Chapter 4 #2
"That's what I want to build." Albert's voice cracked right down the middle of the sentence and he laughed to cover it, badly.
"Nobody builds that. It doesn't pencil — that's the actual phrase they use, it doesn't pencil, meaning the math doesn't work, meaning you can't make enough money if you keep the bakery, so you draw the fern instead and tell yourself you'll do the good version later.
When you're a principal. When you've got leverage.
When—" He stopped. He was doing the thing. "Anyway. That's the sleep stuff."
Dave didn't tell him it was good. He said, "Then why do the other thing?"
And it was such a Dave question — flat, unhurried, going straight through the twelve stacked layers of reasons to the one load-bearing one underneath — that Albert answered it before he'd decided to.
"Because my dad spent twelve years in Jeddah so I could be somebody, and you can't hand your family a corner in the Excelsior that doesn't pencil and call it worth the twelve years.
You hand them a title. A tower with your name on it.
Something that photographs. My whole life is a receipt I'm trying to make big enough to cover what they paid.
" He blew out a breath. "God. Sorry. You made rye for your dead father and I turned it into a TED talk about mine. Ignore the last thirty seconds."
"I'm not going to ignore it," Dave said. "It's the only part you actually meant."
"It's better than the fern," Albert said, quiet now, giving up on the joke.
"Everything's better than the fern, Dave, ferns are—" And then Dave turned one more page, one page past the corners, and went still, and Albert's stomach dropped straight through the soft gray tile, because he knew what was back there.
Hands. Pages of them. Dave's hands, over and over, in every light — cupped around a boule, flat on the bench, the burn scar at the base of the thumb, the wide flat backs of them, a study of the tendons when he pulled a tray, one whole page that was just the way his fingers settled when he crossed his arms and leaned on the bench exactly like he was doing right now.
Neither of them said anything.
Dave looked at the pages of his own hands drawn by a man who couldn't sleep, and Albert looked at Dave looking, and the shop ticked and settled around them, the proofer off now, the ovens cooling, the fog pressing the last of the light out of the windows, and the distance between the back stool and the bench was suddenly the only measurement in the world Albert couldn't do in his head.
Albert had spent his professional life measuring distances — sight lines, setbacks, the exact width a corridor had to be before a body stopped feeling watched walking down it.
He knew to the inch how far apart two people could stand and still call it nothing.
This was not that far apart. This had stopped being nothing several pages ago.
"I should've asked before I—" Albert started.
"Come here," Dave said. Quiet. Not a question. The man who never reached, reaching, in the only way he knew, which was to hold still and open a door and mean it.
And Albert — who had spent his whole life crossing rooms toward what other people wanted, who had never once in twenty-nine years walked toward a thing that was purely, selfishly, unshareably his — took his hands out of his pockets and crossed the small distance, and Dave uncrossed his arms, and there was flour on the bench and rye in the air and about six inches of warm shop left between them, and Albert tipped his face up, and—
The bolt rattled.
"I forgot my damn keys," Mabel announced, letting herself in with the spare, already halfway across the floor before she looked up, and then stopping dead, taking in the two of them and the six inches and the open sketchbook, over the top of her glasses, with the expression of a woman who had won a bet with herself and was too dignified to collect.
"Well," she said. "Don't mind me. I was never here.
" She plucked her keys off the hook by the register, held them up as proof, and left again, and the bolt clacked behind her, and through the window they both watched her walk away up Judah not bothering to hide that she was smiling.
Albert laughed first. Then Dave — actually laughed, a short rough surprised sound, the first full one Albert had ever gotten out of him, and it did more to Albert's knees than the almost-kiss had.
"Timing," Dave said.
"Legendary. She should coach it."
They were still standing close. The moment had cracked but it hadn't left; it hung there, changed, both of them grinning like idiots, and Albert thought, with a clarity that frightened him, I could do this.
I could actually have this, and then his phone went off in his pocket, loud in the quiet, and he pulled it out on reflex the way he pulled everything out on reflex, and it was Corinne, and it was a voicemail already, because Corinne didn't wait for you to pick up, and the little transcription unspooled under it in gray text:
Ocampo — Sutro loved the direction, they want you fronting the community session, you're the neighborhood kid, you're the whole pitch. This lands, the project architect title is permanent and we're talking about your name on the door inside two years. Don't screw the room. Call me tonight.
Albert read it twice. The neighborhood kid.
The whole pitch. They wanted his face on this precisely because he had a face this block trusted — brown and local and grinning, a Daly City kid made good — exactly the person you'd send into a church basement to assure a room full of people that the thing being done to them was, actually, a partnership.
He was the human fig leaf. He was the reason the fern would photograph as consultation.
"Everything okay?" Dave was watching his face. Dave watched everything.
"Yeah." Albert put the phone away. His mouth had gone dry.
Six inches away stood the man whose corner was parcel one on the assemblage Corinne wanted him to go stand in a room and sell, the neighborhood kid, the whole pitch, the friendly focus-grouped face they'd point at the people whose blocks were being erased so everyone could feel consulted.
"Yeah, it's just work. I have to—" He looked at the sketchbook, the corners, the hands, the whole open unguarded thing of it lying there on the bench. "I have to make a call."
"Go make your call." Dave stepped back, and the six inches became a foot, became the length of a shop, easy, no wattage, no ask, that terrible generous letting-go he did.
"The corners are good, Albert. Build the corners.
Don't build the fern." He nodded, once, at the shop around them — the soft gray tile, the cooling ovens, the crock on the shelf, the whole small stubborn made thing of it.
"Somebody put this corner here a hundred years ago and had the sense not to knock down what was already standing.
That's the only reason it's worth anything now.
You can't draw that. You can only not-erase it. "
Albert's stomach folded in half.
He gathered the sketchbook and the tube and the rye heel and did not trust himself to answer that, because the honest answer was that he had already signed on to build the fern, and the fern was going where Dave was standing, and he was falling — he could name it now, standing here, he was well past falling — for the one person on earth his beautiful career-making project was going to pour concrete over.
There was no version of the next six months where he got to keep both of these.
He'd built his whole life on being the guy who made everyone's math work, and here, finally, was a sum that wouldn't: Dave on one side, and on the other every year his father spent in the desert, every double his mother pulled, the title, the door, the receipt at last big enough — and the price of cashing it was this shop, this man, this corner he'd loved enough to draw before anyone paid him to erase it.
"Night," he managed, and went out into the fog, and stood on the sidewalk where Mabel had stood, and did not call Corinne, and did not walk to the train, just stood there a minute in the cold wet dark, wanting two things that could not both exist in the same city, holding a piece of somebody's father's bread.