26. Beau
Beau
My mother has been saying goodbye to Sloane for eleven minutes.
I know it’s eleven because I clocked the stove the first time she said it, and I clocked it again just now, and somewhere in between she’s hugged Sloane twice, fed her a cinnamon roll “for the drive,” and pressed a Tupperware into her hands that Sloane keeps trying, politely, to give back.
“Mom.” I’m in the kitchen doorway with both our bags already on my shoulder. “It’s two hours.”
“Then she’ll want the rolls.” My mother doesn’t look at me. She’s got both of Sloane’s hands inside both of hers now, the way she holds things she’s decided are hers.
Sloane catches my eye over the top of my mother’s head. She’s doing the polite face. The one that means get me out of here and don’t you dare at the exact same time.
I’m not doing anything about it. I lean on the doorframe and watch my mother fall for my girlfriend, and I let it run, because it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a while and I’m in no rush for it to stop.
Last night she said it back. I’m not going to think about that in my mother’s kitchen, because if I think about it I’ll do the face the twins make fun of, the one I don’t know I’m doing.
But it’s sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed warm.
I love you too, to the dark, in my old bed, in a voice I’d never heard her use.
I’ve been carrying it around all morning like it might spill.
“You’ll come for the spring weekend,” Mom says. Not a question. “Britta’s recital. We make a whole thing of it.”
“I’d like that,” Sloane says.
“She’d like that,” my mother repeats to me, like I’d argued.
My dad comes in from the garage wiping his hands on a rag. He’s been “looking at my tires,” which is what he does when he’s got a feeling and nowhere to put it. He decided about Sloane the first night. My father reads people the way I read the ice. He doesn’t narrate it. He doesn’t have to.
“Tires are good,” he says. “You’re due an oil change in maybe five hundred miles. Don’t run it to Haven and back twice pretending you forgot.”
“I won’t.”
“You will.” Almost a smile. He puts his hand out to Sloane, and she takes it, and he holds the shake a second past where a shake ends. “Drive safe, kid. Door’s open.” That’s the speech. From my father, that’s a whole sonnet, and I watch Sloane clock the size of it.
“Thank you,” she says. Two words. She means them. He hears it.
“Erik.” My mother’s gone misty. “Tell her about the lake place.”
“She doesn’t need the lake place yet, Anni. Let the girl get out the door.” But he turns to Sloane anyway. “Summers we go up to a lake in the Berkshires. Nothing fancy. There’s a dock, a bad canoe, a grill I won’t let anyone else touch.” A pause. “You’d be welcome. Whenever. That’s all.”
I watch something happen to Sloane that I don’t have a name for yet.
She goes still. Not cold — still, the way a deer goes still, the way you go quiet when the thing in front of you isn’t a threat but your body hasn’t been told that.
It lasts half a second. Then she’s back, easy, smiling, saying something gracious about canoes.
I file it. I don’t get it. But I file it.
Then the stairs come alive and the twins arrive at speed.
“You’re not allowed to leave.” Liv has Sloane by the sleeve. “We decided. Britta, tell her.”
“We decided,” Britta confirms. “Also, I made you a playlist. It’s on your phone now. Don’t ask how.”
“How?” Sloane asks, somewhat amused by my sister’s antics.
“Don’t ask.” Britta beams. “It’s a two-hour drive. Tracks one through nine are for the highway, ten through the end are for when Beau gets quiet, which he will, because he always does.”
“I don’t get quiet.”
“He gets so quiet,” Liv tells Sloane, confidentially, like I’m not standing right there with two bags on my shoulder. “Mom calls it the Captain Thing. You’ll see it. It’s like a fog rolls in.”
“I’ve seen it,” Sloane says, and she doesn’t look at me when she says it, and something in my chest does a small dumb thing it has no business doing in front of my whole family.
“Okay.” Liv claps her hands. “We follow each other now. On everything. And you have to actually post, not just lurk, because Beau lurks, it’s tragic, he liked a photo from 2019 last week like an uncle.”
“I will actually post,” Sloane lies, smooth as anything, and Britta points at her like she’s caught a teammate cheating.
“She’s lying. I respect it. Welcome to the family.”
Welcome to the family. Sloane laughs — the real one, short and surprised out of her — and I get to watch it land on all of them, my mother and my father and the twins, the whole loud kitchen leaning toward her like she’s the warm part of the room.
Which she is. They just figured out what I already knew.
“Text me when you arrive,” my mother says, catching Sloane’s wrist one more time. “So I know you made it. Both of you. You especially.”
