Chapter 12 Three Things #2
“I’m using everything I’ve got.” He didn’t blink.
“He’s dying. That part’s just true, no angle on it.
What you do with it is yours. But you don’t get to not know.
I won’t hand you that. You’d call the not-knowing freedom and it would eat you alive, and I’d be the one who could have said something and chose the quiet.
I did that once already in my life. I’m not doing it again on you. ”
I had to sit down.
I pulled the chair out and sat. My legs didn’t want to hold it.
My father. In a hospital bed somewhere in this city. The suit on a hanger and just the man underneath. Bad heart.
And the call had come to David. Because the line to me had been dead so long that even this got handed off.
“You don’t get to do this,” I said. It came out small and I hated it. “Come into my kitchen and make me scared for him.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.” No apology in it at all. “Once he’s in the ground it’s just regret, and regret sits there. Fear moves a man. That’s why I came.”
“And if I don’t move.”
“Then you stand at the grave and do the math.” He said it without heat, which was the worst way he could have said it.
“Every year you had. Every one you spent being right instead of being there. I’ve done that math on my own father.
It doesn’t come out clean for anybody. I’m offering you a smaller number. Take it or don’t.”
I put my hand over my mouth and held it there.
David stood. He did it without dragging it out.
“Come to Sunday dinner,” he said. “You’ll say no.
That’s fine. Caroline’s, your aunt, not the firm, not your father.
He won’t be there if you don’t want him there, I’ll see to it.
” He buttoned the coat he’d never taken off.
“She still makes the risotto. The one you used to beg for and then pretend to be too cool for at fourteen.” A breath.
“No conditions. It’s been on the table five years. It’s still there.”
He came around the table. He put his hand on my shoulder.
Warm. Heavy. Steady.
My father has never once in my life put a hand on my shoulder.
“Take care of yourself, Ry,” David said, low, just to me. “You look better than I’ve seen you in years. You could be even better still.”
I didn’t trust my voice.
He went to the door. Stopped with his hand on it, not turning.
“If you ever need anything,” he said. “Me. Not the firm. Not your father. You’ve got the number.”
The door clicked shut.
I sat there.
The radiator ticked. A television murmured in an apartment nearby. Rain had started on the window over the sink, light, just beginning.
Two procedures. Cardiac. The kind they don’t announce.
I got up. I crossed to the counter. I put both hands on the edge and looked at the dark glass.
I didn’t want to feel anything.
The key in the lock.
Luke came in with a paper bag in each hand. The rain had got the shoulders of his coat. He stopped just inside the door and looked at me, and read the whole room in one pass.
He didn’t ask. He set the bags down.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“I know.” He didn’t come closer and he didn’t move off.
“I came up the back stairs. I heard most of it through the door before I worked out it wasn’t a phone call.
” A beat. “I stood on the landing. Didn’t want to walk into the middle of it.
I heard the procedures part. Heard him tell you to take care of yourself. ”
“You stood on the landing.”
“With two bags of dumplings. Trying to decide if you needed me in or out.” He set his keys down. “Still deciding. Tell me which.”
I opened my mouth and nothing came.
He came in. He didn’t crowd me. He pulled out the far chair, put his forearms on the table, and waited.
I sat down across from him. And I tried to find where to start, and there wasn’t a start, so I just went.
“I’ve never told you my real name,” I said. “Not the one that matters. My father is Robert Branford.” I made myself look at him. “Branford Industries. The name’s on three towers downtown. You’ve walked past all of them.”
He went still. Not surprised. He took it in and kept his face even, because he knew the worst thing he could do right then was make a face.
“Branford,” he said. Quiet. Giving it back so I’d know he caught it.
“Carlson was my grandmother’s name, from my mother’s side.” I turned my hand over on the table. “The only one in that whole house who ever said my name like it was a name. Not a job that needed filling.”
“I didn’t know.”
“At nineteen, I told him it was so I could make my own way. He’s called it a phase for twelve years. He’s still waiting for me to come back a Branford and take my rightful place.”
And then it started coming out of me, and I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t try.
“You don’t grow up in a house like that,” I said.
“You get groomed in it. There’s a difference.
Every room’s a stage. Every dinner’s a test. I learned to read a table before I could ride a bike.
Who was angry. Who was lying. Who I could go near.
Because reading it was the only way to stay a step ahead. ”
“Ahead of what.”
“Of being wrong.” My voice did something. I let it. “There was a right way to be and I was never it. Not once. Not one day.”
He didn’t move. His hands stayed where they were.
“He never hit me,” I said. “I want to be clear. Nobody hit me. There’d be a name for it if they had.
