Page 49 of Second Alarm
"I don't know why I needed to tell you that."
"I think," Kevin says slowly, "I needed to hear it."
"Okay."
We split the check. Kevin wants to pay; I say no, which I say with the specific inflection that makes men stop insisting, and Kevin, to his credit, stops. We walk to the parking lot, and hewalks me to my car, which I allow, and I shake his hand at the door — the dorkiest thing anybody has done in the parking lot of an Italian restaurant— and I thank him for the evening and watch him walk to his Subaru… Bruce.
I don't drive home to my mother's house.
I drive to Cal's apartment.
Cal, for reasons nobody has fully explained, requests a post-date debrief after every first date he's responsible for setting up. He's done this since I was sixteen, because he feels invested in the pick, because he thinks his pick is going to stick, because he thinks he's good at this. He isn't. He once accidentally set me up with a married man. He still does it.
I pull up at Cal's apartment building. His door is unlocked — a thing I've yelled at him about since his first apartment — and I let myself in.
Ty is on the couch.
Cal is at the other end. There's a Mariners game on. Ty is in a gray hoodie — possibly the same gray hoodie — with one foot on the coffee table, holding a beer. He looks up when I come in, and his face, for a half second before he controls it, does something.
I stop in the doorway.
"How'd it go," Cal asks.
"It went."
"Okay, that's a — that's a weird — "
"It went, Cal."
"He was nice?"
"He was nice."
"Nice," Cal says, the way a man says a word when he's heard it too many times.
"There's no but, Cal."
"Hanna. There's always a but."
I sit down in the armchair across from the couch — not the couch, not tonight, not for any amount of money — and kickoff my flats under the coffee table. Ty doesn't look at me. He's watching the Mariners. The Mariners are losing. The Mariners are always losing. His grip on the beer bottle isn't precisely relaxed.
"He was on time. He was well-dressed. He told a long story about his car and called the waitress champ."
"Champ?" Cal winces.
"Twice."
"Hanna."
"Cal."
"Dealbreaker?" Ty asks from the couch, without looking up.
"Not the only thing."
"What was the main thing," Cal says.
I look at Ty. Ty doesn't look up. I look back at my brother.
