Chapter Twenty
SAINT
Theo found out about Junie the way Theo finds out about everything, which is completely, immediately, and with sourcing.
He’d had the January clip within hours, that’s documented, he showed it to me himself at a Saturday pancake stack with the delight of a boy watching his brother fall down stairs in a public setting.
He had followed the whole arc since with the rigor he brings to everything he decides is his business: the taco crawl, the kiss cam, the scrum, the Merrit interview, which his entire dorm floor had apparently watched together, my Deaf brother’s classmates reading the captions of my one long-form interview in a common room in real time while Theo provided commentary I am grateful to have missed.
What he had not done, in three months, was meet her. That was by design. Mine. Theo is not content. Theo is the reason the map has Austin on it, and the wall between his world and the shipped, captioned, engagement-audited one was the only wall I’d never let anyone amend.
He requested the meeting himself. That’s the part I want in the record. Two Thursdays after the interview aired, over tacos at the truck on South Congress, my brother put down his al pastor, wiped his hands with ceremony, and signed, “I want to meet her.”
“She’s the team’s social media manager,” I signed back, which was technically the standing cover and fooled him for zero seconds.
“Great,” he signed. “Then I want to meet the team’s social media manager.
Saturday. Bring her to sign-out. If you say no, I’ll DM her myself, I know which account is really her because she likes replies at 11:40 at night and the team account likes them at nine a.m., which means the night one is a PERSON,” and I sat there looking at my sixteen-year-old brother conducting forensic audience analysis and thought, not for the first time, that the wrong Lindell was in marketing.
I asked Junie that night, and I want to describe how I asked, because I’d rehearsed a whole preamble, terms, boundaries, no cameras obviously, no posting ever, she’d be coming as staff, and I got as far as “Theo wants,” and she said “yes,” before the sentence had a verb in it.
Then she went quiet in a way I could hear through the phone, and said, “Saint. That’s the door you don’t open for anyone,” and I said, “I know,” and she said, “Okay,” in a small voice, and then, recovering, “what does he eat, what does he like, is there a wrong shirt, I need parameters,” and I told her the truth: pancakes, hockey, ruthlessness, and there was no wrong shirt but there would be a quiz.
Saturday, ten a.m., the Texas School for the Deaf on South Congress, live oaks and long shade and the particular Saturday hum of a campus emptying for the weekend.
I signed him out at the desk like every Saturday, and Theo came down the walk with his bag and his hair doing what our mother despairs of over video calls, and he clocked Junie standing a polite half-step behind me, and he smiled the Lindell smile, which is to say his face moved a sixteenth of an inch and only family could read the wattage.
I introduced them, signing while I spoke. “Theo, Junie Bloom, the team’s social media manager. Junie, my brother Theo.”
And Junie stepped forward, and lifted her hands, and my entire understanding of the last month reorganized itself.
She was terrible. I want that established first because she’d want it established, accuracy being house style.
Her hands were slow and careful and wrong in places, her palm orientation drifted, her “nice to meet you” traveled backward briefly, and she fingerspelled J-U-N-I-E at a speed that suggested each letter had to be individually persuaded.
But she signed it. Hello. Nice to meet you.
My name is Junie. I’ve heard you’re the smart brother.
All of it, hands only, no voice, her face doing the work her hands couldn’t, eyebrows placed correctly on the question, which nobody gets from an app, which takes practice with a mirror, which takes weeks.
Theo’s face did the full inch. Both inches. He looked at her hands, then at me, then back at her hands, checking, the way you check a scoreboard you don’t believe.
“You SIGN?” he signed, huge, the sign the size of the sentiment.
“Badly,” she signed back, which came out closer to “wickedly,” and Theo barked his laugh, his real one, the one the whole campus knows, and Junie glanced at me with her face full of “did I say badly,” and I stood there on the walk of my brother’s school with my two worlds shaking hands, unable to contribute, because something had happened behind my sternum on the load-bearing wall and I needed a second with it.
Because here is the arithmetic I did, standing in the live-oak shade.
Nobody knew about Theo outside the family and the front office.
She’d learned anyway. Which meant she’d started before there was any occasion, no meeting scheduled, no reason, no return on investment possible, a woman who measures everything had spent weeks on a thing that could never be posted, for a boy she had no guarantee of ever meeting, in secret, sourceless, unbudgeted.
I checked the timeline later, casually, criminally, and she confessed the whole operation: the library on Cesar Chavez, Mondays and Tuesdays, lunch breaks since March, camera off.
Camera off. From her, that’s a cathedral.
Theo, meanwhile, had begun the interrogation, because a Lindell shows love through rigor.
He conducted it across the front seat of my truck and then across a table at Marge’s, and he was merciless, as advertised, and he made zero concessions to her level, signing at full speed and letting me interpret only when she was fully underwater, which she conceded with a hand-flap she’d clearly learned from somebody at that library, and which put another entry in my ledger, because she’d learned how to drown correctly, which is the real fluency.
