"You're late," he says without turning around.
"Traffic was a bitch."
"No traffic between here and anywhere worth going."
I lean against the doorframe. "Funny. That's exactly why I left." A lie, and I know it the second it leaves my mouth.
It gets him. He turns, and Jesus Christ, his face. The same jawline, matured. The same mouth set somewhere between a smirk and a challenge. His eyes are the color of summer sky, and right now they're looking at me like I'm a problem he's already solved.
"Look at you," he says. "All grown up and still full of shit."
"Look at you. Still an asshole."
"Some things don't change." He turns back to the workbench. "Funeral's at eleven. Reverend Phillips. Burial at Oak Hill. After that, paperwork at the county clerk's office. I made copies of everything you need to sign. Twenty minutes, tops."
His voice is flat, practiced. He's been rehearsing this. The cold distance between us is manufactured, and we both know it, and we both pretend we don't.
"I appreciate the efficiency," I say.
"Don't mention it." He folds a map with morecare than the task requires. "Mom's been asking when you'd get here for two days."
"How is she, really?"
That stops him. His hands go still on the map. For a second I think he might actually answer — might drop the act and tell me the truth about what it's been like watching his mother waste away while his stepfather drops dead in his sleep like the universe has a sick sense of humor.
The moment passes. His jaw sets, and he goes back to folding. "You saw her. You tell me."
"I'm asking you."
"And I'm telling you to use your eyes." He sets the folded map on a stack of others. "She's dying, Trevor. It's not a mystery. The doctors gave her eight months, six months ago. She's on oxygen at night. She can't walk to the mailbox without stopping twice. So yeah. That's how she is."
The anger in his voice is fresh, and under it is something raw I recognize because I've carried a version of it myself — the fury of being frustrated with someone you love and having nowhere to put it.
"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it.
"Don't." He shakes his head. "Just don't, okay? You didn't come back for her. You came back because Wade died and there's paperwork. So do the paperwork and then go back to wherever the hell you've been for the last decade. We'll be fine."
We both know that's a lie. Nothing about this is fine. Eileen is wasting away in an armchair. Cole is holed up in a garage surrounded by maps and clippings like a man building a case against the world. And I'm standing in adoorway feeling every one of those ten years like stones in my pockets.
And all the coward in me wants to do is run back to Knoxville.
"My old bedroom?" I ask.
The house has two bedrooms upstairs. One with a wide twin bed we shared until I was nineteen and couldn't take it anymore — couldn't lie next to him in the dark, listening to him breathe, feeling the heat of him a hand's width away and knowing I could never close the gap. So I moved into the smaller room, the one with the secondhand bed, and we stopped sharing a room and started sharing a silence that lasted until the day I left.
"Yeah," Cole says. "Figured you wouldn't want to sleep in the same bed."
"I wouldn't."
"Then we agree on something. Miracle."
I push off the doorframe. "I'm going to get my bag."
"Don't let me stop you."
Back through the kitchen. Eileen's still in her chair, eyes closed now, breathing shallow. The blanket rises and falls with the fragile mechanics of lungs that don't work like they should. I stand in the doorway and watch her sleep, and the guilt arrives on schedule. I should have come back sooner. Should have called more. Should have been the kind of son who doesn't disappear for a decade because his heart is broken and he's too much of a coward to fix it.
Outside, gravel crunches under my boots as I haul my duffel from the truck bed. The sky's gone from dusk to proper dark, and the trees at the back of the property are black cutouts against purple. The house windows glowyellow. From the road, it probably looks warm in there. Inviting. The kind of place where a family lives a normal life.
