Chapter 9
Hanna
Iaccept the date with Kevin for three reasons, none of which are good.
Reason one: Cal set it up. He set it up the day after the Watershed disaster, from inside the apparatus bay, by cornering me and using his best earnest big-brother voice, because Cal has detected, in his way, that something about that Friday night went sideways, and Cal, bless him, has concluded that the cure is to get his sister on a date with a man he personally approves of.
I accepted because saying no would've made Cal ask why, and why isn't a word I can afford to answer right now.
Reason two: I want to prove something.
I don't ask myself what, because I know what, and I don't want to know that I know.
Reason three: Kevin is a paramedic. I have one thing in common with Kevin, at least, and one thing in common with another human being is a better premise for a date than fifty percent of the dates I went on in Portland, and Portland had a lot of bad dates.
Kevin arrives at the Italian place on Main Street at seven-oh-four on Thursday evening, four minutes late, with an apology so complete and detailed — a construction detour, a neighbor's phone call, an opinion about the city's public works department — that I'm unfairly prejudiced against him inside of ninety seconds.
By the time he finishes, he's been at the table longer than he was late.
He's tall, well-dressed, wearing a gray sweater over a button-up, looking like a man who thought about what to wear for a date, which is more than I can say for many. Cal didn't lie about the tall.
"Hanna. It's really nice to meet you."
"You too."
"I've heard a lot about you."
"Oh no."
"Oh no?" He smiles.
"From Cal, right."
"Yes."
"Then yes. Oh no."
"No, it was all — he's proud of you." Kevin leans in. "He said you were top of your cohort at Portland Fire. He said you saved a kid's life last year with a — "
"It's possible," I say, "that we could have a conversation about anything other than me for the next ninety minutes."
He laughs — loud, enthusiastic, relaxed. A good laugh, objectively. Also, I notice with the slow crystallization of a person ruining their own evening, a laugh that fills all the space in the room with itself and doesn't leave any for the other person to laugh back.
Kevin tells me about his Subaru. Not as a joke. As a fifteen-minute story — the Subaru has a name (Bruce), all-weather tires, a roof rack, and apparently a personality. I start timing it at the three-minute mark when it becomes clear this isn't a fact he's mentioning but a story he's building.
He calls the waitress "champ."
Twice.
When she comes to the table the second time — a woman named Jen, someone I know from my brother's school class — Kevin says, "Hey, champ, can we do another basket of rolls," and I watch Jen's face do the infinitesimal thing it's been doing when a man calls her champ.
"Did you know her?" I ask.
"Who?"
"The server."
"No. Why?"
"Nothing." I pick up my water glass.
"I'm just friendly with everybody." He shrugs. "I try to connect with people. I think it makes them feel seen. Service industry — I always try to be nice."
"Mmhmm."
Kevin orders the lasagna. Assertively, in a way that a lasagna has never needed. I order the spaghetti. The gnocchi is for a night when I'm less tired.
We eat.
Kevin isn't bad. Kevin, on paper, is a very good date — employed, healthy, confident, can string sentences together, makes eye contact, laughs at my jokes. Kevin thinks I'm funny. Kevin is enjoying himself. When he laughs, he closes his eyes all the way and tips his head back.
And I keep comparing.
Kevin's hands to Ty's hands, at the salt shaker.
Kevin's voice to Ty's voice when he laughs.
Kevin's shoulders in his gray sweater to Ty's shoulders in his hoodie on the porch.
Kevin's silences, which aren't silences because Kevin is constitutionally incapable of them, to Ty's silences, which are entire languages.
This is not Kevin's fault.
This is the thing I came to the date to prove.
I came to prove I could go on a date with a reasonable man and have a reasonable time, and I can, and I am, and it's reasonable, and it isn't enough.
By the main course I know that nothing anybody could've ordered at this restaurant was going to be enough, because the person I want to be across from isn't across from me, and there's no Kevin in the world who can fix that.
I think about Portland.
I had a fourth-floor walk-up on Belmont for six years.
