28. Sloane
Sloane
tThere are nine people crammed around a table built for six, and every one of them is here because of me, and I keep counting them like the number might come out different if I look twice.
Margo’s at the far end with a glass of the wine she brought because she does not trust other people’s wine, holding court on something to do with torts, gesturing with her fork.
June keeps getting up to refill things nobody asked to have refilled, orbiting the table with a dish towel over her shoulder like she was born with it there.
Wren’s turned her chair half-sideways and she’s talking to Theo in the low even register of two people who’ve decided the loud end of the table can handle itself.
Cash is at the loud end. Cash is the loud end.
And across from me, between Beau and a plate he’s already cleared twice, is my brother.
“So.” Cash levels a fork at Danny like it’s a credential. “Army. You ever —”
“No,” Danny says.
“You don’t even know what I was gonna ask.”
“I’ve met men before,” Danny says, mild, reaching for the bread. “I know how the question ends.”
The table goes up. Beau laughs into his glass, that surprised one he doesn’t plan, and Cash puts a hand to his chest like he’s been shot, and I sit very still in the middle of it and feel the two halves of my life slide toward each other across a folding table in a hockey house, and I do not yet know to be afraid of it.
That’s the part I’ll come back to. For a while there, I wasn’t afraid.
“Okay, but seriously.” Cash leans in. “Have you ever jumped out of a —”
“Cash.” Wyatt, from the other side, easy as anything. “Let the man eat.”
“It’s a fair question.”
“It is not,” Wren says, to her plate, and Theo’s mouth does the thing that on Theo passes for a standing ovation.
June’s already pushing the dish at Danny. “You’re too thin. Is the Army not feeding you?”
“They feed us fine —”
“Eat,” June says, and spoons it onto his plate without consent, and Danny looks at me down the table with an expression I have not seen on him in person in three years, which is the helplessness of a man being loved at by a stranger, and I have to look at my own plate, because I know that helplessness from the inside, and I taught myself a long time ago not to do it where people can see.
“So you’re the draft guy,” Danny says to Beau, around a forkful. Not a challenge, just placing him. “First round, Sloane says.”
“Projected.” Beau shrugs it off the way he shrugs off everything that matters. “Lot of season left. Lot can still go wrong.”
“He’s being modest,” Cash says, mouth full, “which is disgusting, don’t let him do it. He’s gonna go top fifteen and buy us all boats.”
“I’m not buying you a boat.”
“You said the boat was on the table.”
“The boat was never on the table, Cash.”
“It was on the table,” Theo says, to his plate, and the room comes apart, because Theo speaking is an event and Theo speaking to bury Beau is a national holiday.
Danny’s grinning now. He’s watching Beau take it — watching the whole table climb on him and watching him just sit there warm and easy and let them, the captain who doesn’t need the room to know he’s the captain.
“You watch his games?” Danny asks me.
“I go for the concessions.”
“She’s lying,” Danny tells the table, settling back, an older brother with ammunition and an audience, which is the most dangerous animal in any house.
“When she was sixteen she made me drive her four hours each way to watch some boy play juniors. Kid never knew she was alive. She brought a book and held it the whole game and turned the pages in all the wrong places, because she was watching him over the top of it.”
“I did not —”
“You wore the good lipstick. The once.”
Beau turns to look at me, lit up, the same look he gave the fog. “You own a good lipstick?”
“I’m wearing it right now,” I say. “Try to keep up.”
“I always keep up,” he says, easy, and reaches over without looking and takes a roast potato off my plate like it lives there.
And Danny watches him do it. Watches Beau’s hand go to my food without asking.
Watches me let it. And some long-held thing goes out of my brother’s shoulders, and the two of them have an entire conversation in the half-second it takes Beau to eat my potato, and I’m not in it, and it’s about me, and it’s good.
“Okay, settle something.” Cash aims his fork at the table at large. “Hot dog. Sandwich, or not a sandwich.”
“Not a sandwich,” June says, instantly, with feeling.
“It’s structurally a sandwich —”
“It’s a taco,” Wren says.
The table stops.
“It’s a taco,” Wren says again, and goes back to her plate, refusing to defend it, which is the single most devastating thing a person can do to a dinner.
“I need her to elaborate,” Margo says.
“She’s not going to elaborate,” Wyatt says. “That’s the whole move.”
