12
Milo
My mother hangs up on me, but I keep the phone against my ear anyway, standing in the tunnel with my back to the cinder block.
Ten thousand dollars. That’s the part that keeps looping. Ten thousand dollars, which my mother said twice, the second time slower, to make sure the number landed.
I open my banking app because I can’t resist checking a wound.
Eleven hundred and six dollars, which is one paycheck minus my mother’s water heater, and four hundred of it is technically already gone to my phone bill and the loan payment that hits Friday.
So: seven hundred, generously. I’ve got the knife roll, worth maybe six hundred if I found a line cook with cash, and a pair of sneakers with the stitching coming apart, and nothing else that converts.
Fine. Okay. Trains. There’s the subway, or the Long Island Rail Road if I want to spend money I don’t have, to save forty minutes, and then I stand in front of a clerk and say the phrase what are my options in the tone of a man who has options.
“Milo.”
Spencer’s standing in the mouth of the tunnel with sweat still darkening the collar of his shirt. I didn’t hear him coming, which should be impossible for a man that size.
I put the smile on, but I feel it go up crooked.
“Hey. Sorry, that took longer than a second. So the one thirty is going to be tight for you, but if I move the—”
“What happened?”
I have an answer ready, a combination of nothing and family stuff, and that I’ll handle it.
What comes out is everything.
“My brother Dean got arrested last night.” My voice snags on the word brother, which I did not authorize.
“He got in a fight outside a bar over money he owed some guy, and the guy’s got a broken nose, and they picked Dean up, and he’s been in front of a judge this morning, and they set bail at ten thousand dollars.
” I laugh, then keep going. “Ten grand. For a bar fight. Like he robbed a bank. My mom’s there by herself, and I’ve got seven hundred dollars, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to, I mean, I’ll figure it out, obviously, I always figure it out, it just might take a couple of—”
“Wait for me by the car.”
That’s all he says.
“Spencer—”
“By the car. Fifteen minutes.” And he’s gone, down the tunnel toward the locker room.
I stand there for a second, then go get my folding chair and the crate, but they’re not where I left them, and it takes me an embarrassing amount of time to understand that he already carried them to his car.
Out in the lot I sit on the crate next to the car and text my mother that I’m coming, and she sends back a heart and then, forty seconds later, three more hearts, which is how she panics.
Spencer comes out in twelve minutes, hair wet, gray t-shirt, cap on. He fishes the keys out and unlocks the doors. “We’re going to Queens.”
“But you have a one-thirty.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You have a one-thirty with the co-packer and a three with the consultant, and you can’t—”
“I canceled them.”
“You… canceled?” I stand up off the crate. “When?”
“In the locker room.” He opens the passenger door for me. “Get in.”
“Okay, but hang on. Hang on.” I don’t get in.
“This is really nice of you, it is, but you don’t have to drive me.
I can take the train. It’s like an hour, maybe an hour ten, and you’ve got a whole company that needs you to say yes to things today, and my brother is going to be in exactly the same amount of trouble whether or not there’s an NFL safety in the room, so the smart move here is—”
“I’m not putting you on a train for this.”
He says it flatly, the way he says third door, and then he waits.
I get in the car and make it about thirty minutes into the drive before I have to let some air out.
“He’s not a bad guy,” I say to the windshield.
“I want that on the record before you build a whole opinion. He taught me to ride a bike and he’s the reason I know how to make an omelet, actually, because our mom worked doubles and Dean was eleven and decided that was his job.
He’s just got a thing with money. It doesn’t stay in his hands.
It goes through them like they’re a colander. ”
“How often does this happen?”
I open my mouth to say not often.
“He’s short about every three weeks,” I say instead. “Not arrested. Arrested is new, a real escalation, and I’ll be honest, I did not see it coming. When he’s short he texts me, and if I take too long he calls Mom, and then Mom calls me sounding like she’s been crying, and then I send it anyway.”
“How much have you sent him this year?”
Here’s the thing I should do, which is lie.
“Two hundred in January,” I say, because apparently my mouth has decided today is the day.