I had a thing with a man named Theo for two of those years — a middle-school science teacher who kept bees and once almost asked me to marry him in a botanical garden.
I knew the question was coming for a full minute before he opened his mouth, and I gave him an out so smooth he thanked me for it in the Uber back, before he got out at his apartment and we never spoke again.
There was Felix, in 2020, who owned a vinyl shop on Hawthorne and made me dinner three Tuesdays in a row before I let him kiss me.
A part of my brain that I'd told to shut up kept saying not him the whole time, in Felix's perfectly nice apartment, against his perfectly nice records, and after the third Tuesday I told Felix I was sorry and went home and sold the dress I'd worn to that last date because the dress had been complicit.
There was the lawyer in 2022 — excellent on paper, quoted Tom Wolfe at me at brunch in a way I think he meant as charming — and I never called him back, because there was a way he held a fork that I disliked for no reason I could name except that Ty Brennan held a fork the opposite way.
I had a job offer in Medford in 2021 that would've paid me twenty thousand dollars more a year and I didn't take it, because Medford California was further from Copper Ridge by exactly the wrong number of hours.
I had an apartment in 2023 I almost signed a five-year lease on, a view of Mount Hood, and I let it go because five years felt like a sentence I didn't know I'd been refusing to serve until I was sitting in my car in the rental office's parking lot crying about a kitchen I wouldn't be able to leave.
What I had in Portland was a life that looked like a life.
I worked, dated, went to the gym, read books, told the women in my Tuesday-night book club every six months that I might move home soon.
They told me I'd been saying that for three years.
I told them I knew. We ordered another bottle of wine.
I came home because I ran out of stalling — because Theo wasn't Ty, and the man at the next table at the wine bar wasn't Ty, and the man at the gym wasn't Ty, and I had spent ten years building a life around the project of not noticing the not-Ty of every man I met, and at twenty-nine I noticed I was tired.
At eight forty-seven, Kevin reaches across the table for my hand.
"Kevin."
"Oh — "
"I'm sorry." I pull my hand back, gently. "You're so nice, and I accepted this invitation because my brother asked me to. I love my brother, but I don't think I'm ready to be dating right now. I just moved back. That's not fair to you."
"Oh." He sits back. "Okay."
"I mean it — you're really nice."
"Thank you."
"Also, you're calling Jen champ and you have to stop doing that."
He blinks. "Who's Jen?"
"The waitress. She's a person. Her name is Jen. Stop doing that."
"Oh." A pause. "Okay."
"I don't know why I needed to tell you that."
"I think," Kevin says slowly, "I needed to hear it."
"Okay."
We split the check. Kevin wants to pay; I say no, which I say with the specific inflection that makes men stop insisting, and Kevin, to his credit, stops.
We walk to the parking lot, and he walks me to my car, which I allow, and I shake his hand at the door — the dorkiest thing anybody has done in the parking lot of an Italian restaurant— and I thank him for the evening and watch him walk to his Subaru… Bruce.
I don't drive home to my mother's house.
I drive to Cal's apartment.
Cal, for reasons nobody has fully explained, requests a post-date debrief after every first date he's responsible for setting up.
He's done this since I was sixteen, because he feels invested in the pick, because he thinks his pick is going to stick, because he thinks he's good at this.
He isn't. He once accidentally set me up with a married man. He still does it.
I pull up at Cal's apartment building. His door is unlocked — a thing I've yelled at him about since his first apartment — and I let myself in.
Ty is on the couch.
Cal is at the other end. There's a Mariners game on. Ty is in a gray hoodie — possibly the same gray hoodie — with one foot on the coffee table, holding a beer. He looks up when I come in, and his face, for a half second before he controls it, does something.
I stop in the doorway.
"How'd it go," Cal asks.
"It went."
"Okay, that's a — that's a weird — "
"It went, Cal."
"He was nice?"
"He was nice."
"Nice," Cal says, the way a man says a word when he's heard it too many times.
"There's no but, Cal."
