Page 51 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

June

Bex’s couch is four feet eleven inches long. I am not, and haven’t slept in three days, and her apartment smells like the lavender candle she lights whenever somebody she loves is in trouble and there’s nothing else she can do.

Yesterday morning I watched the press conference live, knees pulled up, Bex beside me gripping my hand the whole way through. I watched a man who spent twenty years saying nothing stand at a podium with no notes. He put a lifetime’s reputation on the table in eleven minutes, for me, without once asking me to come home. He stood up there and called me honest. He told a room full of reporters about the follow-up question. He said take it up with me, directly — to a wall of cameras, in the voice I used to hear through a chat window at three in the morning. When it ended, Bex clicked the TV off and sat very still for a whole minute, the way you go quiet next to somebody who’s just heard something too big to talk about. Then she said she was officially out of ways to be neutral and would be resuming her opinions in the morning.

It’s the morning. The phone buzzes on the coffee table at nine-oh-two, and I already know before I look. It comes every night and now every morning, from a number I can’t answer and can’t block and can’t stop reading.

all fine. teddy tooth #2 is loose, he’s asking for advance payment. margot did the whole braid right and then messed up the back herself. no reply needed. — 14

Every message the same shape. The house report. The thing I invented, handed back to me one line a day, asking for nothing. That’s the part that finally breaks me open, on a Tuesday morning, on a too-short couch. He tried for fourteen months to get Juno to ask for something, and she never did, and now he’s doing it back. Loving me in my own language, at a distance I chose, with the patience of a man prepared to do it for years.

I put the phone down. Bex comes out of the kitchen with two mugs and her opinions, as promised.

“You left to protect them,” she says, handing me one, cross-legged on the couch arm, dead serious. “I never once argued with the why. But June — it’s done. He stood up in front of the entire continent and took the shame out of the story. There is nothing left to protect anybody from. So the only thing keeping you on my terrible couch is the oldest habit you own: leaving early and clean and calling it a favor to everyone.”

She watches me the way she watched me in a parking garage once, right before I told her everything.

“Here’s what I keep circling,” I say slowly, because I’m building it as I say it. “If I go back today, everyone will say it’s because of the podium. Because he was magnificent — and he was. But that’s not it. Bex, I’ve left every place I’ve ever lived a little early, packed light, two drawers, easy exit. I did it well because I never once, anywhere, wanted to stay badly enough to risk being left instead.” My hands are steady. My voice mostly. “I want to stay somewhere. I have wanted it since a five-year-old asked me to be there for the wake-ups. I’m not going back for Gus Vaughn, and I’m not going back because a podium gave me permission. I’m going back because it’s my house too, and I left my whole life in it, and I want it back.”

Bex is quiet for a second. Then she stands up, sniffs once, and claps her hands, briskly, decision made.

“Then get off my couch, get your suitcase, and go home. And June?” She’s already crying and pretending she isn’t. “Full report Sunday.”

I time it for after school, because the kids come first or none of it means anything.

The cab lets me out at the curb, and I stand there one breath with my suitcase — same suitcase, heavier by one rubber volcano. I don’t even get to the door. It bangs open and Teddy comes off the porch at a dead run, no coat, socks, screaming my name in two syllables. He hits me at full speed around the legs, and I go down on my knees on the cold walk and hold on.

“I KNEW IT.” He’s shouting directly into my ear. “I told Dad. Maiasaura comes BACK, it’s the whole entire thing about them, I did the waiting and I didn’t even cry every day—”

Margot is in the doorway. Coat off, arms folded, fence up, ten degrees of winter in her face. She makes me cross the whole walk and the steps to her, as is her absolute right.

“You left,” she says.

“I did. I thought it would protect you. I’d tell you I’m sorry, but you’d rather have the truth, so here it is — I’d probably do it again, and I’d be wrong again.”

She takes that in without comment, eyes on me the whole time. “The instructions were fine,” she says at last. “The back kept going crooked.”

“The back goes crooked when you do it alone. That’s the whole reason there’s two of us.”

Margot looks at me for one more long second. Then she steps out of the doorway, pulls the door wide in a gesture her grandmother would recognize, and hands down the family ruling.

“Correct,” she says. “Come inside. It’s cold.”

And past her shoulder, at the end of the hall, is Gus. Leaning against the kitchen doorframe like his knees quit at leaning distance, hair wrecked, dish towel over one shoulder. He’s looking at me with everything a man can carry on a face, and none of it held back.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi. I heard the wake-ups are at seven.”

“Seven sharp.” His voice comes apart in the middle of it. “We kept your squares open.”

I put the volcano back on the windowsill myself, first thing, before my coat is even off, and Margot watches me do it and says nothing, and everything.

Carol arrives at five with a casserole and no questions. She sets the dish on the counter. Then she takes my coat off the chair where I dropped it and hangs it on the far peg herself — my peg — like she’s putting a book back where it belongs. “Reheat at three-twenty-five,” she says. “Ovens run hot in this family.” Then, on her way past me, quietly, under the kitchen noise: “You’re the first woman I’ve ever watched walk out of this house to protect the people in it. My daughter would have liked you very much. Don’t do it again.” She pats my arm, twice, in exactly the spot Margot uses, and goes off to lose an argument with Teddy about dinosaurs.

That’s the whole trial. I’m sentenced to dinner.

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