12 #2
He handles the rest of it, and I stand there and watch.
He asks what the return date is and gets it written down.
He asks what happens to the money when Dean shows up, and how long that takes, and who it comes back to, and confirms it comes back to him, and I feel the top of my ears go hot.
He asks what happens if Dean doesn’t show, and when the clerk tells him, he repeats it back so my mother hears it in plain words, and he asks whether anything gets mailed and to which address, and takes a photo of the receipt before he folds it into his wallet.
Every one of those questions is a question I would not have known to ask. I’d have paid the money and walked out feeling accomplished and then panicked in three weeks and had no idea who to call.
Then we wait, because it turns out that paying ten thousand dollars purchases exactly no speed.
Two hours on a bench with a metal edge that finds the same spot on my back no matter how I sit.
Mom on my left, working through her whole repertoire, first the crying, then the plans, then a long stretch of telling Spencer about my sixth-grade science fair for reasons I will never understand.
Spencer on my right, forearms on his knees, answering emails with his thumbs.
I sit between them and feel nine years old. On a bench, with somebody else handling it. I haven’t been the smallest person in a room since I was a kid, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.
Spencer gets up once and comes back with a Sprite for my mother, and a water and a bag of pretzels I didn’t ask for, and puts them in my lap and sits back down without comment. I look at those pretzels for a long time.
Somewhere in the second hour, a guy in a windbreaker takes a picture of Spencer from across the hall.
Spencer’s knee is warm against mine and he doesn’t move it, and I think about how tomorrow there might be a photo online of him sitting in a criminal courthouse, and nobody who sees it will know it’s because of me, and everybody in his life will get to guess.
Dean comes out at ten past four with his shirt untucked and both hands out like he’s arriving at a party.
“There he is.” He gets me around the neck and squeezes and I get a faceful of holding-cell smell and sweat.
His knuckles are scraped raw across two fingers and one eyebrow’s split.
“There’s my guy. My lifesaver. You’re a lifesaver, you know that?
Ma, look at him, look at his shirt, who dressed you? ”
“Dean,” Mom says, and starts up again.
“I’m fine, I’m fine, it was nothing, it was a misunderstanding.” He’s already turning, scanning the hall, and then he stops.
I watch him spot Spencer, and his whole face reorganizes.
“No,” He points. “No. Get out. Spencer Rhodes?” He says the name at a volume that turns four heads in the hallway. “In here? Are you seeing this? Milo. Milo. Do you know who this is?”
“I’m aware, Dean.”
“I watched you take Callahan’s head off in November.” He’s got Spencer’s hand in both of his now, pumping it. “Fourth quarter, third and eight, you came off the edge and put him in the turf. I stood up on my couch—”
I look at the floor and I ask it, sincerely, to open.
Spencer gets his hand back. “Thanks. We should go.”
Dean puts an arm around my shoulders as we walk and turns toward Spencer.
I know what’s coming a full sentence before it arrives, because I’ve heard this overture at every holiday since I was fifteen.
“So listen. Listen. This is crazy timing, actually, because I’ve got a thing.
A real thing. There’s a guy I know does resale, sneakers, deadstock, and he’s got a line on inventory, and it’s a hundred percent turnaround inside of six weeks, but the window’s tight, and it’s honestly not even a big number to somebody in your—”
“No,” Spencer says.
Dean keeps going for another half second on momentum. “It’s like four, maybe five, and I’d have it back to you before—”
“No.” He hasn’t raised his voice at all.
What he’s done is move, a half step closer to me than he was, so that Dean’s arm around my shoulders now has company.
“You’ve got a court date on the ninth. Ten thousand dollars of mine is sitting with the city until you show up to it. That’s the only business we’ve got.”
“Sure. Sure, no, absolutely, I hear you.” Dean laughs. “Just, you know. Opportunity knocks.”
“Ninth of next month,” Spencer says. “Nine a.m.”
Then he turns his head and looks at me. “Do you want to stay with them, or do you want to go home?”
I don’t answer right away, because I’m too busy noticing that in twelve hours of this day he is the first person to ask me what I want.
“Home,” I say. “But can we give them a ride first?”
“Of course.”
We drop Mom first, and then Dean, who lives in a building with a buzzer panel and a stairwell that smells like cat litter, and he hugs me for a long time in the street and tells me he loves me.
Then it’s just me and Spencer in the car, and the sun’s low off the storefront glass, and I’m so tired my hands don’t feel like mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About all of it. My family’s a lot, I know that. I usually keep it in a box, and today the box just came apart, so. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing for other people.”
“It’s efficient. I do it in bulk.”
He changes lanes. “Your mother’s a lot like mine was.”
I turn my head. He’s watching the road, one hand loose at the top of the wheel.
“Was?”
“Yeah. She passed away from cancer when I was eleven.”
“Spencer, I’m so sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.
“Thanks. It was a long time ago.”
That’s all he gives me, and I don’t reach for the rest. I know what it means when somebody stops at just a few words.
At a light he says, “Everybody calls you when there’s a problem. Your mother calls you, your brother calls you. Who do you call?”
The question goes under my ribs.
“Uber, mostly,” I say. “Occasionally a dentist.”
He doesn’t take it but he also doesn’t let me have it, exactly, because he keeps looking at me for another two seconds after the light turns green. And then he drives and doesn’t ask again.
I make it maybe six miles before I fall asleep with my head against the window and come up out of it when the tires change sound, and the gate’s swinging shut behind us in the side mirror. There’s a weight across my chest that turns out to be his jacket, tucked up under my chin.
I sit in a parked car and don’t want to get out. One afternoon of somebody else taking care of things, and now that I know what it feels like, I have no idea how I go back to not knowing.
But look at it from his side. He watched me get fired and hired me, put me in a guest suite, bought me clothes, canceled an afternoon of meetings to go pay my family’s bail.
Those aren’t things you do for somebody you want.
They’re what you do for a problem you’ve decided to solve, and once it’s solved you’re done.
I told myself on day one I wasn’t going to be his rescue project, and then I handed him the paperwork myself. But I’m not handing him anything else. It’s not a good decision, but it’s the only one I’ve got.
I fold his jacket over my arm and get out of the car.