27. Sloane #2
And that — that lands somewhere in Danny he wasn’t braced for, I watch it go in, because I don’t talk about anyone, and he knows that better than anybody alive. He covers it the way we both cover things, with motion, looking around for somewhere to sit.
We sit. Danny takes the armchair. I take the couch and Beau takes the cushion next to me, close, his knee against mine, and I’m grateful for the warmth of it in a way I’ll resent later.
“Okay,” I say. “Headline.”
“Dad got arrested Thursday night.”
And there it is. The past, walking clean through a door I bolted two years ago and changed my name to keep shut. I go still and I feel Beau notice it and decide to be a wall instead of a fuss, and I love him for it in a flat far-off way I can’t reach right now.
“For what?” I ask, terrified of the answer.
“You want the headline or the list?”
“The list. You do headlines, I do lists. We settled the division of labor around 2009.”
The corner of his mouth moves, the gallows thing we share, the only thing that ever passed for cheer in that house. “DUI. He put the truck through the Snyders’ fence out on Route 9. He’s fine, before you ask.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know. I’m narrating for the cheap seats.” A flick of his eyes toward Beau, who’s gone very still and very large at my side. “He’s fine. That’s the DUI. The DUI’s not why I got on a plane.”
“So tell me why.”
He takes a second he doesn’t want, inhaling deeply as if to brace himself for what comes next. I feel myself do the same. “They only picked him up because somebody called it in first. Woman named Renata.”
“Who’s Renata?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Danny. Who’s Renata?”
“His girlfriend.” He watches me take it, the way you watch someone take a hit to see if the knees hold. “About a year now. She lives there. In the house.”
“In the house.” I hear my own voice flatten. “Since when does Dad have a girlfriend living in that house that I’m finding out about from an arrest record?”
“Since I found out from the sheriff’s office, Sloane, because I’m somehow still next of kin on a form he filled out.” He drags a hand down his face. “I didn’t keep her from you. There was nothing to keep. He doesn’t send me updates either.”
“Why’d she call it in?” Level. Even. I already know. I knew the shape of it the second he said her name, because I know the architecture of that house and I know what gets built in it.
“Because he put her into a wall.” Flat. Gentle.
My brother, handing me the worst of it the way you’d hand someone something hot.
“Fractured cheekbone, broken arm. She pressed charges and she’s not dropping them.
That’s why it’s not the drunk tank and a fine.
It’s assault. He’s looking at real time. ”
“When’s the arraignment?” I ask, because logistics I can hold; logistics have edges I can get my hands around.
“Wednesday.”
“Of course it’s a Wednesday.”
“Of course it is,” he says, and neither of us has to say the rest of it.
The rest of it is that Wednesday is ours.
Wednesday is the call — the one good standing thing either of us ever got clean out of that house, the half hour a week that belonged to us and not to him — and the court has gone and set our father's arraignment down on top of it.
Which is exactly how the old house always ran.
The bad thing finds the good thing and pulls up a chair like it was always invited.
The movie murmurs to itself in the corner. In the kitchen, far off, in the warm life, Cash laughs at something Theo said.
A girlfriend. A year. A woman named Renata I’ve never heard of, learning the floor plan of him the hard way, the way I learned it, the way my mother learned it before she put on her good coat and didn’t come back.
He found someone new to do it to. It isn’t a town I escaped, it isn’t even a man, it’s a thing he is, and it just came due on a stranger’s face on a Thursday while I was two hundred miles off letting a boy stock my shampoo.
“Okay,” I say.
“That’s it? Okay?”
“What do you want me to do with it, Danny?” My voice drops and I can’t stop it.
I watch it not land on him, because he got just as quiet growing up in the same rooms, and Beau’s hand comes flat and warm against the small of my back, an anchor I don’t take.
“She pressed charges. Good for Renata. That’s more than I managed at that address in eighteen years.
What do you need, because you didn’t cross an ocean to read me a police report you could’ve read me on Wednesday. ”
He looks at his hands. “I fly out Tuesday. Boston to Pittsburgh, then I drive the last stretch. Somebody’s got to handle him.
The lawyer, the arraignment, the house — it’s mine, it’s always been mine, and I’m not handing you any of it to deal with.
