“Caleb.” He looked at me, and there was no dodge in it, which was its own answer. “I'll handle it.”
And here's the part I'd come back to later, when it mattered. There was a version of me — the one who came home at thirty-one needing every load-bearing fact in any room he stood in, because not-knowing was how people he loved ended up in the ground — and that man does not walk out of that office without the rest of it.
I didn't push.
“Tell me if it gets bigger than that,” I said. Lower. Not a question.
“It won't.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He nodded. We both knew what bigger meant, and neither of us said it, because saying it out loud in a clean room with a wall of awards we'd actually earned would've made it real — and I wanted it to stay not-real a while longer. Because for the first time in my grown life I had something across town behind a white fence that I did not want this old dark thing within a mile of. So, I let my father carry it alone, told myself I was honoring a clean man's right to clean up after himself, and walked out.
Tuck foundme at the bench mid-afternoon, sideways and grinning, a coffee in his good hand and the grinder scar still pink across the other.
“Fellas.” He pitched it across the shop so the whole bay caught it. “Anybody seen Dog lately? Real Dog. Word is he went and bought himself a little house with a little fence and a pretty little nurse right across the road, and now he comes to work,goes home, pulls the drawbridge up behind him. Man's turned hermit on us.” He leaned on the bench like he held the lease. “You embarrassed of us, Dog? Keeping her behind glass? Or are we just never gonna get a look at her?”
I ran the bead to the end of the seam. “You done?”
“Not even close.”
I cut the arc and pushed the helmet up. “She's not for hiding, Tuck,” I said it plain, because it was plain. “She's for being ready for.”
And the grin came off him, slowly, like something coming untacked. He set his coffee down on the bench. He didn't say a word, which from Tuck is the same as a whole speech.
“Ready for” is not a thing a man says about a good time. It's what he says when he's started quietly building toward something and hasn't admitted it to a soul, his own self most of all — and I'd just said it out loud to a brother who'd known me since we were prospects with grease to the elbows and no notion of what was coming. He'd watched me leave. He'd watched me come home and charm half the county again without it costing me a thing. I watched him take the one word that didn't fit any of that, and turn it over, and put it away to bring out later — the way the club puts away a thing that matters.
Then he picked the coffee back up and tipped it at me.
“Bring her to the roast, then,” he said. “When you're ready.”
“When I'm ready.”
He went back to his bench, but he was gentler on the radio the rest of the afternoon, and twice I looked up to find him watching me work with something on his face that wasn't a joke. I let him have it. He'd get there; they all would. I was a few weeks ahead of the whole club on this, and only because I happened to live across from her.
I'd beenunder the showerhead long enough to sluice the shop off me and most of the day with it when the knock came, soft and unfamiliar.
I came out with a towel hitched at my waist and water still running off me, figuring it for a kid selling something or a brother who'd been sent, and opened my front door to Sophia Walker on my porch in the last of the daylight. Home from wherever the morning had taken her
Whatever she'd come to say left her the second the door opened. Her eyes went over me once, fast and clinical — the nurse in her cataloguing before the rest of her caught up, shoulder, the old scar down my ribs, the forearm — and then the clinical part finished its sweep and she just kept looking. The color came up her neck like a tide, partially hidden by her hair, but enough that I could see it.
“You're—” She stopped. “I came to say hi,” she said after a moment. “And thank you. For the date. Which I already thanked you for at the time, so this is additional thanks, which nobody actually needs, that's a known fact about thanks, they don't compound?—”
“Sophia.”
“—and you've clearly just — anyway. Hi.”
I stood back off the door and tipped my head at the room behind me, and she came in, because she'd talked herself too far in to do anything else, and got three steps into my front room before she stopped to take the measure of it — the one book, the bare table, a man who lives alone on purpose.
“This is a nice place,” she said, to the room, and something in her shoulders let go the second she'd landed a sentence that worked.
“Thanks.”
And then I caught her at it again — eyes coming off the bare wall and back to me and staying, frank as you like, before she remembered I had a face she might be expected to look at instead. I leaned on the doorframe and let her get all the way to the bottom of the look before I said it.
“You're gonna want to stop looking at me like that.”
Her eyes snapped up. “Like what?”
