Page 101 of Second Alarm
"It's what she thought."
"Was it true?"
"I don't know, Cal. I was twenty-three. I also didn't want to lose you. I thought if I waited, you'd come around. I thought if we were patient, we'd tell you eventually." I try to make the sentence come out. "I was wrong about the waiting. I was — I — "
"Ten years," Cal says.
"I know."
"Ten years of me being your best friend while you — "
"Yes."
"Get out, Brennan." His voice has gone flat, which is worse than the yelling. "I can't look at you. I can't look at my sister either. Hanna, take him. Go. I don't want anyone in my house."
"Cal — "
"Get out."
We get out.
On Cal's back stairs I sit down because my knee has given out for real. My lip is still bleeding. Hanna is one step below me, looking up. The sun is gone. The porch light is on its timer. In the light, her eyes are dry and very clear.
"I'm going to tell him the rest tomorrow. Go to his door alone." She holds my gaze. "I need you to go home. Not fix this. Let me fix this."
"Hanna."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I know."
"I love you, Hanna."
"I know, Ty."
"I'm going to keep saying it."
"Okay."
"I'm saying it now because I'm — because — "
"I know."
Cal Larsen was at my dad's wake, because my dad died of a heart attack on a Tuesday and my mother called Cal's mother, Cal got in his truck and drove four hours to be at the funeral home. He didn't say a thing for the first two hours. He stood at the back in a black tie his mother had ironed, holding a paper plate of food he didn't eat. Then he drove me home. Then he sat on my couch until five in the morning. He drove me to the diner for eggs. He didn't ask me how I was. He didn't try to fix it. He just stayed.
Cal Larsen drove twelve hundred miles to help me move out of an apartment I should never have moved into, in the spring of 2020, when the woman I'd been seeing for eight months turned out to be married to a contractor in Boise. I called him at two a.m. He was on the road by three. He showed up at my door at six p.m. with a U-Haul, a six-pack, and a roll of paper towels he'd bought at a gas station in Pendleton because, he said, you always need paper towels when a relationship ends. He didn't make a joke about her for weeks. The joke he eventually made wasn't at her expense. It was at the contractor's.
Cal Larsen asked me, years ago, on his porch, what I wanted to do with my life. He asked because nobody else had asked me. He asked the way Cal asks anything — like a man prepared to sit on the porch until I answered. I told him I wanted to come back to Copper Ridge and be a firefighter because working a dead-end job outside of Boise wasn’t it. He told me he'd already started making the calls. The calls included the Chief, who he played pickup basketball with on Sundays, and Big Jim, who he drank with on Fridays, and a man at the city named John, who Cal had once helped get a fridge up three flights of stairs. The job offer came through in eight days. It came through because Cal Larsen had been working on it for eight months without telling me.
Hanna reaches up and puts her thumb on my lip and wipes off the blood. Goes back into Cal’s she's no longer welcome in to get her laptop and her coat. I walk down the back stairs with a grinder in my hand and a split lip and the taste of kung pao grease in the air, and I drive home.
In my kitchen I set down the grinder and put my forehead on the counter and stand there for a long time.
The worst thing I've been afraid of, for the last ten years, has happened.
I'm still standing.
