Page 112 of Keep

Chad didn’t give him a second glance. Just another worker, another uniform, the background furniture of the federal district going about its Thursday. He was twenty feet past when the man called out behind him.

“Hey.”

Chad turned.

The man had stopped raking. Fifties, maybe. A weathered face—not hollowed out, just lived-in. He was leaning on the rake, studying Chad with an expression that was less do I know you and more I know exactly who you are and I’m deciding whether to say so.

“You’re the one from the speech,” the man said. Not a question.

Chad’s stomach did a small, involuntary thing. “Yeah.”

The man nodded. Slow. Considering. Then his face settled—not a smile exactly, but the look of a man who’d arrived at a conclusion he was comfortable with.

“Good for him,” the man said. “Good for both of you.”

“Thanks.”

“You have a good day, now.”

“You too.”

Chad walked on. Behind him, the rake resumed its steady rhythm—leaves being moved from where they were to where they belonged. He was almost out of earshot when the man’s voice carried one more time, easy and unhurried, not directed at him, but at someone else:

“Can’t complain.”

He saw Mac before Mac saw him.

Further west, past the Washington Monument, near the World War II Memorial, where the fountains were shut down for the season and the granite sat exposed without them. A maintenance crew—three people in Park Service jackets working on the drainage grates. One of them was Mac.

Chad stopped on the path.

His body knew before the brain confirmed it. The height, the shoulders, the way he carried his weight slightly forward, like he was always about to step into something. But the rest⁠—

Mac looked good. Not the qualified, considering-what-he’d-been-through version of good. Actually good. Better, maybe, than Chad had ever seen him—and that landed, because Chad had known Mac for three years and two of them had been the drugs, and before the drugs there’d been a version of Mac that Chad had loved but never seen clearly because he’d been too young and too hungry for someone to need him. The face had filled out. The hands gripping a section of pipe were steady. The hollows under the cheekbones—the ones Chad had traced with his thumb in the dark of stolen nights—were gone.

This was Mac without the wreckage. Mac, as he might have been all along, if the chemistry had gone differently.

Mac looked up. Saw him.

A beat. The crew kept working.

“Hey,” Mac said.

“Hey.”

Mac set the pipe down. Wiped his hands on his pants. Walked over.

“I saw you,” he said. “On the news. The speech.”

“Yeah?”

“You two look good together.” He said it plainly. No edge, no irony, no buried thing. Just an observation from a man who’d lost the right to an opinion about Chad’s life and knew it.

Chad looked at Mac’s hands. Steady. Clean nails.

“You look good, Mac.”

“Getting there.” Mac glanced back at the crew, the grates, the work. “Roy’s people set me up with this. It’s—I mean, it’s maintenance. It’s not⁠—”