He does. He’s the worst texter in the world and refuses to use any punctuation, which I regularly annoy him about.
“How’s South Carolina?” he asks, changing the subject as I walk out the automatic doors of the emergency room, waving goodbye to Kwame, the elderly security guard, who absolutely could not do anything if there was an actual emergency.
“North Carolina,” I correct him. “And it’s good. I’ve got a new roommate.”
“Roommate?” he asks, incredulous. “I thought after the bad roommate situation in college, you refused to do roommates anymore.”
I had…which made my offer to Stevie even more of a surprise.
“He had a booger wall,” I say.
“Who didn’t?”
Evan decidedly didnothave a booger wall, but he was a complete slob, and we shared a room growing up, which is howI turned into a clean freak minimalist. How his wife, Kate, stays with him, I’ll never know.
“So, who’s the roommate?” Evan asks. In the background, I hear the sliding door to his deck opening and closing. It’s dinner time here, which means Clara must have just gotten home from school in Montana and is probably bouncing off the walls in their house.
I can perfectly picture the view. The aspens and cottonwoods just starting to change color. The dusting of white on the peaks of the mountains in the distance. The sky so big you can’t ever imagine it stopping. The way everything out there feels so endless. Irememberthat view. It’s seared in my brain, carved on the marrow of my bones, even though I hadn’t seen it all that often. At least, not from that particular house. The one Mom finally bought herself when I went off to college. The one she only lived in for a few months before she got sick, and only for a few more months before she had to be hospitalized. The one she left to Evan when she died, like she knew I would never be able to live there in the place she was dying.
And she was right. In fact, I’ve managed to hardly return there at all.
“Jack?” My brother’s voice pulls me from my memories, the ones that feel like a tender bruise still, all these years later.
“Sorry, got distracted,” I say, unlocking my Jeep and climbing in. It’s old, the first car I ever bought myself, but I haven’t been able to get rid of it, despite the thousands of miles I’ve put on it. “Stevie.”
“Sounds like a porn star name.”
“She’s not, as far as I know.”
“Oh, I was thinking it was a man.”
“A female Stevie isn’t a porn star name?”
“Nah, only a male porn star from the seventies,” he responds. “So, how’d you end up with a roommate?”
The unseasonable chill has burned off with the last of the storms, leaving the evening pleasantly warm for mid-September. The chill brought with it the first of the change in the leaves, so the drive from the hospital is filled with shades of burnt orange and fiery red interspersed with the green trees on the mountains. It’s pretty here, prettier than I would have guessed, having only spent time in the eastern part of the state before. This place feels grounded, steady.
“A tree fell through her roof,” I say, flipping on my blinker to turn right.
“Ah, the classic.”
“She lived in an Airstream and a tree fell through the roof. She was my patient one of my first nights at the hospital.”
“Scandal,” Evan says.
“It’s fine. I talked to my supervisor about it,” I tell him. “Anyway, I ran into her a few days later, and she didn’t have anywhere to go, so I offered her the second bedroom.”
Evan is quiet for a moment, and I can almost hear the gears in his head turning.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says.
I stop at a red light and stare at the speaker where my aux cord is connected, like I can see him through it. “No, tell me.”
“I’m just surprised, that's all.”
“Why?”
