Page 23 of Takedown

His eyes came up.

"'Your weight's on your heels,'" I quoted. "'Eat the egg.' 'He can't skip the shifts, Pemberton.'"

"That's coaching, chemistry, and manners."

"Where I'm from, that's three love letters," I said — meant it to land like a joke, built it like a joke, and heard it leave my mouth like the truth, and there it was, out on the table between the wreckage of two Hungry Man Specials, the most honest thing either of us had said with our mouths all season.

Grayson went very still. Not the flinch-still. The other one — the mat-still, the held-position still, three seconds in an empty room still.

"Danny."

"Eat your pie," I said. "It's from this week."

And he looked at me for one more second — taking the second look, always taking it, and this time I held it, all the way, didn't look at my fork, didn't look at the carousel, let it land and burn and stay — and then Doris appeared with the check and asked if we were paying together or separate.

"Together," we said. Both of us. Same beat.

Doris looked at us a moment longer than the question needed.

"Huh," she said, and walked off, and I'd swear on the Ledger she was smiling.

The pie came. The pie was, against every law of that carousel, genuinely good, and we slowed down over it the way you do when neither of you wants the table to end.

"Ask me something," he said. "You've been sitting on questions for seven weeks. I can hear them. It's like sharing a booth with a filing cabinet."

So I asked the one I'd been carrying longest. "Why do you wrestle?"

I watched it land somewhere real. He turned the fork over. "Because Whitfields wrestle," he said. "That's the true answer, which is different from a good one." A beat. "Ask me why I got up at five forty to fix your setups. Better question. Rounder."

"Why'd you—"

"No idea," he said, fast, honest, and laughed at himself, and it was the second-best thing I heard all night. "Genuinely none. I lay awake planning it like a lecture. My whole life is inherited reasons, Danny — the blazer has a reason, the seat at the table has a reason, the bow tie has a reason — and the one thing I've done all year with no reason attached is get up in the dark to make you harder to beat. In a wrestle-off. Against me." He pointed the fork at me. "You're a strategic catastrophe. I want that acknowledged."

"Acknowledged." My chest was doing something I let it do. "You want to hear my true answer? Why I wrestle?"

"Badly."

"My mom." I hadn't planned it. The diner pulled it, or the pie did, or he did. "She drove me to every practice for seven years. Falcon with a rusted door, February, five a.m., engine you had to talk to. She'd sit in the lot the whole time because driving home and back wasted gas. Two hours in a cold car with a paperback and a thermos, every morning, for a sport she never once understood the rules of." The carousel turned behind him. "She got sick my sophomore year. State final was the last match she saw. I wrestle because — " and I heard my voice do the thing it does, go flatter the truer it gets, my family's tell, we armor down instead of up — "because it's the thing she paid for. The gas. That's the true answer."

Grayson didn't say sorry. This is the part I need you to understand about why everything after happened. Every person at Ashworth who'd learned about my mother had said sorry, the word doing what the word does, closing the subject like a lid.

He said: "What was she reading?"

"What?"

"Two hours in the car, every morning. The paperbacks. What did she read?"

And the diner went kind of bright and watery for a second, because nobody had ever asked me one single thing about her that wasn't the sickness — and I told him. Westerns. Louis L'Amour, the whole rack from the drugstore, cowboys on every cover, and she'd read the good parts out loud on the drive home doing all the voices, and Grayson Whitfield sat in a mustard booth at eleven p.m. listening to me do my mother doing a gunslinger, laughing in the right places, asking follow-ups, keeping her alive in a diner for twenty minutes, and I thought:

Oh no.

That was the whole thought. Clear as a whistle. Oh no.

* * *

He drove us back the long way. Neither of us mentioned it was the long way.

November had emptied the roads and the heater ticked and the radio played something neither of us chose, low, and the whole car was full of the thing we weren't saying — it rode with us like a third passenger, taking up room, breathing our air. Outside, the last of the leaves came apart in the headlights. Route 12, then River Road, then the covered bridge, dark red gone black in the dark, and he slowed for it the way everybody slows for it, and inside the bridge, for three seconds, the world was just wooden walls and headlights and us.