Chapter 37 Chicago
Colt
The afternoon before we drive back north, we head to King's Diner.
The lunch rush has cleared and Greg is wiping down the counter with the slow methodical motion of a man who has wiped that counter fifty thousand times in his life.
Sarah is in the kitchen, prepping for supper, singing along to her playlist too quiet to make out the words.
Autumn flew home to Charleston for the trip and has been at the diner for three days running.
She's in the booth across from us with Jake. They're arguing about a fishing trip.
Summer is next to me, her hand on my thigh.
She has eaten half her grilled cheese and pushed the rest across to me.
She's been doing it since we were teenagers, and she did it again ten minutes ago without thinking.
Her hand reached for the plate and slid it over while she was mid-sentence.
That muscle memory coming back is something I'm going to spend the rest of my life being grateful for.
"So," Summer says to the room at large.
Autumn looks up. Jake looks up. Greg behind the counter looks up.
"Chicago is home now."
Nobody says anything. The music is still playing. Outside, the diner sign hums.
"I know I haven't made it official. I've been in Wicker Park for months and I've been telling everyone it's temporary. It isn't temporary. I'm not moving back to Charleston. Colt isn't moving back to Charleston. We're looking at apartments in Lincoln Park."
Autumn's eyes are wet. She has known this was coming. Knowing it and hearing it out loud are different things.
Jake nods once. Slow. "Good."
"You're okay?"
"I'm okay. Of course I'm okay. I'm just going to need a bigger Christmas budget for plane tickets."
"You're going to come up four times a year and you're going to like it."
"Yes ma'am."
I look at Greg. He hasn't moved. The dishrag is in his hand and the counter is half wiped and he's looking at his daughter across the diner with a face I can't read.
He sets the rag down. He goes behind the kitchen pass.
I can't see him for thirty seconds. When he comes back, he has a bottle in his hand.
He walks the length of the diner with it, slow, his work boots squeaking on the tile.
He stops at our booth. Sets the bottle down on the formica between Summer's plate and mine.
Bourbon. The one that lives behind the kitchen pass for occasions, which in this diner happen approximately once a decade.
"That for us, Daddy?"
"That's for him."
Greg King looks at me. The same look from the night we arrived. The diagnostic look. The look of a man deciding whether I'll hold.
"You taking my baby to Chicago?"
"She's taking me, Greg."
"Don't be cute. You know what I'm asking."
I look up at him. The whole diner is quiet. Autumn has stopped breathing. Jake is pretending to study the dessert menu he has had memorized since he was ten.
"Yes. We're going to Chicago. We're getting an apartment.
We're going to live there. I'm going to keep showing up for her every day for the rest of my life, Greg, and I'm going to come down here every couple of months and let your wife tell me I'm too thin, and I'm going to be the man you would want her to be married to. Even on the days that's hard."
"Especially on the days that's hard."
"Especially then."
He looks at me for a long time. Then he puts his hand on the back of the booth next to my shoulder. Squeezes once. The Greg King benediction.
"Welcome back, son."
"Greg."
"Don't make me regret it."
"No, sir."
He picks up the bourbon. Hands it to me. The seal is unbroken. He has been holding this bottle behind the kitchen pass for years, waiting on a day worth opening it.
"Open it tonight. Not now. Tonight. You and her. One glass each. That's how you drink the bourbon. You don't drink it in a hurry and you don't drink it alone."
"Yes, sir."
"And one more thing."
"Yes, sir."
"You're family. You hear me. I'm not saying it because you fixed it.
I'm saying it because Sarah and I decided you were family the first time you sat in booth four, let her order for you, and ate every bite.
That hasn't changed. Whatever happens, that doesn't change.
You're Summer's husband and you're my son the same as Jake is.
You have been forgetting that for too long. Stop forgetting."
I can't make my mouth work for a second.
Greg waits.
"Yes, Dad."
"Good." He nods once. Walks back to the counter. Picks up the dishrag. Resumes wiping. The conversation is closed.
Sarah, who has been pretending not to listen from the kitchen, comes out at exactly the right moment with a slice of pecan pie I didn't order. Sets it in front of me. Kisses the top of my head. Goes back into the kitchen without a word.
Summer's hand on my thigh has gone tight. I look at her. Her eyes are wet. She's biting her lip. It's what she does when she's trying not to lose it in public.
