen. "I brought the pinot."
"Oh, you didn't have to do that, honey, that's too expensive."
"It's forty dollars."
"That's too expensive. I love it." She waves a hand at me. "Where are your manners, though — you didn't hug me hello."
"I apologize." I hug her. She's small. She's always been small. I've been taller than her for more than a decade and I still come in for the hug with the same instinct as when I was twenty-three, which is to bend a little, so she can reach, and when I pull back I ask, "How are you feeling."
"I'm well. I'm always well."
"How's the chemo." I keep my voice even.
"Tyler." She pulls back to look at me.
"Mom Larsen."
"I'm well."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you'll receive this evening." She pats my face a third time. "Ask me again after dinner."
"Yes, ma'am."
She releases me. I step back and look at Hanna, and Hanna is looking at her mother's hand on my face with an expression that's probably unreadable to anyone who isn't me, and is, for me, painfully legible.
It says: I haven't been in this kitchen for dinner in three years.
I've forgotten how much this woman loves this man. I'm unprepared.
"Calvin, set the table," Mom Larsen calls toward the living room.
"I'm watching — "
"Calvin Richard Larsen."
"Yes, ma'am," Cal shouts back.
Cal thunders into the kitchen. He stops short at the island. He looks at Hanna, who's his sister, and at me, who's his best friend, and at his mother, who's feeding all of us, and his face does the thing his face does when he's pleased with the universe, which is to split in half at the cheeks.
"My three favorite people."
"Four," Mom Larsen says, from the stove.
"Right. Dad." I say it quietly, and Cal nods.
"Set the table, please."
Cal finds the plates.
She still sets a place for her husband. I've known this since I started coming to dinner.
She sets a fifth place at the end nearest the head of the table — a small plate, a fork, a napkin, a glass.
She doesn't put food on the plate. She says the man doesn't need food, but he needs a seat.
Cal's dad's name was Tom. Tom Larsen was a captain at Station 7, and he died in service in 2012, when Hanna was fifteen and Cal and I were nineteen and just starting to understand what this family would mean to me, and his death is part of the weather in this house. It always will be.
I carried his casket. Mom Larsen asked me to, at the memorial service at the Copper Ridge firefighter memorial park. Cal was on one corner. I was on another. Two of Tom's old crew were on the other two. Mom Larsen said I was family, and the Larsen family didn't have enough men, and I should help.
I did. I do. I'm a Larsen-family man, which is what I've told myself for the better part of a decade, and it's the operating truth of my life, and it's why what I'm currently doing is unforgivable.
"Ty," Cal says, handing me a stack of plates. "Salad forks on the left, you always screw it up."
"I've never screwed it up."
"One time at Thanksgiving — "
"One time."
" — you put the salad fork on the right, Tyler, because you were raised in a barn — "
"I was raised in the same town as you, Calvin."
" — and I've never forgotten it."
"Your mother has forgotten it."
"She's a saint. She forgets everything out of charity."
"I don't forget anything," Mom Larsen says, from the stove. "I choose what to remember. These are different skills. Pot roast is ready. Hanna, honey, bring the rolls."
We sit. Mom Larsen at the foot, Cal at the head, Hanna and I across from each other, Tom's empty chair at the end.
The pot roast is on a platter. The rolls are in the breadbasket Mom Larsen puts out when she wants us to slow down and chew.
The grace is short. Mom Larsen doesn't like a long grace.
She says that God already knows you're grateful and the man wants to eat.
"Before we start," Cal says, "I'd like to say a thing."
"Calvin." Mom Larsen doesn't look up.
"Mom — "
"I said no speeches."
"This isn't a speech."
"Every time you say this isn't a speech, Calvin, we get a speech."
"It's not a speech."
"Calvin."
"I'd just like to formally welcome Hanna home, now that we're all together, as a family, which I said I'd do, and I'm doing it."
"You did it," I say.
"I'm doing it again."
"Fine. Make it short," Mom Larsen says.
"Welcome home." Cal lifts his glass. "We love you. We missed you. We're proud of you."
Hanna, across the table, looks at her brother like he just stabbed her in the chest with a butter knife, and then she looks down at her napkin. "Okay, Cal."
"That's not short enough for a thank you?"
"Okay. Thank you, Cal."
"There we go."
"I love you too." Still looking at her napkin.
"I love you more."
"Shut up."
"You shut up."
"Eat the roast," Mom Larsen says, and we eat the roast.
The trouble starts, as it always does, with Cal, somewhere around the second helping, somewhere around the point where he's cut into the third roll and slathered it with butter in a fashion that would've gotten him slapped by his mother in 1998, but Mom Larsen has aged into permissiveness with her son on minor issues, and the roll carnage is now allowed.
"So." Cal sets down his knife. "We have to find Hanna a boyfriend."
The entire dining room, internally, in my head, stops.
Hanna, externally, doesn't react.
Mom Larsen passes the butter.
"Cal."
"The crew is on it," Cal says.
"The crew is on what."