38. Jake
JAKE
Deacon did not bring beer this time. He brought a lecture, and I deserved every word of it.
I heard his truck before I saw it, that particular rattle in the tailgate he'd been meaning to fix for a year, and I almost didn't get up from the porch step to let him in.
I'd been sitting out there since before the sun cleared the tree line, coffee gone cold in my hand, watching the light come up gray and then gold over Aria's roofline like it was any other morning, like the whole world hadn't tilted a few degrees sideways the night before.
The house behind me was too quiet without the kids in it. Carol had taken Noah to school and had Lily for the day too, no explanation needed on her end, which meant she already knew more than I wanted her to. That was how it worked around here.
Somebody always knew before I'd told anybody.
Deacon parked crooked, half on the grass, and came up the walk without his usual easy roll, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, jaw set in a way I recognized from job sites right before he fired somebody.
"You look like hell," he said.
"Thanks."
"I'm not saying it to be nice. I'm saying it because it's true and somebody should."
I stood up off the step, mostly because sitting while he loomed over me felt like a position I didn't want to be in for whatever this was. "You want coffee? I can make more."
"I didn't drive over here for coffee, Jake."
"Okay."
"Carol called me at six this morning." He stopped a few feet off, close enough that I could see he hadn't shaved, which for Deacon meant he'd left his house in a hurry.
"She had Aria's girl and your boy both, no warning, no story, just showed up at her door with two duffel bags and a face like somebody died. You want to tell me what happened, or should I guess?"
"Nobody died."
"That's not what I asked."
I looked past him at the street, at nothing in particular, the same way I'd been looking at nothing since about four in the morning.
"We had a fight. It got quiet. I needed some air, so I went out and stood on the porch for a while. That's it. That's the whole story."
"That's not the whole story and we both know it." He said it flat, no heat in it yet, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd been shouting.
"Carol wouldn't take two kids overnight with no warning over a normal fight. What happened?"
I told him, because there wasn't a version of this where Deacon left without hearing it, and because some tired, worn-down part of me almost wanted to say it out loud to somebody who wasn't Emily.
I told him about the job offer, about Meridian Features, about three weeks gone out of every four for a year with just one week home, a door Aria had been standing in front of for weeks without telling me it existed.
I told him about the candles and the cold plates and the chair scraping back too sharp against the floor, and I told him I'd gone quiet instead of yelling, that I'd walked outside instead of finishing the conversation, and that I hadn't gone back in until she was already asleep on the couch with her arms wrapped around herself like she was cold.
Deacon didn't interrupt any of it. He just stood there on my walkway with his arms crossed, listening in a way that felt like being measured for something.
"And where'd you sleep?" he asked when I finished.
"Guest room."
"Did you talk to her this morning before Carol showed up?"
"She was already gone when I got up. Took the girl over to Carol's before I was awake."
"Convenient."
"It wasn't convenient, Deacon, it just happened that way."
"Sure it did." He finally moved, coming up the last few feet of walkway and dropping onto the porch step where I'd been sitting, elbows on his knees, staring out at the yard instead of at me.
"You know what's funny? I've known you eleven years. Eleven years, Jake. And I can tell you the exact three times I've watched you do this."
Something in my stomach went cold and tight, because I already knew where this was going and I hated that I knew.
"Do what?"
"Don't." He said it quiet, almost gentle, which was worse than if he'd yelled it. "Don't make me spell it out like you don't already know exactly what I'm talking about."
"Humor me."
He looked up at me then, and there was none of the usual glint in his eyes, none of the setup for a joke that would land soft and then get walked back with a grin. There was just something tired and a little angry underneath it.
"Emily," he said.
"After Emily died, you didn't talk to me for six weeks.
Not really talk. You'd show up to job sites, you'd nail boards, you'd say fine when I asked how you were, and then you'd go home and shut your door and I couldn't get past it no matter what I tried.
I brought food. I brought Noah's favorite cartoon on a flash drive because I didn't know what else to bring a man whose wife had just died.
You let me in the house maybe twice in two months. "
"That was different. That was grief."
"I know it was grief. I'm not saying it wasn't allowed. I'm saying it was the first time I watched you go somewhere I couldn't follow, and I remember exactly what it looked like, because I'm looking at the same thing right now standing on your porch."
"I'm not grieving Aria, Deacon. She's not dead. We had a fight."
"I know she's not dead." His voice sharpened, just a little, the first real edge I'd heard in it.
"But you're doing it again. You get scared, and instead of staying in the room, you go quiet and you go somewhere else, even if your body's still standing right there.
You did it at the festival too. Renee said whatever she said to you, and you didn't tell a single one of us what it was, you just went dark for two weeks and let everybody worry themselves sick wondering what was wrong with you. "
"That's not the same as last night."
"Isn't it?" He stood back up, and now there was nowhere for me to look that wasn't at him.