"You okay."
"Yeah."
"You didn't warn me Daddy was going to do that."
"I didn't know he was going to do that."
"He was going to do it the whole time. He had that bottle in his hand the day he met you."
"I was sixteen."
"He had the bottle in his hand metaphorically."
"You're making that up."
"I'm not. He saw you, reached for the bottle, put it behind the pass, and waited for the right day."
"It took him eight years."
"He has patience."
She leans her forehead against my shoulder.
I put my arm around her. Across the diner, Autumn pretends to be very interested in her sweet tea, Jake in the dessert menu, Greg in the chrome of the milkshake mixer.
The four of them are giving us a private moment in a public booth, which is what King's Diner has been doing for the people it loves since before either of us was born.
***
We split the drive to Chicago. The car is fuller on the way north.
Lorna packed us a cooler of biscuits and apricot jam and the last of the pecan pie.
Sarah loaded the trunk with three Tupperwares of leftovers and a pound of cured bacon and a jar of her brown-butter caramel.
Jake gave me a small bottle of cologne, the kind his old fishing buddy makes.
He told me it doesn't work on him, might work on me, and that I should take it as a fresh start.
Autumn gave Summer a flat manila envelope and told us not to open it until we were on I-65 and we haven't opened it yet.
We open it outside Indianapolis.
Inside is a single sheet of paper. Autumn's handwriting.
Summer,
I've known you for fifteen years. I've known him for nine.
I watched him fail you for one of those years and I've been watching him try to pay it back for three months.
I'm still going to be skeptical of him for a long time, because that's my job.
But I want you to know two things on this drive home.
One. I've watched him these last few days.
How he stops talking the second you start, even mid-sentence, even to Greg.
The chair he takes without trying to own the table.
How he goes loose in the shoulders the second you walk into a room, easy in a way the old version of him never managed.
That's the kind of small specific evidence I trust more than any speech.
Two. The man driving you home to Chicago tonight isn't the man you married. He's a different one. I'm not telling you that to make you trust him. I'm telling you so you know I see it too.
Take him home. Take the new marriage. And clear out a corner of that city for me, because I'm coming too. January, if I don't lose my nerve. You'll be sick of me by March.
A
Summer reads it twice. She passes it to me without saying anything.
I read it. The road is empty. The light is going.
Autumn's handwriting is the same handwriting it has been on every birthday card she has ever written to Summer in fifteen years, slanted hard to the right, the S on Summer's name a deliberate flourish.
"She means it," Summer says.
"She means it."
"Autumn doesn't write things she doesn't mean."
"She has never written me a letter before. Fifteen years. Birthday cards. Texts at three in the morning. Never a letter."
I fold the letter. Hand it back. She tucks it into the visor pocket with the gas-station coffee receipts and every other small evidence she keeps of the people who love her.
"You feel her watching."
"I feel her watching."
"Good."
***
We pull into the parking garage in Chicago at four in the morning.
The hallway smells like the curry the neighbors made for supper. The lock is the same temperamental lock she's been wrestling with for months. I carry up the cooler and the Tupperwares and the duffel bag. She carries the cake.
Inside, the apartment is as she left it. The pad on the kitchen table where she's been outlining Book Five. The throw blanket I gave her in October that she's been pretending she didn't want and that's now in a permanent state of being draped across the back of the couch.
"Home," she says.
"For three more weeks."
"Home for three more weeks."
She sets the cake on the counter. Goes to the cabinet. Pulls out two of the rocks glasses Sam gave her.
I take the bourbon out of the bag. Break the seal.
She holds out the glasses. I pour. Two fingers each. She hands me mine.
"To Daddy."
"To Dad."
She looks at me. The crooked corner.
"Dad, huh."
"He says I'm family. I'm not going to make him say it twice."
"He won't. He'll just pour you a beer next time and that'll be the whole conversation."
"That's what I'm hoping for."
We touch glasses. We drink. The bourbon is the smoothest thing I have ever put in my mouth and the smell of it brings tears up behind my eyes and I don't let them out. They're still saved. Saving themselves for something.
She kisses me. Just once. Quick. Bourbon-warm.
"Sleep."
"Sleep."
***
The next afternoon, I go to Vibes.