There’s no name for what he did.” I pressed my thumb hard into the table.
“He just looked at me like I was a draft of something. Like the real version was in there and one day all the wrong parts would come off and there I’d finally be.
Patient about it. So patient. He never raised his voice. He didn’t have to.”
“Ryan.”
He didn’t say it yet. I didn’t hear it yet. I kept going.
“You know what that does to a kid.” My throat was closing. I talked through it. “To be picked apart and a disappointment every step you take, every word you say. You spend your whole life trying to figure out which parts to take off. And you can’t. Because it’s all of you. It’s just all of you.”
My eyes were stinging now. I blinked and it got worse.
“And I built this.” I made a small motion at my own face.
“The smile. The charm. Walking into a room and finding the temperature and turning it. Nobody taught me that. I made it. In his house. Because it was the only thing that was mine and they couldn’t take it off me.
” A breath that shook on the way in. “And it’s the thing he hates most. He looks at it and sees a weak boy who needs to be liked.
He doesn’t know I built it against him. To get out of there alive. ”
“You got out,” Luke said. Low.
“I got out at twenty-three.” It cracked clean in half and I let it. “I walked into a squad room. People who had no idea who I was. And nobody in that room wanted me to be anything except a cop who did the work. And I could do the work. God, I was good at the work.”
“You’re good at the work.”
“It was the first room in my life I wasn’t performing in.” The tears came over and went down my face and I let them. “It was mine. I found it myself. Nobody handed it to me. It’s the only thing I have ever loved that I picked. And they took it.”
“Who took it.”
“That’s the thing.” I was crying now and I didn’t stop talking, the words coming out wet and broken between breaths.
“I’ll never know. The job, or his friends, over white tablecloths.
His reach goes everywhere. Into every room I’ve ever called mine.
And I can’t prove a hand and I can’t prove there wasn’t one, and that’s what it is to be his son, there’s no bottom to it, it just goes down and down. ”
I had to stop. I was breathing in pieces.
“He put his hand on my shoulder,” I said, and that was the thing that took the floor out from under me.
“David. On his way out. My father’s never done it.
Not once. And David has, and tonight he sat in that chair and took every soft thing he ever gave me and used it as a handle.
All of it, tonight, turned into a way to move me.
” My voice came apart on it. “And the worst part is I still can’t tell you if he meant it.
I don’t think he can either. The one person in that family who ever loved me, and I can’t find the line where the love stopped and the job started. There isn’t one. There was never one.”
I put both hands over my face and I broke.
It wasn’t quiet. I’d cried quiet my whole life. This wasn’t that. It came up out of somewhere thirty-one years deep and it shook me apart, ugly, my breath going in pieces, my shoulders going, all of it.
The chair across from me scraped.
I heard him come around the table. Felt him there. His hands closed on my shoulders and he pulled me up out of the chair, not rough, just sure, and he took me into his arms.
Face to face. He turned me into him and got both arms around me and held on. My face went into his shoulder. The cold of outside was still on his coat. I got two fists in the back of it and I held on and I sobbed into him like something coming apart in his hands.
He didn’t shush me. He didn’t tell me it was okay. It wasn’t, and he wasn’t a liar. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen and took all of it. One hand flat between my shoulders. One at the back of my head. His jaw against my temple. Still.
I cried until it stopped on its own. Until there wasn’t any more.
He felt it go. Of course he did. He felt everything in a room. When the worst of it passed he eased, just a little, the length of him going soft against me. No clock on it. No hurry.
“I’ve got you,” he said. Into my hair. Just that.
Then, quieter, the thing that went through me like current:
“Ryan.”
Not Carlson. Not once had he called me anything but Carlson. He said my name. The plain one underneath. Low and even and sure, no weight on it except all of it, and it landed in the middle of my chest like a hand laid flat.
I held on tighter. I couldn’t have said a word if my life hung on it.
He held on.
When I came back to myself we were still standing in the middle of the kitchen. The dumplings were stone cold in the bags and neither of us cared.
I straightened. I dragged the heels of my hands down my face, and it came away wet, and I left it be.
“Sorry,” I said. The reflex.
“Don’t.” Flat. Final. “Not for that. Not to me.”
I looked at him. His eyes were wet too. He didn’t hide it and he didn’t make anything of it.
I looked at him in the small light. My face was a wreck and my hands weren’t steady and I’d just cried in front of him until there was nothing left, and I wasn’t afraid.
That was the new thing. After all of it.
I wasn’t afraid.
Two floors down a door banged and somebody told the rain off like it could hear them, and the building laughed, and the kettle two doors over started its slow climb to a boil.
I allowed my mind to calm down in the warm kitchen and let him stand close.