29
Tean sat on the bed with Scipio huddled between his legs. The Lab was plastered against Tean, trying to maximize contact.
Out in the living room, Jem screamed something. There might have been words in it, but Tean couldn’t make them out. He focused instead on running his hands over Scipio, stroking his head and ears, scratching under his chin, jiggling his scruff. He breathed in slowly. Breathed out slowly.
Jem’s bloodshot eyes.
Jem’s slack face.
Jem’s voice that wasn’t Jem’s.
A door slammed.
Tean and Scipio flinched at the same time.
And then Tean whispered, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
The daylight streaming in through the windows was bright and colorless.
It showed the dust on the nightstands; things had been busy lately.
Daniel. Amy. The wedding. An engine started—the Subaru, Tean guessed—and then the sound faded away.
Scipio started to pant. His fur felt smooth and rough at the same time, sliding between Tean’s fingers, leaving the faintest trace of oil.
He made himself get up and finish the laundry.
Up and down the stairs still hurt because he was stiff after his fall from the night before, and he had to slide the basket from tread to tread because he didn’t trust himself to carry it.
Scipio settled down onto the couch, head on his paws as he stared out the window.
The day’s brightness continued to sharpen until it felt like they were under a magnifying glass.
In the bedroom, he took polos out of the basket and hung them in the closet.
Some of them were DWR branded, which meant khaki and gray and navy, nothing too interesting.
But some, the ones with floppy collars or cute little front pockets or one that looked like it had been knit, were ones that Jem had picked out for Tean—bought for him, in many cases, and presented as gifts, or as surprises, or occasionally as trophies.
The image of Scipio bringing back a slobber-covered ball came to mind, and Tean had to stop and rub his chest.
There wasn’t any point thinking about it. He was too upset. He needed to calm down. And so, he took another shirt out of the basket. But he couldn’t stop his mind from replaying it: Jem coming home, and then his bizarre reactions, how he’d started shouting about Tean’s dad—
His dad.
Why had Jem been so fixated on his dad?
Because he was high.
Maybe. But that seemed too easy of an answer.
Too facile. And it was strange, especially in retrospect.
Everything had happened so fast that, in the moment, Tean hadn’t paused to wonder why Jem had gotten so upset about his dad being asked to leave.
Or kicked out, as Jem kept putting it. You can’t kick him out—wasn’t that what Jem had said?
Something like it, anyway. Tean’s own embarrassment over his behavior hadn’t helped either.
He hadn’t wanted to talk about his dad. He hadn’t wanted to have to justify it.
Some part of him had believed that Jem would be excited about it, even encouraging.
Probably—and Tean felt a tiny, hurting smile creep across his face—too excited, because Jem was always excited for Tean.
Always excited. Always supportive. Always proud. Except for now.
Tean dragged the basket to the opposite side of the bed, closer to the dresser.
He sat, and their room was small enough that he could open the dresser without getting up.
He folded a pair of jeans, and these were definitely ones that Jem had bought him because the denim was higher quality, and the stain was darker, and Jem had made him turn around so that he could check out Tean’s butt from different angles, wolf-whistling loudly enough that Scipio had finally come to investigate.
It was easy enough to understand why Jem had gotten angry.
Anger was a defense. And while Jem was usually more careful, usually more in control, he’d been very much not in control when he’d come home.
Observing anyone else with the same sweating, the same shallow breathing, the same glassy eyes, and Tean would have said they were close to having a panic attack.
Had it been only the cannabis? Or was there something else there?
Tean shut a drawer.
A question for another time, when he wasn’t so dysregulated himself.
But with the laundry put away and the next load still tumbling, he found himself momentarily at a loss for what to do. He made his way to the kitchen. He stared at the sink. But then, instead he grabbed his coat from the hook by the door.
Scipio’s head came up.
“Come on,” Tean said as he grabbed his Keens.
The Lab had to do some stretching, and then he bounded over, bumping Tean with his head while Tean was trying to tie his shoes, slinking between his legs while Tean tried to get to Scipio’s basket, poking his head through the harness in the wrong direction.
