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I didn’t press any further. He deserved his privacy.
“It’s not your fault.” Jesse let out a soft sigh. “I suppose there’s nothing more to say, but I think you deserve to know why. It’s… it’s part of why I’ve been struggling to open up to you. To talk to you. A few years ago, I answered a call for firefighters at the station. The address… it sounded familiar, but I didn’t place it until I was standing there with a hose hooked up to the hydrant that this was my best friend’s home.”
“Did… did they make it?”
Jesse only shook his head.
“I’m so sorry.”
I put my beading supplies down, thinking that Jesse’s mental anguish was far more important than some pair of earrings right now. They could wait.
As I turned to look at Jesse, he had turned his face away from me. I wondered why. Perhaps he subscribed to the idea that it wasn’t manly to be seen crying, but this was the loss of a friend he clearly hadn’t dealt with very well yet. I didn’t think that there was anything wrong with him to be mourning a friend so dearly. After all, the tone in which he spoke about his friend told me all I needed to know.
They had been close, and this death had been incredibly hard for him to process.
“Is there anything I can do to make it a little easier?” I offered.
I knew there probably wasn’t much, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. If I didn’t offer, it looked horrible. If I did, at least he knew that I was trying to do something to help him through this.
He shook his head.
“No.” His tone remained unusually even. “It was a few years ago. Talking about it still hurts, but I have processed much of the grief… I think. It just shattered me. Couldn’t work for a few months after that. Not at the station, anyway.”
I walked over to where he sat and put my hand on his shoulder, gently. He may not like that I was more of the touchy-feely type, but he clearly needed the support. Even if he was still struggling with how to go on with his life without this friend, he had made a path for himself. I only had to wonder if it made him happy at all.
“Are you happy with how your life has turned out since your friend’s death?”
The shocked silence that sat between us said it all to me. He may not have known what he wanted out of life, but I didn’t think he was getting anywhere in life with how he was acting. Perhaps I was wrong. But there was nothing more obvious about his life than the fact that he appeared to be stuck in a rut.
“Why do you ask that?” Jesse asked, finally turning to face me.
He wasn’t tearful, as I had thought he might be. Instead, his face was simply pale. This topic was clearly hard for him to stomach. Something that made a firefighter queasy was nothing to laugh at.
“Because I’ve had plenty of time to notice what you do when you’re home,” I replied. “Jesse, you kind of live in a rut. You have the same foods for each meal that I’ve seen you cook, and it all seems to come out of a bag or box. The only thing you’re reallydoing is making sure that you get calories. I suppose that’s a good thing, but you don’t appear toenjoylife. At all.”
Jesse simply shrugged.
“I was like this before his death, too,” he revealed. “I never really saw a need to cook a lot of food at four-thirty in the morning. I eat a small breakfast here, have a better one at the fire station later in the day, and lunch and dinner are all foods that could easily fill me up so that I can go.”
“I see.”
I moved back to the couch now. There was nothing more to say about his habits. If he was happy with them, then I didn’t think it was worth bugging him about them any longer.
“Do you ever visit them? I mean, like their grave?” I didn’t want to overstep, but he hadn’t shut me out so far.
He shook his head.
“If you wanted, I could make you something that you could leave there—I guess that would make more sense if your friend’s a woman. Or we could get flowers or something for them? Or a picture of their favorite animal or something?” I glanced at Jesse. “I’m not entirely sure what else to suggest, but I think it’d be… a sweet… gesture…”
As I trailed off into the end of the movie, Jesse simply walked out of the room. I didn’t follow after him. The fact that he was not yelling at me to stop talking or suggesting that I needed to take a page from his book and mind my own business was a good sign, but I worried that I had crossed a line all the same. I’d taken his nod as a willingness to continue the conversation, but maybe I’d misread him.
I sat back on the couch, sighing softly. Shortly after this, I heard the sounds of the front door opening, shutting, and locking. It sounded as though Jesse meant to be out for a while, since he had locked the door. That, or it was his habit to lock the door every time he left the house.
“Oh, Jesse Delaney. You’re a mystery,” I muttered. “I’ll figure you out soon enough. I promise you that.”
I shook my head before turning off the movie and putting on one of the many TV shows I watched while I was beading. If Jesse was going to let me have the living room all to myself, then it was only fair that I got to watch something that would allow me to focus more on my beading than the conversation I was having with him.
Especially now that he was no longer in the room.