The interrogation, selected exhibits:
Theo: “Ranking of my brother’s superstitions, most to least insane.”
Junie, out loud, me interpreting, her hands attempting support: “The carpet logos. Nobody else even sees them, we’ve had to reroute him through two airports. The pipes I respect. The oatmeal I’ve made, and he ate my version, which the team considers a marriage.”
Theo, to me: “You ate her oatmeal?” Me: “It was 9 a.m.” Theo: “That’s worse.”
Theo: “The kiss cam. Whose idea.”
Junie: “Mine, on the content calendar. His, the last four seconds.” Theo, delighted, slapping the table: “The last four seconds are the whole clip. Eleven million views. I’ve seen the analytics breakdowns, someone on my floor runs the numbers, you fell off a CLIFF of a smile at second five.
” Junie, to me, weakly: “Your brother runs analytics.” Me: “He runs everything.”
And then, over pancakes, Theo went in with the real one, no warning, the way I go glove-side on a shooter who thinks the conversation is about his blocker:
“The podcast guy. The one with the receipts. Are you scared of him?”
The table went still. Junie put her fork down.
And she answered him in the only register that was ever going to work at that table, which is the true one, voice and broken hands together: “I was scared of him for two years. He’s why I smile like a brochure sometimes, your brother can tell you which smile.
I’m less scared now. Partly your brother.
Partly I found out the man’s just small.
Scared’s not all gone. But it’s outnumbered. ”
Theo read her face all the way through it, the way our whole family reads faces, at the depth where lying is a structural impossibility, and then he nodded once, the Lindell nod, and picked up the syrup, which is a verdict, and signed, one-handed, casual, catastrophic:
“Your fingerspelling looks like a fistfight.”
Junie, when I interpreted, laughed her Waco laugh in the middle of Marge’s, loud, unbudgeted, and Theo grinned down at his plate at having caused it, and then he added, both hands now, to me, flat and final as a scoreboard:
“Keep her.”
I did not interpret that one out loud. I signed back, “It’s fake, it’s a marketing arrangement,” because a big brother has duties, and Theo looked at me with our grandfather’s exact eyebrows and signed, “Sure. So is my homework,” and Dot arrived with more pancakes nobody ordered, saw the state of the table, and signed the only editorial Marge’s ever runs.
Pancakes. Meaning “ceiling.” Meaning everything.
The rest of the day, kept brief because I keep everything brief except goaltending and lately, apparently, this: we walked the lake trail and Theo taught Junie signs at triple speed, half of which I had to quietly flag as unusable in polite company.
Our mother video-called at four, in her good cardigan, the one that means she knew, meaning Theo had briefed her, meaning the entire Lindell operation had coordinated this weekend around me like a power play around a screened goalie.
Junie waved at my mother with the hand-flap, and my mother put her hand flat on her own chest, and I stood in a parking lot by the lake watching the two of them fail to share a language and communicate perfectly, and thought about walls, and doors, and rule 6a, and how the best construction I ever managed was the one that turned out to be hinged.
I drove Theo back at six. Junie waited in the truck, at the correct distance, reading her phone with the screen off, which is called waiting where I come from.
Theo shouldered his bag at the door, and turned, and this is the part I’ve filed where I file the 4:40 things, behind the sternum, where the load path runs.
He looked back at the truck, then at me, and signed it small, private, at family speed, the register we save for the things we mean:
“You laugh with your face now.”
I signed back, “I’ve always laughed.”
“No,” Theo signed. “You laughed with your shoulders. Like this,” and he did it, the single seismic shrug, my whole comedic range for two years, and it was so accurate that I did the other thing, the new thing, the face thing, and he pointed at it, at my own face, like a man tapping a stat sheet, case closed, and signed, “There. That. That started in January. I have the receipts too,” and went inside, sixteen years old, ruthless, correct, mine.
I stood on the walk for a minute in the long light.
Two summers ago I stood in a backyard in Duluth where the ice used to go and believed the laughing part of the machine had been decommissioned with its builder.
Rituals I could keep. The oatmeal, the pipes, the taps, all of it maintained to spec, a machine run in memoriam, and I had made my peace with operating it solo forever, shoulders only, face retired.
Then a woman with a ring light took my picture by accident, and it turned out the machine had one more part on order the whole time.
I got back in the truck. Junie put her phone away and looked at me, and read whatever the face was doing, at the depth where lying is a structural impossibility, and had the mercy not to name it.
“Well?” she said instead. “Did I pass?”
“He says your fingerspelling looks like a fistfight.”
“I KNEW the J was bad, the J travels, what else did he say?”
Keep her. On the walk, in the truck, at 4:40 tomorrow and every day after, at the library on Cesar Chavez where she’d been building a bridge to my brother in secret since March, keep her, keep her.
“He rated the pancakes,” I said, and pulled out of the lot, and she launched the investigation like I knew she would, volleying all the way up South Congress, and I drove, and let my face do what it does now.