“Three fifty in February, but that was actually two separate ones. Six hundred in March, that was a car thing, allegedly. April I skipped because I didn’t have it.
May, five hundred. And a hundred fifty the morning I moved into your house, which he asked for as two hundred, and I want credit for the negotiation.
” I do the addition twice, hoping for a different answer. “So. Eighteen hundred.”
Eighteen hundred dollars. My rent was fourteen fifty.
“Great instincts, right?” I say. “Really strong portfolio. I should be advising people.”
He doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t say anything either. Doesn’t tell me I’m an idiot or we’ve all been there. He just drives. I’d rather be called an idiot.
Then, on the Expressway, he says, “What happens if you say no?”
I look over at him, but his eyes stay on the road.
“What?”
“If you don’t send it. What happens?”
I go looking for the answer and there isn’t one. I’ve got twenty-two years of data on what happens when I say yes and a blank file on the alternative.
“Traffic’s pretty good,” I say.
He lets that stand for about a mile.
“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
***
The courthouse smells like floor wax and old coffee.
The light comes down out of the ceiling, fluorescent green, and everybody under it looks like they’ve been sick recently.
The floor’s scuffed pale in two tracks where feet have gone the same way for fifty years.
There’s a line along the wall of people who’ve been here since morning.
A woman with a toddler asleep across her lap. A guy in a suit that fit him once.
My mother finds me before I find her, comes at me with her purse in both hands, and hugs me so hard I lose air, and says my name into my shoulder about six times.
When she finally lets me go, I get an arm back.
“Ma, this is Spencer. Spencer, this is my mom, Mrs. Shaw.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Shaw.”
She gets his hand in both of hers and holds on past where a handshake ends. Her chin goes up and keeps going.
“Oh,” she says. “Hello. And how do you know Milo?”
Spencer clocks my hesitation. “I’m his friend. I gave him a ride.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Ma.”
“I’m saying hello.” She pats the back of his hand twice before she lets go. “Thank you for bringing him. He never lets anybody bring him anywhere.”
“He didn’t have much say in it,” Spencer says.
She laughs, and then she looks at me around his arm with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead. I study the floor.
She takes friend at face value. I told her weeks ago I was working for a football player, but she has never watched a football game, so the man standing in front of her never turns into that man.
Then she’s got my arm and she’s steering us toward the elevators, telling us both what the officer downstairs told her.
Spencer keeps his cap on. He doesn’t take it off in the elevator and he doesn’t take it off in the hall.
A court officer looks at him, looks away, and then does the whole thing again slower, the moment the file loads.
Behind us a phone comes up over a shoulder, held at that angle people think is subtle.
Spencer turns a quarter turn so his back is to the room and reads the signage on the wall like it’s interesting, and he doesn’t say a word about it.
If I’d been alone I’d have stood in the wrong line twice by now, and he asks a woman behind glass where cash bail gets posted and what they need in hand, and we’re on the third floor at a window with a different sign on it.
“It matters that we got here today,” he says while we wait. “Once they transfer him, it’s a bus ride out to the island and then it’s tomorrow, maybe the day after, and your mother’s making two trips instead of none.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve had teammates go through it.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t push, because the line moves.
At the window I pull my phone out and start doing the thing I’ve been doing in the back of my head since the tunnel, which is opening every account I have in sequence, looking, and opening the next one, as if money is going to have crawled in overnight.
Checking. Savings, which is a joke, forty-one dollars.
The card with the limit I already ate through.
I’m still scrolling when I see the black rectangle come past my elbow and land on the counter.
“Absolutely not.” I put my hand on it. “No. Spencer. This is my family. This is not a work expense, you can’t expense my brother, that’s not a line item.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“So then—”
“Move your hand, Milo.”
“You don’t get it, this is ten thousand dollars, this is a car, this is somebody’s whole—”
“I know what it is.” He looks at me then, and there’s nothing kind in his face, which is how I know he isn’t doing pity. “Move your hand.”
I move it.
The woman behind the glass takes the card without any ceremony at all, which strikes me as insane, that a thing this large gets processed the same way as a parking ticket.