” He looks up, and his eyes are very tired and very young all at once. “I’m asking you to come.”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have to see him. You wouldn’t have to go in the building. I’d sit you in a diner with a milkshake, I don’t care, I just —”
“No, Danny.”
“— don’t want to walk into that house by myself.” It comes out of him in a rush, the real thing, the thing under the thing. “I’ve done a lot of things in that house alone. I’d like to not do this one alone. That’s the whole ask.”
And that’s the knife, the one he doesn’t know he’s holding, because Danny is the one good thing I kept, the only person from back there I never taught myself to stop needing, the brother who started calling me every Wednesday the year after Mom left because somebody had to be a Wednesday for me and it was never going to be the adults.
And now he’s asking me for a Wednesday in person.
The worst one. And I have to look at his tired face and do the thing I do.
It’s Beau who moves first.
He shifts forward, barely, his hand still at my back, and he says it low and even, not a challenge, just a fact set on the table. “She said no, man.”
Danny’s eyes cut to him. Something goes between them, fast, two men taking each other’s measure across the person they’ve both got a hand out toward.
“I heard her,” Danny says. “I’m her brother. I get to ask once.”
“You asked.” Beau doesn’t move. “She answered.”
“Beau.” I put my hand on his knee. “It’s all right.
He’s allowed.” And then, to Danny, in the true register, the quiet flat one that’s the closest thing I’ve got to mercy: “You asked. The answer’s no.
I’m not going back. Not for him, not for the lawyer, not for the house, not for closure, not for whatever soft word you’ve got queued up next.
I built a person who can’t be found in that town.
I drive back in, I un-build her, and there’s no spare in the trunk. This is the only me I made that runs.”
Danny doesn’t argue. That’s the whole mercy of him, the part nobody who didn’t grow up in it would understand.
He doesn’t argue, because he watched what it cost me to leave, because he wired me money my first two semesters out of a private’s pay and swore it was a re-enlistment bonus. He just lets it be no.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, Sloanie. I told myself I’d ask the once. I asked.”
“You asked.”
He tips his head toward Beau. “He always this quick to step in front of you?”
“Faster, usually.” Something in me loosens a half-inch, because we’re on the other side of it now, the asking’s done. “You should see him in a real argument. He just stands there being reasonable until you forget what you were mad about.”
“She hates that,” Danny tells Beau, confiding, like I’ve left the room. “Hand to God. You give her a kind thing, she stands there holding it like it’s wired to go off.”
“Yeah,” Beau says. “I noticed.” And he doesn’t look at me when he says it, which is the only reason I don’t come apart on the couch.
“You eaten?” Beau says.
Danny looks at him like he’s switched languages.
“You flew in today. It’s gone four. You eat anything that wasn’t sealed in plastic at thirty thousand feet?”
Danny laughs — a real one, the laugh I only ever get squeezed thin through a phone at half eleven his time — and the whole room can breathe, because Beau found the one door that opens in a moment like this, the practical one, the let me handle a thing I can actually handle one, and went straight through it.
“No,” Danny admits. “No, I have not.”
“Okay. The guys did a barbecue last night — there's enough left over to feed a platoon, no offense — let me heat you up a plate.” He's up. He stops at my shoulder, his hand light on the back of my neck, just for me. “You want anything, babe?”
“No. Thanks, though.”
“Okay.” And he goes, and he gives us exactly the kitchen doorway’s worth of distance — close enough to hear me if it goes sideways, far enough to leave me my brother.
Danny watches him the whole way out. Then he looks at me, and his face has gone soft and wrecked and proud all at once.
“Sloane.”
“Don’t.”
“He’s a good one.”
“I know.”
“No. Listen.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, the way he used to lean in my doorway when he was reading the temperature of the house before he’d let me come down.
“I have spent ten years on the phone every Wednesday quietly scared out of my mind that you’d decided people were just a thing that happens to you.
And I show up and there’s a guy who won’t get off the couch, who you’ve told about me.
Do you know what that is? Do you know what you’ve got? ”
“I know what I’ve got,” I say, and it comes out smaller than I authorize, because I do, that’s the entire problem, I know exactly what I’ve got and I can hear the clock on it now, ever since a knock on a Sunday.