Chapter 18 #2
"You — Brennan, you — "
He's standing over me. His fist is ready for another.
My lip is split, iron on my tongue. I don't swing back.
I'm going to take whatever he gives me in this kitchen, because ten years of lying to a man who loved me buys him a certain amount of floor time on my jaw, and the physics of this isn't something I'm going to fight.
"Cal," Hanna says, "if you hit him again I'll break your other shoulder myself."
"Hanna — "
"I'm not joking. I'm a paramedic. I know exactly where to hit you. Don't hit him again."
He doesn't.
He stares down at me. His face is doing the crumple of a grown man whose brain has finished running the reel. His fist opens. He staggers back, drops into his own kitchen chair, puts his good hand over his face. His bad shoulder twitches. He swears, long and loud and graceless, at the ceiling.
"Cal."
"Shut up, Brennan." Hanna doesn't look at me.
"I'm not going to defend it."
"Good."
"I'm not going to pretend this wasn't what it was."
"Good."
"And I'm not going to apologize for loving your sister."
The kitchen goes quiet again.
Cal takes his hand off his face.
"What did you say."
"I'm not going to apologize for loving your sister. I'll apologize for the lying — every day, Cal, for the rest of my life. But not for the loving."
"You're so lucky I'm injured."
"I know."
"I'd end you."
"I know."
"Get off my floor."
I get off the floor — slowly, knee protesting, lip bleeding down my chin onto my shirt. Hanna is at the counter with her face in both hands. The coffee in the cone has over-extracted. The kitchen smells like bitter coffee.
Cal looks at his sister.
"You're my — " his voice cracks " — you're my sister, and you're the best thing in my life, and you've been lying to me for ten years."
"Yes."
"You told me you were going to Portland to make a difference."
"Yes."
"You cried at the airport."
"Yes."
"I drove you." Something breaks open in his face.
"I drove you to the airport, Hanna. I watched you get on that plane crying, and I thought I was watching my sister leave to do a big brave thing for herself.
I flew out to see you five times. I sent you gift baskets.
I told everyone I knew how proud I was of my little sister going to the big city — and you were running from my best friend. "
"Yes."
"Who you were — who you had been — "
"Yes, Cal."
"Hanna."
"Yes."
"You're supposed to — "
"I know."
"I loved you so much, Hanna."
"I know."
"I didn't need a secret from you. I was going to love you if you had told me. I was going to love you, Hanna — did you think I wouldn't?"
Hanna isn't crying. Her face is the specific dry stillness of a woman about to say the truest sentence of her adult life.
"I thought you wouldn't love him, Cal."
Cal stops.
"What?"
"I knew you'd love me. I didn't think you'd love him. I thought you'd cut him off. And I thought that would kill him. And I couldn't take his brother from him. So, I left."
Cal looks at me.
I look at the floor.
"Brennan. Is that true?"
"It's what she thought."
"Was it true?"
"I don't know, Cal. I was twenty-three. I also didn't want to lose you. I thought if I waited, you'd come around. I thought if we were patient, we'd tell you eventually." I try to make the sentence come out. "I was wrong about the waiting. I was — I — "
"Ten years," Cal says.
"I know."
"Ten years of me being your best friend while you — "
"Yes."
"Get out, Brennan." His voice has gone flat, which is worse than the yelling. "I can't look at you. I can't look at my sister either. Hanna, take him. Go. I don't want anyone in my house."
"Cal — "
"Get out."
We get out.
On Cal's back stairs I sit down because my knee has given out for real. My lip is still bleeding. Hanna is one step below me, looking up. The sun is gone. The porch light is on its timer. In the light, her eyes are dry and very clear.
"I'm going to tell him the rest tomorrow. Go to his door alone." She holds my gaze. "I need you to go home. Not fix this. Let me fix this."
"Hanna."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I know."
"I love you, Hanna."
"I know, Ty."
"I'm going to keep saying it."
"Okay."
"I'm saying it now because I'm — because — "
"I know."
Cal Larsen was at my dad's wake, because my dad died of a heart attack on a Tuesday and my mother called Cal's mother, Cal got in his truck and drove four hours to be at the funeral home.
He didn't say a thing for the first two hours.
He stood at the back in a black tie his mother had ironed, holding a paper plate of food he didn't eat.
Then he drove me home. Then he sat on my couch until five in the morning.
He drove me to the diner for eggs. He didn't ask me how I was.
He didn't try to fix it. He just stayed.
Cal Larsen drove twelve hundred miles to help me move out of an apartment I should never have moved into, in the spring of 2020, when the woman I'd been seeing for eight months turned out to be married to a contractor in Boise.
I called him at two a.m. He was on the road by three.
He showed up at my door at six p.m. with a U-Haul, a six-pack, and a roll of paper towels he'd bought at a gas station in Pendleton because, he said, you always need paper towels when a relationship ends.
He didn't make a joke about her for weeks.
The joke he eventually made wasn't at her expense. It was at the contractor's.
Cal Larsen asked me, years ago, on his porch, what I wanted to do with my life.
He asked because nobody else had asked me.
He asked the way Cal asks anything — like a man prepared to sit on the porch until I answered.
I told him I wanted to come back to Copper Ridge and be a firefighter because working a dead-end job outside of Boise wasn’t it.
He told me he'd already started making the calls.
The calls included the Chief, who he played pickup basketball with on Sundays, and Big Jim, who he drank with on Fridays, and a man at the city named John, who Cal had once helped get a fridge up three flights of stairs.
The job offer came through in eight days.
It came through because Cal Larsen had been working on it for eight months without telling me.
Hanna reaches up and puts her thumb on my lip and wipes off the blood. Goes back into Cal’s she's no longer welcome in to get her laptop and her coat. I walk down the back stairs with a grinder in my hand and a split lip and the taste of kung pao grease in the air, and I drive home.
In my kitchen I set down the grinder and put my forehead on the counter and stand there for a long time.
The worst thing I've been afraid of, for the last ten years, has happened.
I'm still standing.
My best friend hit me, and I'm still standing, my lip is bleeding, and my jaw hurts.
Somewhere a few blocks over, my best friend is sitting on his kitchen floor eating cold Asian food and hating me and also — in a place he hasn't reached yet — loving me.
Because Cal Larsen isn't capable of loving anyone less than completely, and he's loved me completely for thirty years.
That love isn't going to go away overnight.
It will come back eventually, because I have faith in the version of Cal who's been loving me all along.
I have faith in Hanna.
I have faith in Cal.
I have faith.
That's new.
I ice my jaw and I wait.