Page 14 of Take the Fall
His head came up slow, like it weighed more than it had this morning. His eyes found me on the second pass. Then he gave me the smile, the polished one, the one that had sold a hundred rooms on a man who wasn’t in them, and seeing it switch on over a face with nothing behind it was worse than if he’d wept.
“The Bear comes home,” he said. The words slid at the edges. “Long shift?”
“You’re bleeding.”
He turned his hand over on the table and considered it like a curiosity somebody had left him. The cut on his finger had scabbed and he’d picked it raw again, the skin around it angry, a thread of dried red down to the knuckle. He’d been worrying at it for hours. I could read the hours in it.
“Would you look at that,” he said.
I crossed the kitchen.
The bottle first. I lifted it out of his reach, capped it, set it up on the high shelf over the fridge where a sober man would have to want it and a drunk one would have to climb. He watched it go without a flicker, which told me how far down he’d got, because the Carlson I knew would have made it a bit, turned the taking-away into a routine to walk us both off the moment.
“That’s the good stuff,” he said. Mild. A flag stuck in soft ground and abandoned.
“It’s not, and you’re done with it.”
The kit was in the drawer by the sink. I’d put it there the morning after the glass, against a night I’d hoped not to have. I wet a cloth at the tap, warm, and crouched in front of his chair and took the hand. He let me. That was the measure of him tonight too. Carlson sober would sooner bleed than be tended. This one gave me the hand like it belonged to somebody he’d stopped speaking for.
I cleaned the cut. There’s a way that doesn’t drag, and a man taught it to me a long time back, in the third house they put mein, where he patched people for a living and showed a kid with split knuckles how to leave a wound better than he found it. The skin was hot. The hand shook, a small constant tremor he didn’t know he had, and I knew it now, and I pressed the cut shut under my thumb a breath past what it needed and held it there because the next thing wasn’t ready and the holding was.
He smelled of whiskey and a week of himself and, underneath, the cheap soap we both used, and that last one got in somewhere I didn’t have a guard up.
“You don’t have to,” he said, to the top of my head.
“I keep being told that.”
I wound the gauze on neat. Taped it. Set the hand back down soft, like it might come apart on the table, and got up off my knees before kneeling there turned into a sentence I’d have to finish.
Standing put a yard of air back between us, and the yard was nothing, the way it had been nothing for six weeks while I called it professional distance. Up close he was all wrong. The careful hair shoved up on one side. The gray worn in under his eyes. The mouth I’d spent a month teaching myself not to look at, gone soft and unguarded with the drink. I looked at it anyway. One second, maybe two. Then I made myself look at the kettle, which had never once made my chest do anything.
He looked at the white of the tape for a while.
I pulled the second chair out and sat. Slow, so the sitting wasn’t a thing. You keep a frightened man talking by giving him a quiet to talk into and staying clear of the middle of it, and I’d learned that the hard way in more rooms than I’d care to count. So I sat across from him at his ruined table and gave him the quiet, and he walked straight into it.
“I could just go,” he said, and the words came loose, unmoored, like he’d forgotten there was anyone to hear. “There’s a door. There’s always a door. Somewhere warm, my whole lifein a bag by the weekend, and they’d take me back. They’d be glad. They’d never let me forget the gladness, but they’d take me.”
He swept a hand at the room without lifting his head. The dishes, the dark, the cupboard the bottle had gone up into.
“A week of this,” he said. “You come home to a week of this and you’re too decent to say what you actually think of it. Of me.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
“I know what I’d think in your shoes. They handed me a problem with good hair and called it a partner, and the hair’s the only part still holding up.” He almost laughed and didn’t quite get there. “Don’t correct me. You’ll only lie to be kind, and you’re a terrible liar. It’s the best thing about you.”
I was, right then, lying to him about a folder across the city with his name turning the right way through it. I let the compliment stand.
I held still. The family was a country he’d never handed me the map to. Six weeks of partnership and all I’d had were the edges, the watch he played down, the shoes that gave the lie to the rest of him, things I’d filed and never opened. Now here was the border of it, slurred out at a wrecked table to a man he wasn’t sure was in the room.
“My father doesn’t push,” he said. “That’s the trick of him. He pulls. You don’t feel a hand. You feel the floor tilt, slow, year on year, and one day you look up and you’re standing exactly where he wanted, in the suit he wanted, and you can’t name the step where you agreed to it.” His good hand pressed flat to his sternum, like he was checking something still ran under there. “I got out once. It cost me everything I had to get out. And he’s pulling again and I am so tired, and the part I can’t say, the part that’s true. I’d lie down in the ground before I’d sit in that office. Some nights the ground’s ahead on points.”
The cold went down my back fast.
“No,” I said. Low. “You don’t get to put that in the room and have me sit across from it.”
“Relax. Figure of speech.” It wasn’t, and we both knew it wasn’t, and he batted it off with the bandaged hand. “Don’t do the face. I can’t see it but I can feel you doing it. The grave one.”
“You can’t see my face because you won’t look up. I’m right here.”
