38. Lance
Lance
“Does this go in the keep pile or the donate pile?”
Adrian is holding up the San Diego Padres bobblehead George won at a game two summers ago.
“Donate,” I say.
Adrian immediately drops it into the donate pile.
A few minutes later, I catch myself staring at it.
I remember George shoving it into my hands on the walk back to the truck. He spent twenty minutes trying to win the damn thing in the arcade at the mall because I’d joked it would look stupid in my apartment.
I’d been right. It looks stupid, and I’d also kept it for two years.
Adrian follows my gaze.
“Right,” I say, mostly to myself. “Donate.”
He studies me for half a second, says nothing, and quietly moves it into the keep pile when he thinks I’m not looking.
Holloway is on the floor across the room, laptop open, photographing furniture, lamps, kitchen appliances, and whatever else I’m not taking with me.
Adrian sits beside him sorting boxes.
They arrived together yesterday and have basically been running my move ever since.
At some point I ordered takeout for everyone and dug the last unopened bottle of orange juice out of my fridge—the one George bought a few days before I left for Seattle.
The apartment is ninety-percent packed already.
A week and a half of sorting through what belongs to the life I’m building and what belongs to the one I’m leaving.
George’s flannel is still on the back of the kitchen chair.
His work shirt is still folded over the arm of the couch. His boots are still by the door.
I haven’t touched any of it. Don’t know how to yet.
Adrian has been packing carefully around all of it without saying a word.
Trevor shows up later that afternoon carrying an assortment of gas station snacks—chips, beef jerky, gummy bears, and energy drinks.
He flops down next to Holloway, thumbs through the marketplace listings, and nods approvingly. “Good price on the lamp, but you could’ve gone higher though, mate.”
“I want it gone,” Holloway says.
We eat on the floor in the middle of everything because there’s nowhere else to sit. It’s not bad, actually—the four of us in the wreckage of my apartment, passing food around. It feels like something, having people here. It fills up the apartment the way the packing doesn’t.
Then Holloway looks up from his laptop.
“You holding up fine, Bradford?” he asks.
The room adjusts to the sudden change of mood.
My eyes drop to the moving box beside me. “Yeah, all good. Handed in my resignation last week.” It’s easier to start there. “Nate said the door’s always open if I miss them.”
“What do you plan to do now?” Adrian asks.
I study the crack in the concrete under my feet.
“First thing is Mom. Depending on how treatment goes, I might move her into my late aunt’s palliative care facility.
I’ll mostly be looking after her. I’ve also been helping out with the facility’s management since I visited, and they’ve offered me a full-time position.
I’m going to start part-time first and see how it fits.
There’s also an urgent care clinic nearby reviewing my application. I should hear back by the time I land.”
“You’re planning to stay busy,” Trevor comments, his accent thicker than usual. “Hard to miss why.”
“You good?” Holloway asks. “With leaving.”
I picture myself walking out through that ward.
The nurses’ station. The break room with the coffee machine that’s been broken on the left side for three years, the handwritten sign above it that says USE THE RIGHT SIDE ONLY in progressively more exasperated capitals.
Everything I chose when I was twenty-two and needed to prove something about who I was going to be.
“Yes,” I decide. “I built something real here. Had nothing to do with the Bradford name, what my family wanted or what I was supposed to become. Walking away from that…it just hurts more than I expected. That’s all. But it’s the right move.”
The three of them are quiet.
“Mate,” Trevor starts.
“Can we not do the concerned-parent-at-a-PTA-meeting face?” I say. “It’s weird. I’m okay.”
“It’s okay not to be,” Adrian says gently.
There hangs the heavier silence that wraps around you when your friends see straight through the bullshit armor you’re still trying to wear. George’s absence feels like a bruise that keeps getting worse when you look away.
“No, seriously.” I force a smile. “I know I look like a guy one bad week away from adopting six cats and living in the woods, but I’m okay.”
Adrian raises an eyebrow.
“Mostly okay,” I amend. “And I appreciate you being here. All of you. I mean that.” I look at Holloway specifically. “You guys flew out. You didn’t have to do that.”
He’d canceled a sponsor’s meeting back in San Francisco, something Adrian unthinkingly dropped earlier.
He said Holloway loves packing anyway, but we both knew the real reason.
George isn’t here, and they’re making damn sure I’m not falling apart by myself before I move out.