"Hanna. There's always a but."
I sit down in the armchair across from the couch — not the couch, not tonight, not for any amount of money — and kick off my flats under the coffee table.
Ty doesn't look at me. He's watching the Mariners.
The Mariners are losing. The Mariners are always losing.
His grip on the beer bottle isn't precisely relaxed.
"He was on time. He was well-dressed. He told a long story about his car and called the waitress champ."
"Champ?" Cal winces.
"Twice."
"Hanna."
"Cal."
"Dealbreaker?" Ty asks from the couch, without looking up.
"Not the only thing."
"What was the main thing," Cal says.
I look at Ty. Ty doesn't look up. I look back at my brother.
"The main thing is that I'm not — I think I'm not ready to date. I just moved, and Mom had the scare, and I don't think I can take on the project of getting to know someone right now."
"A project," Cal says.
"Dating is a project, Calvin."
"No, it isn't."
"It's a months-long project. You sit across from a stranger and exchange data. It's inefficient."
"You're describing it like it's a drill."
"It is a drill."
"Hanna."
"Cal, not every person is ready for that, and I'm not, and I know you were doing it out of love — but I don't think you should set me up with anyone for a while."
"Got it."
"I mean it."
"I said got it. I'll back off. I was just trying to — "
"I know."
"Yeah," Ty says quietly, from the couch.
"I know you were," I say.
Cal cracks another beer. Ty takes a sip of his.
His knuckles on the bottle are white. He hasn't said more than a few words to me since I walked in, hasn't looked at me once, sitting on that couch with the discipline of a man holding very, very still because moving would mean doing something that can't be done.
I know that discipline. I invented it.
I look at Ty sideways, under the pretense of looking at the television.
He's wearing, under the hoodie, a gray t-shirt with a small faded logo on the chest — a running shoe.
A Brooks t-shirt. I know the Brooks t-shirt, because I bought an identical one in a mall in Portland and mailed it to a P.O.
box, without a return address, from a post office in Beaverton, as a birthday present — because I couldn't bring myself to send it to his street address and couldn't bring myself to not send it at all.
I watched for a year for him to reach out about it or throw the package out.
He did neither. I decided it had been lost in the mail.
It clearly wasn't lost in the mail.
It's on him. On the couch. Next to my brother. On a Thursday night.
I'm going to be sick.
"Hanna?" Cal says.
"I'm holding." I stand up and slide my flats back on. "I'm tired. I'm going."
"I thought we were doing the debrief."
"We did it. He was nice. I'm not ready. You're not setting me up again. That was the debrief."
"That was a short debrief."
"I'm a tired woman, Calvin."
"Fine. Drive safe."
I walk to the door. At the door I pause without turning around and say, to the ceiling, "Goodnight."
"Night, Hanna," Cal says.
"Goodnight, Hanna." Ty's voice, from the couch. The first thing he's said. The only thing.
I close the door behind me.
In the stairwell I sit on the third step, put my face in my hands for twenty seconds, get up, and drive home to my mother's.
I lie in my old bed and think, over and over, about the fact that Ty kept the shirt.
He kept it. He wore it. He wore it tonight, on the couch next to my brother, like a man running out of self-discipline.
At eleven forty-two, my phone buzzes.
Ty: The shirt is clean, for the record. I washed it.
I laugh out loud into my pillow in the dark — the real laugh, the unguarded one, the laugh I used with him at the academy under the exit sign in the dorm hallway — and my pillow is wet from laughter or something adjacent to the laugh, and I'm in very, very deep trouble.
Me: How long have you had it?
Ty: Since it randomly showed up in the mail.
Me: Have you worn it?
Ty: Not on purpose.
Me: Ty.
Ty: Go to sleep, Hanna.
Me: I'm going.
Ty: Hanna.
Me: What?
Ty: Thanks for coming by.
I put the phone face down on the nightstand.
I don't fall sleep for an hour.
When I do sleep, I dream about a mall in Portland, and a post office in Beaverton, and a package that wasn't lost.