I don't call ahead. Sam doesn't need me to. The bar opens at four for the early crowd. I get there at four-thirty. The room is mostly empty, he sees me come in. He nods.
"Bourbon?"
"Yeah."
He pours. Sets it in front of me. Doesn't ask why I'm alone.
"Summer is at home. Sleeping. We got in early this morning."
"How was Charleston?"
"Hard. Good. Heavy."
"Family good?"
"Greg gave me a bottle of bourbon he has been saving for years."
Sam sets down the rag.
"He did?"
"He did."
"How did that feel?"
"Like I'm going to be paying him back for the rest of my life."
"You are."
"Good. I want the kind of debt that doesn't close."
He picks up the rag. Goes back to the glass.
I take a sip of the bourbon. It's the same one Sam has been pouring me for three months and the same one her father gave me last night, and the symmetry isn't lost on me, two different men who care about Summer in two different specific ways pouring the same drink for the same reason.
To say welcome, sit down, we're in this together whether either of us asked for it.
"Sam."
"Yeah."
"There's something I need to say to you. I've been writing it in my head for a while. I want to get it out before the rest of the crowd comes in and I lose the chance."
He sets the glass down. Turns toward me. Both hands flat on the bar. Patient.
"Go."
"I owe you a debt I can't pay. I know that.
I'm not going to try to pay it down with a speech.
I'm going to pay it by being a person you can trust in Summer's life for the next fifty years.
That's the only currency that matters. I'm telling you that out loud because I want you to be able to hold me to it.
If I fail her, you have standing. If I slip, you have standing.
The way Greg has standing. The way Autumn and Jake have standing.
You're in the room with them now. You belong there.
Not because you earned it from me. Because she gave it to you. I'm not going to take it back."
He looks at me for a long time.
Then he says, "She doesn't need you."
I blink.
"She wants you. Don't confuse the two."
I know these words. Dom said them in my kitchen months ago. Different room. Different speaker. Same load-bearing truth.
"She built a life without you. She built it from scratch.
She survived in Wicker Park for months on willpower, her notebook, a bartender who pours her favorite bourbon, and sheer audacity.
The need part is done. The want part is the whole rest of your life.
You aren't her oxygen. You're her partner.
Don't get those confused. The minute you go back to being her oxygen, you fail.
Want her every day. Don't need her any day.
Need is your problem to manage. Want is what you show up with every ordinary day. "
I drink the bourbon to give myself a second.
"Yeah."
"I'm not trying to lecture you, Bennet."
"You aren't lecturing me. You're telling me the truth. I needed to hear it. Greg said something at the diner and you're saying it differently. They're the same sentence."
"They would be. Greg has been figuring out men his whole life. I've been doing it for a couple."
"You're good at it."
"Comes with the bar."
He picks up the glass. Resumes polishing.
I sit at his bar with the bourbon and watch him work and think about the new vocabulary I have to learn. Want her, don't need her. The grammar of a marriage you build instead of inherit.
"Sam."
"Yeah."
"Autumn."
He goes still for half a second. Then keeps polishing. Doesn't look up.
"What about her?"
"She told Summer she's going to try to move to Chicago in January. Did you know?"
"She has been hinting."
"How are you feeling about that?"
He thinks. Sam takes a long time with important questions and he's doing it now.
"I'm feeling like a man whose life is about to get less quiet."
"Ha, with Autumn that is completely accurate."
"I don't move fast, Colt. Autumn knows that. We have had two coffees and one walk along the lake and she hasn't asked me for anything I'm not ready to give. She's the most patient woman I have ever met. The slow part is something we have agreed on."
"Good."
"You ask because?"
"Because she's family. I'm keeping track."
He looks up. The smallest curve of a smile.
"Welcome to the bar, Bennet."
"Thank you, Sam."
We drink in silence. He pours me a second one.
The room starts to fill up. Sam goes to take other orders.
I don't move. I sit at the bar and watch his club come alive around me.
It'll keep coming alive, with my wife in the corner at her stool, my best friend in the front row in front of his future, and Lucia at her mother's hip naming all of us as we walk through the door.
I'm going to be one of those people now. The named ones.
The corner-lady's husband. Uncle Cowboy if I'm unlucky. Whatever Lucia decides.
I'm going to take whatever name she gives me.
I'm going to wear it.