What Jem called helping, even though Tean tried to point out that no help was required in any of these instances.
Between the two of them, though, they got Scipio’s harness sorted out, and then the Lab waited at the door, panting, casting looks over his shoulder because Tean was taking too long grabbing his keys.
A moment later, they were out in the sunlight.
It was one of those winter days in the valley that was close to perfect.
No inversion—no clouds at all, just that huge blue sky, and the air so clear that the mountains looked close enough to reach out and touch.
The cold made Tean’s eyes burn when the wind picked up, but even so, it felt good to be moving, and as his body warmed up, some of the stiffness eased.
Scipio trotted alongside him, sniffing everything—what Jem called getting big sniffs—and his tail wagging because for Scipio, walks never got old.
The dog park wasn’t far, and when Tean and Scipio got there, they found it empty.
Tean unlocked the gate, and then he undid Scipio’s harness in the sally port, and then they passed through to the park proper.
Scipio raced off. It was a sudden wildness: the bunching of muscles under sleek fur, the strong body exploding out in a lunge.
The Lab made it to the end of the park, stopped, peed on a patch of winter-dead grass, and then began a more sedate trot along the fence to check his favorite spots.
Tean thought about pulling out his phone to read something—an article for work, an email, an ebook. But he didn’t; he sat there, staring out at bare branches and stark shadows. He was too tired, he told himself. And it was easier to let his brain turn off.
Where had Jem been? Taking care of something had been the only answer before Jem’s anger had gotten too big, the fire burning up all the oxygen in the conversation.
What had he needed to take care of? Where had he gone all night?
Jem was not responsible in the traditional sense; there were plenty of times Tean had come home, and Jem had forgotten to clean the bathroom or do the dishes or run to the grocery store, usually because he’d found something more fun to do.
And then Jem would scramble to do whatever he’d promised to do, because Jem was many things, but foremost among them, he was kind and loving and had a childlike yearning to be good.
Which he was, if your definition of good didn’t squint at things like light to moderate fraud.
But the big stuff? Forgetting about something important?
Forgetting about Tean? That wasn’t Jem at all.
And while it was like him to avoid a conversation, to obfuscate, to lie outright if he thought things weren’t going the way he wanted—well, Tean had thought that had been getting better.
What had he needed to lie about the night before?
And then a separate question raised its head: why had he lied about the vows?
The rattle of the gate made Tean glance over.
A man was trying to open the outer gate.
Tean’s first suspicion was that he either had forgotten his fob or never gotten one.
A surprising number of people turned up at the park, hoping they could talk someone into letting them in.
Maybe not so surprising, considering that Jem might have been one of them under different circumstances.
But this man didn’t have a dog, so what did he—
“Dad?” Tean said.
His dad glanced up and offered a wary smile. “Didn’t know the gate was locked.”
“It’s a members-only park.” Then Tean realized he was still sitting there, staring, so he got to his feet. He slowed before he got to the gate, stopped, and said, “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I wanted to talk, and you weren’t home, and Scipio wasn’t home, so I thought maybe you’d gone for a walk.” His dad shrugged as though this had explained everything.
Exhaustion—and deep, deep hurt—made it hard to think, and Tean was silent. Then he said, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing else I think we need to say.”
“Well,” his dad said, “I wanted to apologize.”
It might have been the first time in Tean’s life he’d ever heard his dad say those words.
His dad was always making statements. His dad was always teaching, informing, explaining.
His dad always knew everything. Because among all the other religious nonsense that had been packed into their family dynamics, his dad was the patriarch.
“If you’ll let me,” his dad added.
Tean pressed the crash bar, and the gate inched open.
They sat on the bench, and Scipio launched himself across the park to greet Tean’s dad with sniffs and kisses before sprinting off again. The wind shifted and found the back of Tean’s neck, and he huddled deeper in his coat and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” his dad said. “About you not wanting to talk about anything. I’m sorry about that.”