I know for a fact that their next stop is George’s place to check on him too.
Holloway shrugs like it’s nothing.
Trevor has been holding the same mug for a few minutes without drinking from it. He sets it down and grabs a tape to seal down a box.
“Called George,” he says, not quite looking at me. “A couple days ago, just checking in.”
Nobody says anything.
“He’s not doing real flash, mate. Not that he’d ever bloody admit it.” He pauses. “He might talk to ProMotive about the buyout.”
The words hit like a punch to the gut.
“That fucking idiot.” I let myself feel it. “After everything he’s put into that place, he’s just gonna hand it over to a corporate chain?”
Holloway leans forward. “Bradford, easy—”
“No, I’m serious. Years of holding that shop together and now he just folds.”
“Mate—”
“He’s the most stubborn son of a bitch I know. Works himself into the ground for everyone else and won’t take a damn thing back. And now he’s just fucking giving up—”
I stop, chest heaving, hearing myself. The raw shit I just said out loud. I blink.
Adrian raises an eyebrow, looking worried but amused. “You done?”
Trevor watches me for a long beat, then nods once, calm as ever. “Think we know what we need to fucking do.”
Adrian and Holloway exchange a quiet look. They don’t say it outright, but it’s clear. They’re not about to sit back and let this happen either.
I let out a slow breath and meet their eyes.
“I’ll be in Seattle…doing Seattle things,” I mutter. “You guys can deal with that human embodiment of a check-engine light without me.”
“You’re gonna be up late at night rebuilding his whole fundraising plan from scratch, mate,” Trevor says, not even looking up from the box he’s taping shut. “We all know it.”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Bradford, you’ve never let go of a problem and let it be someone else’s. You’re not starting because you’re sad.” Holloway says. “Especially not for George.”
“I’m extremely capable of minding my own business.”
All three of them just look at me. I hold out for about ten seconds.
“Fine. Maybe I’ll glance at some numbers. Once. Out of curiosity.”
“There it is.” Adrian grins, going back to wrapping glasses in newspaper like he just won something. “Knew you had it in you.”
“How’s Mom?” I ask Marcus over the phone, leaning against the wall just outside the staff locker room.
I’d clocked out at three after a long shift, still in my scrubs, the faint smell of antiseptic clinging to the fabric.
The hallway is quiet now, the afternoon rounds mostly wrapped up, a few patients shuffling past with their IV poles.
“She’s better this week. The last round is rough, but she’s responding. When you see her, she'll insist she's fine. I wouldn't put too much weight on that.”
He pauses, then says what I think he really wants to say.
“I’m glad you’re coming home, Lance. I truly am.
” His voice warms the way it always does when he thinks things are going his way.
“People tend to re-establish themselves more quickly than they expect.
You already have a support system. You're not walking into unfamiliar ground.”
“Sure,” I say, though the word comes out thin.
“I'm saying the comparison isn't entirely fair. You're not returning to an empty life. It's not like San Diego, where you built everything from scratch with—” He stops, but not quite fast enough.
Everything inside me goes still.
“With what, Marcus?” I say, letting the edge show.
“Lance.”
“No, please. Finish the sentence, Marcus.”
He takes a moment before he answers. “I'm saying your circumstances here are materially different. You'll be surrounded by people who've known you your entire life.”
I let out a short breath.
“What you’re really saying is that everything I built in San Diego will just disappear,” I say, the words tasting hollow.
“I’ll come back there, settle back in, and before long George will just become some story I tell people about those few years I spent on the coast, like he was a fun little detour. ”
Marcus doesn’t answer right away. The silence stretches, like he’s waiting for me to back down or make a joke so he can pretend this conversation never happened.
I don’t. I keep going before he can twist it into something smaller.
“You think eventually all this just…” I gesture helplessly around the empty apartment even though he can’t see it. “Fades out. That George turns into some meaningful chapter of my twenties I look back on fondly while I’m dating someone ‘acceptable’ at family dinners.”
“Lance—”
“He’s not some fucking phase I can just grow out of.”
The words come out harsher than I mean them to, but once they’re out, I can’t stuff them back in.
“I’ve never suggested otherwise.”
“Then explain to me why acknowledging that doesn’t change the outcome.” I tighten my grip on the phone until my knuckles ache.
A long pause fills the line.
“You’re right,” Marcus finally says. “That was an unfair inference. I shouldn't have invited it.”