“Daniel. You’re neutral. Adjudicate.”
“I’ve been on three continents,” Danny says, “and I have never once heard anything as unhinged as ‘the hot dog is a taco,’ and I’m counting things men said to me under fire.” He tips his head at Wren. “Respect.”
“Respect,” Wren says.
That’s the part nobody warned me about. I always thought the danger was the bad nights — the fights, the floor, the leaving.
Nobody mentioned the dangerous thing would turn out to be a Monday with roast potatoes, the brother I kept and the boy I kept looking at each other over my head and liking what they found.
Margo waits until the noise dips, which is a thing Margo does, she has a lawyer’s ear for the gap.
“So, Daniel.” She folds her hands. “Intentions.”
“Margo,” I say.
“It’s a fair line of inquiry.” She turns back to him, sweet as a subpoena. “You’re in town how long?”
“Flying out in the morning.” He doesn’t flinch. He likes her, I can tell, he likes that she’s coming straight at him. “Boston, then home, then a thing I have to do that I’m not going to ruin a good dinner with.”
“And your intentions toward this household in the window remaining?”
“Eat what I’m given,” Danny says. “Embarrass my sister at least twice. Make sure the big one’s not a problem.” He tips his head at Beau without looking at him.
“I’m not a problem,” Beau says.
“I’ll be the judge,” Danny says, and Margo says, “objection,” and June says “overruled, he’s right there being lovely,” and it rolls on like that, easy, the way a table rolls when nobody at it is performing, and I am the only one performing, and I’m good enough that not one of them can tell.
June has decided Danny is a project. She’s three questions into his life — does he sleep enough over there, is it cold, has he got anybody looking after him — and he’s answering all of it with the baffled patience of a man who hasn’t been fussed over by a soft person in a long time, maybe in his life.
“There’s a mess hall,” he says, when she circles back to the food. “I eat. I promise.”
“A mess hall is not a person cooking for you,” June says, like that closes it, and lands another scoop on his plate, and beside her Wren says, not looking up, “Just take it, she won’t stop,” and Danny takes it.
Wren’s been the quiet kind of present all night, watching the room from its edge, and somewhere in there she and Danny find each other on that same rail, because he does it too.
“You play,” he says to her. Not a question. He’s clocked the way she holds her shoulders.
“Women’s. D-line.”
“She’s the only one here who could actually take Beau,” Margo says proudly.
“She’s the only one here who could take all of us,” Wyatt says, mild, and Wren smiles, small and real, and Theo beside her says nothing in a way that says plenty, and I watch my roommate and my brother recognize each other across a table neither of them ever expected to sit at.
And it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. That’s the whole trouble with it.
There’s nothing wrong anywhere in this room — no flaw to point at, no bad night to hold up as evidence.
It’s good all the way down, every face at the table good, and I’m sitting in the middle of more good than I’ve ever been handed, already rehearsing how to give it back.
It’s the plays that do it. In the end it’s the plays.
“She used to put on plays,” Danny says — to June, who asked what I was like small.
June asks everyone what they were like small, it’s her whole heart in a question.
“In the living room. Full productions. Wrote and directed them, cast me in every part going, because I was the only other person who’d —” and there it is, the smallest catch, half a breath where the real story lives, the one about who else was in that house and who wouldn’t have shown up for a living-room play if you paid them, and it passes so fast that only Danny and I feel the floor of it “— who’d show up.
I played the hero, the villain, the horse. One time I played weather.”
“You played weather,” Beau says, lit up.
“I was a fog. A convincing fog.”
“You were a terrible fog,” I tell him, because the room wants me in it and for once I let the room have me. “You kept narrating. You’d just announce yourself. ‘I am the fog’.”
“Fog doesn’t narrate,” Wren says.
“Thank you, Wren.” Danny points at her. “Finally. A woman of standards in a house of savages.”
And the table laughs, and June’s got a hand pressed to her chest, and Margo’s demanding to know whether there’s footage, and Beau has turned to look at me with his whole stupid open face like I’ve just handed him a present, like the picture of a small, bossy girl directing fog in a living room is a thing he gets to keep now, and I’m laughing too, I can hear myself doing it, and I let Danny have my childhood at this table in front of these people, which is a thing I have never once done in my life.
That’s the high point. I want to be accurate about that later, when I take the night apart. That, right there, is the top of it.
Then Danny looks at me.