“I—” Sloane starts, and stops. Nobody’s asked her to text when she’s home in a long time, maybe ever, and I watch her not know where to put it. “Okay. Yes. I will.”
“She will,” I say, to give her somewhere to look that isn’t my mother’s face.
Getting her out the door takes actual effort.
My mother has both of Sloane’s hands again, and Sloane’s got the Tupperware and the rolls and a tote bag Liv has decided she can’t live without, and I get an arm around her shoulders and sort of peel her out of the cluster.
Like backing a guy off the puck. Gentle. Firm. No whistle.
“Okay. Okay. We’re going.”
“Beau.” My mother holds on.
“Love you. We’re going.”
She lets go of one hand. Keeps the other. Looks at Sloane like she’s about to say something big, and then doesn’t, because my mother knows when something’s too big for a doorway.
“You’re a good one,” is all she says.
Something moves across Sloane’s face. I don’t get to read it.
I’m already steering her toward the truck, and anyway, I’ve learned not to ask about the things that cross Sloane’s face in front of other people.
She doesn’t like being asked in front of people.
She doesn’t much like being asked, period.
I’m getting better at the difference between what she’ll tell me and what I have to wait for.
In the rearview, all four of them are on the front step, waving, my mother with both arms, Liv doing something with her phone, my father with one hand up like he’s stopping traffic. The house gets small behind us. Sloane watches it go in the side mirror until the trees take it.
“They’re going to be impossible now,” I tell her. “You know that. My mom’s going to text you recipes. Unprompted.”
“Good,” Sloane says, to the mirror. “I’ll learn to cook.”
“You will not.”
“I will not,” she agrees, and settles back, and I point the truck at home.
We’re twenty minutes onto the Merritt before either of us says anything that counts, and it’s me who breaks first.
“That went well.”
“Your family is a lot.” Sloane’s watching the trees go by her window. “In the good way. I want to be clear it’s the good way.”
“They loved you.”
“They have generous standards.”
“They really don’t.” I check my mirror, change lanes. “My dad doesn’t like anybody. Took him a year to like my last girlfriend, which was in high school, and he never got past tolerate. He liked you in about four minutes. I timed it.”
She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, and I take the win.
I’m running the weekend back while I drive, and every frame of it’s good.
The dinner where my dad asked her about the Yale thing like it mattered, because it did.
My mother teaching her the trick with the lefse that nobody outside the family knows.
The twins deciding inside one afternoon that she was theirs.
And last night, the part I keep not letting myself sit in because I’ll get stupid about it.
I came up here braced for it to go sideways. I came up braced to manage it. To translate Sloane to my family and my family to Sloane, to run the room the way I run a room. I didn’t have to run anything. She walked in and the room ran toward her. I just got to watch.
I don’t put anything in the GPS. I know this drive in my hands.
Merritt to 91, 91 to the Pike, the Pike to the road that turns into Haven.
The signs come up green and go by fast, and I don’t fight the small print on them at seventy because I don’t have to; I know every exit by the shape of the ramp and the feel of the curve.
I’ve driven home from this house my whole life.
Some things you don’t read. You just know where they sit.
The sun’s behind us. The road ahead’s gone long and gold, and Sloane’s got her boots up on my dash, which she’d never do if she were performing for anybody. This is the version of her nobody else gets. The one with her guard somewhere in the back seat.
“Track six,” she says, when the song changes. “Britta’s got range. This is a breakup song.”
“We’re not breaking up.”
“I’m aware. I’m just saying your sister’s an optimist about my driving companion.” She turns the volume down a notch. “She’s not wrong about the fog, though. You do go quiet.”
“I think about stuff.”
“I know you do.” She says it like it’s a thing she likes about me, which still catches me sideways every time, because for a long time being the guy who thinks about stuff was the thing I worked hardest to hide. “You’re allowed.”
We’re past Hartford when she says it.
“Can I tell you something?” Her voice has gone flat and level, the way it goes right before she says a true thing. I’ve learned that one too.
“Yeah.” I keep my eyes on the road. “Course.”
“Don’t pull over.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
“You’re going to want to. Don’t.”
So I don’t. I put both hands on the wheel and I drive and I let her talk to the window.
“I’m from a town in Pennsylvania I don’t tell people the name of,” she says. “It’s not a secret. It’s just not a thing I do. A name’s a key. I don’t hand out keys.”
I nod, even though she isn’t looking. I do it for me.