Chapter 3 A Home That Works #2
I almost asked him then. The thing sat right there between the eggs and the water glass.
The question I’d been not-asking since I surfaced under that borrowed blanket.
Did I say anything last night. I’d been drunk enough to be afraid of my own mouth.
But asking would put the name back in the room, the one I’d choked on in the cab, and I wasn’t going to be the one to do that twice.
So I ate my eggs and let it lie. If he noticed me deciding not to ask, he had the grace to lay another plank over it and keep walking.
His phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it, thumbed it dark without reading.
And that was when the other thing showed, just for a second, before he tidied it away.
His eyes came back to me a half-beat warmer than the conversation called for.
The flush starting up the side of his neck, the one he hated, a man whose own face kept telling on him.
I’d known about it for weeks. The vanilla coffee on my desk I hadn’t asked for.
The laugh that came a notch too quick. It had been faintly funny at the station, where everything was armor and his lack of it stood out.
It was not funny here. In his home. Where he’d fed me and covered my tab and let me snore on his couch and asked nothing back.
He saw me see it. The flush went deeper. He looked down at his plate.
I could have done a number of things. The old reflex offered three, smooth ones, ways to make it a joke and let us both off. I didn’t take any of them. He deserved better than my reflexes.
“Hey,” I said. Gentle as I had it in me to be this hungover. “Thank you. For last night. For all of it. I mean that, Reid.”
It wasn’t the conversation. The real one would have to happen on a day when I wasn’t held together with painkillers and somebody else’s blanket.
It would have to be honest, and kind, and I owed him that on a clear morning, not this one.
But it was the truth, set down plain, no exit cut into it.
He took it for what it was. The flush eased. Something in his shoulders came down.
“Anytime,” he said. Then, because he was twenty-three: “I mean. Not, like. Anytime, anytime. You can’t move in. The couch is spoken for.”
“By whom?”
“By me, some nights. It’s closer to the TV.”
That got a real laugh out of me. The first in what felt like a week. It hurt my head. I didn’t care.
We sat with it a minute, the easy quiet of two men who’ve eaten together.
He stacked the plates but didn’t get up to wash them, which I understood was a courtesy too, a way of not turning his back on me, of staying in the room.
He turned his coffee mug a slow quarter-turn on the table, around and around, the way a man does with his hands when he’s deciding whether to say a thing.
He didn’t say it. Whatever it was. He let it go around with the mug and stay unsaid, and I was grateful, because I had a feeling I knew the shape of it and I wasn’t equipped this morning to hear a kid tell me what was plain on his face.
I finished the plate. Drank the second glass of water he’d refilled without my asking. The painkillers had taken the worst edge off, enough that I could see the day standing in front of me. And the day had a shape I’d been avoiding the whole time I pretended to study his bookshelf.
I had to go back.
Not here. Here was kind and warm and not mine, and a man can’t live on another man’s good couch hiding from a third man’s silence.
There was a desk waiting for me. An inbox.
An institution deciding in rooms I wasn’t in whether I got to keep being the only thing I knew how to be.
I could keep letting it get decided without me, the way I’d let everything get decided lately, or I could go and put myself back in front of it.
I decided on the second one. It was the first thing I’d actually chosen in longer than I wanted to count, and it took something out of me.
And there was a door with my keys on the counter behind it, set down by a hand whose warmth I could still feel if I let myself.
Which I did not. Which I would not, this morning of all mornings.
I stood. The room held steady. Progress.
“I should let you have your day.”
“You don’t have to bolt.” He stood too, fast, like he might slow me down if I went for the door. “You can sit. There’s more coffee. There’s a whole second egg in the future if you want it.”
“I’ve imposed enough on the egg.” I found my jacket on the back of the chair where he’d hung it and got into it the right way this time.
Both arms on the first try. I counted it a victory and a sign.
“If I stay any longer you’ll find out I’m not actually that interesting, and then where will we be. ”
He walked me the four steps to the door, because it was that kind of apartment and he was that kind of host. I sat on the little bench in his entryway, because the floor and I weren’t on speaking terms yet, and worked my shoes on.
The left one took two tries. The bench undid me a little.
Who puts a bench by their door, on a constable’s pay, except a man who’s decided his quiet life is worth the small kindnesses.
I got the second shoe on and sat a moment longer than the shoe required. Elbows on my knees. Looking at the clean floor of a home that worked.
That was the thing about the place. It worked.
A man lived here, alone, and it held him, and I’d never once managed that in any of the rooms with my name on them.
The one that had started to feel like anything was the apartment with my keys on the counter, and only because of who slept on the other side of the wall.
Which was the exact reason I couldn’t walk into it this morning.
Out that door was the street. The streetcar that came in threes.
The river to cross back over. The walk after it.
And at the end of the walk, the door I’d walked out of and the man I’d walked out on, who’d be at work by now, who I’d have to face tonight in a kitchen the size of a confession.
I’d run out of that apartment less than a day ago like the place was on fire.
Now the whole morning had narrowed to the animal fact that I had to walk back into it.
Sleep down the wall from him. Do it again the night after.
Because that was the deal I’d signed and the law of the small life I had left.
And under all of it, the thing I wouldn’t look at straight.
That I didn’t dread going back the way you dread a place.
I dreaded it the way you dread a person.
Dreaded the door because of who’d be behind it tonight, and the dread had a thread of something else braided through it that I refused, this hungover, in this kind man’s borrowed entryway, to name.
I’d spent the night running from a feeling and woken up in a stranger’s home and the feeling had simply waited for me, patient, the way it had been waiting since a hand settled at the back of my neck and I forgot, for one second, every rule I’d ever made about myself.
Reid was still standing over me. Waiting. Not crowding. Just there.
“You good?” he said. No crush in it now. Just a young man watching an older one find the will to stand up.
“Define good,” I said, and stood, and reached for the door.