"You want to tell me the difference? Because from where I'm standing, it's the same pattern every single time. Something gets hard, you get quiet, and you disappear behind your own face while everybody else is left standing there wondering if you're even still in the room."
"I stepped outside for ten minutes. That's not disappearing."
"You didn't step outside for ten minutes, Jake.
You told her you needed air, and then you stood on a porch until she fell asleep on the couch waiting for you to come back and finish the conversation.
That's not air. That's a door you closed without slamming it, which somehow you think doesn't count, but it counts. It counts exactly the same."
I felt heat crawl up the back of my neck, the kind that comes right before you say something you'll regret, and I let it come because it was easier than the alternative.
"You weren't there. You don't know what it felt like sitting at that table finding out the woman I've been building a life with has had a job offer sitting in her inbox for over a week and didn't say a word."
"I don't need to have been there to know how you handle hard news, Jake.
I've watched you handle hard news for eleven years.
You go still. You go quiet. You get real polite and real careful, and everybody around you learns to read that as calm, but it's not calm, it's you leaving the building while your body stays behind to hold your spot. "
"That's not fair."
"Maybe not. But it's true, and you know it's true, or you wouldn't be sitting out here at seven in the morning with cold coffee instead of inside talking to her."
"She's not even here, Deacon. She took Lily to Carol's before I woke up. What exactly was I supposed to do, chase her down the driveway?"
"You could call her." He said it simply, like it was the easiest thing in the world, which made it worse somehow.
"You've got a phone. It's sitting right there on the railing. You could pick it up right now and tell her what you're scared of instead of making her guess."
"And say what? That I'm terrified she's going to leave for three weeks at a time and come back different, or not come back at all? That every time somebody I love gets a chance to walk out that door, my whole chest locks up the same way it did the day I lost Emily?"
The words came out louder than I meant them to, cracking somewhere in the middle, and Deacon didn't flinch, didn't back up, just stood there and let me hear myself say it.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
"Say exactly that. That's the whole speech, Jake. That's everything you need her to hear, and instead you handed her ten minutes of silence on a porch and a cold plate of food."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. It's just not easy, and you keep treating those two things like they're the same word."
I sat back down on the step because my legs didn't feel steady enough to argue standing up, and Deacon sat beside me again, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, the anger gone out of his voice now, replaced with something that sounded almost like grief of his own.
"You know what kills me?" he said.
"It's not that you get scared. Everybody gets scared.
It's that you decided a long time ago that going quiet was the safe move, and it's not safe, Jake.
It just feels safe because nobody can see you flinch.
But Aria saw you flinch last night. She watched you do the thing you do, and I'd bet every dollar I own she's sitting over at Carol's right now thinking it's her fault you shut down, when it isn't. It's a habit you built two years ago and never bothered to break. "
"You don't know what she's thinking."
"No, I don't. But I know what you're doing right now, which is sitting on a porch talking to me about it instead of calling her and talking to her about it. Which is, in case you hadn't noticed, exactly the pattern I just described to you."
That landed somewhere low in my chest, sharp enough that I didn't have a comeback ready, and for a second neither of us said anything, the two of us just sitting on cold wood in the early light, the street empty, a dog barking somewhere a few yards over.
"I don't know what to say to her," I admitted finally, quieter than anything else I'd said all morning. "I don't know how to tell her I'm scared without it sounding like I'm asking her to give something up for me."
"Then tell her that part. Tell her you don't know how to say it right. That's still more than she got last night, which was nothing."
Deacon stood, brushing off the back of his jeans, and for the first time since he'd pulled up crooked on the grass, something almost gentle came back into his face.
"I'm not saying this to twist the knife, Jake.
I'm saying it because I've watched you do this too many times, and one of these days the person on the other side of that door isn't going to wait around for you to figure out how to open it again. "
"Carol waited."
"Carol's family. Family waits longer than they should. Aria's not family yet, not officially, and grief doesn't come with a deadline but relationships do, whether we like it or not."
He walked backward down the steps toward his truck, hands back in his pockets, watching me the whole way.
"Call her, Jake. Today. Not tomorrow, not once you've got the perfect sentence lined up in your head. Today."
"I hear you."
"Hearing me and doing something about it have never been the same thing for you either." He climbed into the truck, started the engine, and leaned out the window before he pulled off the grass.
"I love you like a brother, man. That's the only reason I drove over here instead of minding my own business. Don't make me regret it."
"You won't."
"We'll see."
He pulled away with that same rattle in the tailgate, and I sat on the step until the sound of his engine faded all the way down the road, until the street went back to birds and wind and nothing else.
The coffee in my hand had gone fully cold, and I set it down on the boards beside me and picked up my phone instead, turning it over once in my palm like the weight of it might tell me something.
He was right and I knew it, and I still did not pick up the phone. Some habits you do not break just because someone names them out loud.