"I could talk to him," Soren says.
"Absolutely not."
"I'm just saying. Brother to whatever I'm."
"You aren't going to brother-to-whatever-you-are your way out of fifteen years of guilt-shaped aggression. He'd respect it and then he'd put you through the glass too. That's how he tells you he likes you."
"Your family communicates exclusively through assault."
"And tourtière. Assault and tourtière." The corner of his mouth goes and the warmth that usually chases it's there. I can feel it start. Tonight it stalls. Not gone. Stalled. Like a signal trying to reach me through glass that wasn't there a week ago. What scares me isn't the glass but how precisely I can trace its outline. Every accommodation he's made for me tonight laid over it like a blueprint. The water. The curtains. The waiting. Iknow the shape because I grew up inside it. My mother built one and I lived in it for eighteen years. I loved it and I left it, and now I'm sitting across from a man who builds the same thing with his hands without being asked. The question is no longer what it was in my kitchen two weeks ago. The question has changed.
He watches me a beat too long. "You don't talk about them much. The brothers."
"There's not much that translates. You'd have to have been in the house."
"Tell me about the house."
"It's small. Three boys in a small house and a mother who ran it like a clock because one of her boys needed it to be a clock. She figured that out before anyone told her there was a reason." The water sits in my reach. I don't drink it. I'm aware of not drinking it, and I'm aware that he's aware. "We ate at six. Not six-fifteen. Six. The forks went down the same way every night. The door got checked twice, by her, out loud, so I'd hear it and not have to do it myself. She did my counting for me for years before either of us knew that's what it was."
"She sounds like you."
"She's where I got it. Not the wiring. The managing of the wiring. She built the whole house into a shape I could live in and never once made me feel like that's what she was doing." The thing I'm describing is sitting on the bed across from me with a water he poured, curtains he closed, and a bag he squared. I keep my voice level and my eyes on the carpet because if I look up he'll read it. "That's the part nobody can teach. She just did it."
"And Matty?"
"Matty was fifteen, watching his mother bend the house around his little brother and not understanding why, and being a fifteen-year-old about it. He's spent the last fifteen years paying that back. Tonight was him paying it back with a forearm. He doesn't know another currency."
"Are you going to see them? The one free night."
"I'm going to sit in that kitchen and eat tourtière and let my mother run her clock around me for three hours. It's going to be the easiest I feel all series. That's the part I can't explain to anyone who didn't grow up in it. The thing that should feel like a cage is the only place the noise in my head goes quiet without me working for it."
"That doesn't need explaining. I'd take a place the noise goes quiet."
"You have one. You just have to sit still in full gear for twenty-two minutes to get there."
"It's a high price. I pay it." He reaches for the folded newspaper on the nightstand, the one that travels with him, creased to today's grid. "Seven down. I've been sitting on it since the bus."
"We're not doing the crossword."
"We could do the crossword."
"I know what you're doing."
"I'm doing a crossword."
"You're handing me a thing to put my hands on that isn't the pattern." It lands soft. Almost fond. The way it would land any other night. Any other night that's all it would be. Tonight my brother put his arm across my throat. I saw him be afraid of what he was doing and do it anyway. That's the grammar. The only grammar any of us were ever taught. The man across from me has learned the same grammar without growing up in the house. I don't know anymore if what I'm seeing is care or fluency.
"Is it working?" he asks.
"That's not the question."
"It's my question. Is it working."
"Yeah. It's working. It always works." I open my mouth. The next sentence is right there, fully formed, the one I've been carrying since the kitchen and the ropa vieja and the cat. I can'ttell if you care about me or if you're managing me, and I'm terrified they're the same thing. It sits on my tongue for three full seconds. I feel the shape of it. I feel the weight it would put into the room. I close my mouth. Let the sentence go back down where it lives. Saying it would make him answer, and whatever his answer is, I'd spend the rest of my life cataloguing it for evidence. So I say the other thing instead. "You're good at it. You're good at all of it." He hears a compliment. It's one. He takes it, because he should.
"Then let it work," he says. "Come here."
I go. The body wants him even on the nights the rest of me is somewhere small. He takes me down onto the bed and folds himself around me with that care that has a hundred hours in it. His hands find every place I'm wound and start letting it out. It's good. So close to perfect that the distance between close and perfect is the loneliest stretch of carpet in the world.
