“Noah? Mr. Safety?”
“He was eighteen. Hormones are a hell of a drug.” Griffin leans in, his voice dropping an octave. “He forgot the parking brake. They were in the back seat. Things were… progressing. Until the structural integrity of the back bench gave way under the rhythm of the moment.”
I choke on a chip. “Griffin, no.”
“Piper,yes. The seat collapsed into the trunk. And because Noah’s foot hit the gear shift during the panic, he knocked the car out of park. They rolled twenty feet down the incline and wedged the front bumper directly into a massive ‘Welcome to Town’ sign.”
I am vibrating with the effort not to scream. “Did he get out?”
“He couldn’t. The seat had him pinned. He had to call me from Tiffany’s phone at two in the morning because his own was trapped under the collapsed bench. I had to drive up there with a crowbar and a flashlight.”
I put my face in my hands. “Please tell me she was at least dressed.”
“She was wearing his track jersey. He was wearing… well, defeat. I had to pry the seat off him while the local deputy stood there with a notepad, asking if he’d been operating the vehicle safely. Noah just looked at him and said, ‘Officer, I wasn’t even operating the vehicle.’”
Griffin shakes his head, the memory finally breaking his stoic expression.
“He didn’t talk to me for a month. Not because I saw him like that, but because I had one of those old disposable cameras in my truck, and I took a photo of the seat before I helped him out.”
“You still have it?”
“In a secure vault,” Griffin says, his eyes glinting. “It’s my retirement plan.”
He stops folding to glance at me. I can see the memory playing on his face. “Your parents fed me six days out of seven that year.”
I know this story. “Mom always said you were the easiest guest she ever had.”
“She made me call home every time I stayed past dinner, which was every time.” He pauses, lost in a memory. “Every time I called, my grandmother asked if I’d eaten. I said yes. She said good. That was the conversation.”
I think about younger Griffin walking two streets over every afternoon. Sitting at our kitchen table doing homework while my house exploded with its usual noise. He chose the noisy house over the quiet one. Every single day.
“You’re basically my family,” I say, and then, because it feels like it needs to be said properly: “A good version of it.”
He picks up the bag and starts putting the folded piles in.
“Same,” he says, looking at me.
The teenager is gone. The older man has finished his chapter. The machines have gone quiet.
“Escalators,” Griffin mutters after a minute.
“I was eleven. The timing is everything.”
“The timing,” he repeats, like this explains every single thing wrong with my personality.
He picks up both bags. “Gerald knows.”
I stand up. “Gerald is a penguin.”
“He’s trustworthy, though.”
“He absolutely is,” I agree.
We push out into the evening, and I think about eighteen-year-old Griffin going to help his best friend at two in the morning, six-year-old Griffin needing walls, and the man walking next to me, who folded my underwear without making it a weird thing.
Same family.
Yeah, I think we are.
