Chapter 6 #2
After, in the dark, with the fog at the window and the ocean going about its slow business two blocks off, Albert lay with his head on Dave's chest and Dave's hand moving slow through his hair, and neither of them said the enormous thing, and both of them, Albert was fairly sure, were thinking it.
"Your heart's still going," Albert murmured.
"Whose fault is that."
"Mine. I'll take that one." He pressed his mouth to Dave's sternum. "Proudly."
Dave's chest moved under him with something that was almost a laugh, and his arm tightened, and Albert lay there in the spare deliberate room that had one chair and now, apparently, room for two, and was happier than he could remember being, and did not let himself think, yet, about the thing sitting downstairs in the dark waiting to ruin it.
***
He woke to an empty warm place beside him and the smell of the shop coming up through the floor.
For a second Albert didn't know where he was and then he did, all at once, and the knowing was the best thing that had happened to him in years — Dave's flat, Dave's bed, the gray early light and the fog and, distantly below, the sound of a man who'd gotten up at four so quietly Albert never stirred, already down there feeding the starter and building the day.
Albert lay in the warmth a while just to have it.
Then he pulled on his clothes and Dave's spare sweatshirt off the hook because it was cold and because he wanted to, and went down the inside stairs into the back of the shop.
Dave was at the bench in the lamp light, sleeves shoved up, shaping, and he looked up when Albert came down, and something moved across his face that on anyone else would've been a grin and on Dave was a kind of settled brightness, and Albert's chest did the thing it did.
"There's coffee," Dave said. "I made it. Don't get used to it."
"I'm getting completely used to it. This is my life now.
I've decided." Albert got the coffee and hopped up to sit on the end of the bench where he wasn't in the way, and watched Dave's hands do the thing they'd tried to teach his, and felt, for one whole golden hour, like a person who got to keep something.
"You sleep okay?" Dave asked, turning a loaf.
"I slept like a person who's been trying to sleep for four days and finally let himself." Albert wrapped both hands around the mug. "You got up at four and I didn't even feel you go. That's a superpower. You move like a cat that pays its taxes."
"Practice." But Dave's mouth did the settled thing. "You looked like you needed it. Didn't have the heart to wake you."
And there it was again, the small enormous thing, offhand, unbearable: didn't have the heart.
Dave Nowak, arranging his four a.m. around not waking him.
Albert had spent his whole life being the one who arranged himself around everyone else, and he sat on the end of the bench in a borrowed sweatshirt and let himself, for one hour, be the one arranged around, and it felt like a country he'd been trying to get a visa to for years.
It was the best morning of Albert's adult life and it lasted until Mabel came in the front with the mail and the flyers.
"These were shoved under the door and taped to the pole and stuck in the slot," she said, dumping a slick stack on the counter, disgusted. "Whole block's papered with them. When'd they do that, the middle of the night? Like roaches."
Albert knew what they were before he could see them. He knew the paper stock. He'd signed off on the paper stock.
He slid down off the bench and crossed to the counter with his heart going wrong, and there it was, glossy and friendly and focus-grouped, a rendering of six stories of stacked glass with a cheerful ground-floor retail box and a fern in the window where Dave was standing right now shaping bread.
COMMUNITY INFORMATION SESSION, it said, warm and inviting.
Come learn about the exciting future of your neighborhood.
A date, ten days out. The Sutro Capital logo.
And down in the fine print, in the small gray line nobody was meant to read, the name of the design firm of record, and under it, because Corinne had put it there herself and been proud of it, a project contact.
A. Ocampo.
His own name, on the thing that was going to erase the shop, taped to the pole outside the shop, sitting on the counter eighteen inches from the man he'd spent the night telling I've got you.
The room tilted. Every good thing in it — the coffee, the sweatshirt, the settled brightness on Dave's face, the whole golden hour he'd just been handed — went suddenly provisional, borrowed against a debt Albert had known about the entire time and Dave didn't know about at all.
He'd said I've got you. He'd said it with his hands flat on the man's heart.
And the whole time his name had been sitting in a stack of paper in a print shop somewhere, drying, on the thing that would take the bench and the ovens and the one-chair room and pour six stories of glass over the exact place where Dave had learned how to be a person again.
"Bunch of vultures," Mabel said, and swept half the stack into the recycling, and had no idea. "You want these gone, Dave, or you want to keep one to be mad at?"
"Keep one," Dave said, not looking up from the bench, unbothered, because to Dave it was still just a room in ten days, still just theater, still the part where they let you feel involved.
He didn't know it had a face now. He didn't know the face was eating his coffee in his sweatshirt.
"I'll frame it next to the historic free bun. "
Albert stood at the counter in Dave's sweatshirt with his own name in his hand and understood, with a clarity that felt like the floor going out, that there was no more time.
That the thing he'd folded down and put away three times was going to come up whether he chose it or not, in ten days, in a church basement, in front of the whole neighborhood, with his name on the pole outside — unless he said it first, today, now, to the man's face, in this warm shop, and watched what it did to that settled brightness.
He could keep putting it down. That was the terrible, available thing — he could set his name back in the stack, laugh at Mabel's vultures line, drink his coffee, kiss Dave goodbye, and go to the office and be the friendly face, and maybe find some clever angle later, some redesign, some way to make it all come out fine so he'd never have to stand here and watch the light go out of Dave.
He was so good at later. Later was where he'd always put everything that might make someone stop needing him.
But Dave didn't need him. That was the whole miracle of the man. Dave just wanted him, here, for nothing — and you did not get to be wanted like that and lie to it. The one had to buy the other. Being chosen meant being honest enough to be un-chosen.
"Dave," Albert said. His voice came out wrong. "I need to tell you something. I need to — can you stop for a second. Can you look at me."
And Dave, hearing it finally, the real thing under the words, set down the dough and looked up.