Chapter 12 #2
Cal's family, since forever, has had three legs: his mother, Hanna, and me.
Not me in any conventional sense — me by Sunday dinners, by the chair his mother set out the first year and never put back, by the funerals and the barbecues and the casseroles I've eaten at her table for a lifetime.
If I become Hanna's husband, I stop being Cal's chosen brother and become Cal's brother-in-law, which sounds like a small change and isn't, because brothers-in-law aren't what brothers are.
Brothers-in-law are what the man who used to be your friend becomes after he marries your sister.
Cal's going to do that math in about four seconds when she tells him.
He's going to look at me and at Hanna and at the chair, and he's going to subtract me from the chair, and he's going to be down to two legs in a week.
That isn't enough legs for a stool, much less for a family.
"Yeah," I say.
" — falls apart. And I did that. I. Me. With my decisions. I broke my mother's family. And you're sitting there saying 'yeah.'"
"Because I've been carrying that exact fear for ten years.
I've had to plan Christmases around it. I've driven past your mother's driveway at forty miles an hour because I was scared she'd see me and know something.
I've apologized in my head to Cal approximately a million times while we were eating at the same table. I know."
She closes her eyes. The spin stops.
"What do you want from me tonight?"
"I want you to say you're in."
"I'm in."
"On the actual telling."
"Ty — "
"You said you're in."
"I'm in on the — the being together. The relationship. The — " She gestures, frustrated — the same windmill gesture she made when she broke her mother's casserole dish at nine years old and couldn't say sorry. " — that. I'm in on that."
"Okay."
"But."
"Yeah?"
"I can't promise you a date."
"I'm not asking for one. I'm asking you to agree we're going to tell him. Not on my schedule — on the one where it happens before the universe forces it."
She looks at me for a long moment. The spin starts again, stops again.
"And if I don't agree?"
"Hanna."
"No. Ty. Genuinely. What happens?"
I don't answer immediately. Not because I don't know. Because the answer has been sitting in my chest for forty-eight hours and I haven't said it even to the kettle.
"I can't keep doing it. I wouldn't leave the station. I wouldn't leave you in any meaningful way. But I couldn't keep being in the linen closet. I'm not built for that."
"But you were at twenty-three?"
"At twenty-three I was built to be whatever you needed me to be. I'm not twenty-three now."
She flinches.
I wish I could take it back. I don't.
"I didn't mean — "
"You did."
"I did."
"Okay."
The kitchen is very quiet. The dying-bug porch light buzzes through the door.
"I need to think. I need you to leave." She holds up her hand before I can speak. "Not forever. Not like — tonight. I need tonight."
"Okay." I stand up, knees sore the way they get when you've been clenching your quads for forty-five minutes without noticing. I walk to the door, stop, and turn around.
"If you need me, call me. Any hour. I mean that."
"Why do you always make it hard to hate you?"
"Wasn't trying to."
"I know."
"Good night, Hanna."
"Good night."
I walk to the truck and don't start it. I sit in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition, unturned, staring at the dying-bug porch light, trying to catalogue whether I've just won something or whether I've just lit the match on the structure I've spent ten years building with my bare hands.
My phone buzzes.
Hanna: Don't say I have to tell Cal by a specific day.
Me: I wasn't going to.
A pause. The three dots.
Hanna: But you'd leave the bed.
I look at the blue door, the buzzing light, and think about a twenty-three-year-old me in a twin bed in Oregon waiting for a text from a nineteen-year-old her that never came.
Me: Yes.
The three dots appear and stay for almost a minute.
Hanna: Okay.
Just okay. No follow-up.
I sit in the cab of my truck on Hanna Larsen's street on a Thursday night and watch the blue door until the kitchen light goes off, and then I drive home.
In my own kitchen when I pour out the cold tea, make new tea, don't drink it, and stand at the counter. No new messages come.
The thing about an ultimatum — I scrape my thumbnail along the edge of the counter where the caulk has split — is that you're supposed to feel decisive.
You're supposed to feel like the sentence you said was a door closing behind you.
I don't feel decisive. I feel like a man who's put a live grenade in the hand of the person he loves and told her she can hold it or she can drop it and either way he's standing right here when she decides.
I pick up the phone. Put it down. Pick it up. Put it down.
I go to bed at two in the morning and don't sleep.
At four fifty-one a.m., my phone lights up.
Hanna: I'm not going to let you leave the bed.
I stare at the ceiling for a long time.
Me: Okay.
It isn't agreement. It isn't a timeline.
It's a woman in a dark kitchen sending a message at four fifty-one in the morning to the man who asked her to do the hardest thing she can imagine, and the message is I'm not going to let you leave the bed, and that isn't a plan, but it isn't a no, and I'll take it.
I close my eyes. I sleep for an hour and a half.
When I wake up, the barbecue is in thirty-six hours and I'm trying hard not to think about the fact that there will be eighty people in a parking lot with grills, and Cal will be one of them, and so will Derek's rubber chicken, and so will we.
Riley shows up at Station 7 in civilian clothes, which is an event. Riley in civilian clothes mid-shift means Riley is here on what I'll call investigatory leisure.
She finds me at the coffee pot without looking like she's finding me, which is part of why she's good at her job.
"Brennan. Got a second?"
It's not a question. I get a second.
She walks me to the apparatus bay and leans against Engine 7 with a posture that says nothing, looks at me with an expression that says nothing, and asks mildly, "You sleeping okay these days, Brennan?"
"Yes."
"Eating okay?"
"Yes."
"Whose toothbrush is in your bathroom?"
I open my mouth. I close it. I don't say anything for two full seconds, which is two seconds longer than a man not hiding something would have needed.
Riley smiles — not a friendly smile, the smile of a woman who has just confirmed a hypothesis without asking the question that would have confirmed it.
"That's all I needed." She pats me on the shoulder, walks back to the kitchen, refills her coffee, and leaves the building. The whole encounter takes minutes.
I stand in the apparatus bay for a full minute trying to recover something, and I can't, because Riley Pritchard has just interrogated me without asking a single question that would have held up in court. She knows what she knows. There is, as far as I can determine, nothing I can do about it.