Page 29 of Take the Fall
“You’re making the face. The one that costs you nothing and says everything.” He glanced back, just enough to land it. “Long enough across a desk from you. I can read it through the back of my own head now.”
I hung my coat on the hook by the door, the one I’d hung it on every night for weeks, and the ordinariness of it sat wrong against the smell of a cooked meal. He’d done the kitchen too. Properly, not the surface tidy of a man burning an afternoon.Counters cleared. The week’s mail squared in a stack by the toaster. A man with nowhere the suspension would let him be, building order out of the one square of ground still under his hand.
These last evenings I’d come up those stairs braced, out of a habit I couldn’t shake, for the other version of this kitchen. A few nights back it had been the bad one: him at this table at two in the morning, gone and gray, the bottle at his elbow, and me capping it and walking him to bed. Each climb since, the dread had come up the stairs with me and been wrong. Sober. Upright. Tonight a pan on the stove. I hadn’t let myself put weight on it. I put a little on it now.
“What is it,” I said.
“Stew. Allegedly.” He turned the heat down. “There was a recipe. I followed roughly two-thirds of it and improvised the rest, which is, I’m told, the whole of cooking.” He pulled two bowls down from the shelf. Set them on the counter. Two, without a word about the two, without asking what time I’d be in. “Sit. You look like the day went twelve rounds with you.”
“It didn’t.”
“Sit anyway. I made enough for a precinct.”
I sat. The chair I sat in was mine the way the hook was mine, by weeks of habit, and across the small table his chair sat empty and waiting, which was the right way round for once. He ladled out two bowls and brought them over and put one in front of me and folded into the other seat, and for a second neither of us did anything but let the steam come up between us.
“Eat,” he said. “Tell me it’s edible. Lie if you have to. You’re a terrible liar, so I’ll know, but lie anyway.”
I ate. It was good. Better than good, which surprised me, and the surprise must have made the desk-face again, because he pointed the spoon at me.
“There,” he said. “That. Whatever that was. Hold onto it. I’m going to need the morale.”
“It’s good.”
“Don’t oversell. You’ll strain something.” But the corner of his mouth had gone, the small involuntary tug he could never quite govern, and he looked down into the bowl to hide it, and didn’t quite.
“There’s bread,” he said. “I didn’t make the bread, before you give me the look. There are limits. I bought the bread like a normal person.” He got up, crossed to the counter, came back with half a loaf on a board and a knife, and set it between us.
I half rose to lift the empty pot off the heat before it caught. He waved me back down with the knife.
“Sit. I cooked. The least you can do is let me.” He cut the bread himself and pushed a piece across. “You’re a difficult man to do a kindness for, you know that. I put a plate in front of you and inside a minute you’re up hunting for something to carry or scrub. I’m beginning to think you don’t know how to be on the receiving end of anything.”
That landed closer than he could have known, and he saw it land, because he saw everything, and he had the grace to look back down at his bowl and let me off it.
We ate a while. The fridge hummed. Down in the building a door went and feet took the stairs. The flat had a quiet to it tonight that it hadn’t had in those first weeks, when the two of us had moved around each other measuring the distance like men sharing a cell. That quiet had been work. This one wasn’t. The same four rooms. Something had shifted, and nothing had moved, and I had no clean word for the difference and didn’t reach for one.
“I had a letter today,” he said, into the bowl. Light. Too light. “Form language. The kind they run off a template and don’t sign with a real name.”
I waited.
“The review’s still open. That’s the whole content. Three paragraphs to say a thing they could’ve said in four words.” He turned his spoon over. “Weeks yet. Could go either way, they want me to understand. As if I’d forgotten.”
“They have to send those.”
“I know what they have to do.” Not sharp. Tired. He set the spoon down. “It’s the sitting that does it. I’ve read everything in this apartment, Luke. Including the back of the cereal. Twice. I cleaned the grout with a toothbrush yesterday like a man doing penance.” A short breath that wanted to be a laugh and didn’t make it. “Eight years I had somewhere to be by seven in the morning. Now I’ve got a kettle and a list of chores I finish before ten and a whole day after it with my own hands in my lap.”
He got up. He couldn’t sit with a thing once it had been said; he had to move it off with his body. He took the carafe to the tap, filled it, brought it back, topped up a glass that didn’t need topping up. Restlessness with the manners of a host.
“You want to hear the genuinely pathetic part,” he said, standing, looking down at me. “Some mornings I miss the bullpen so much I could put a fist through that wall. The bad coffee. Saunders being wrong about everything at volume. Reid and his stickers.” He set the carafe down. “Three years I’d have told you the job was the one thing in my life that was only ever mine. The one nobody else got a vote on. Turns out the second it was gone, I found out how much of me was holding onto it with both hands.”
“It’s not gone,” I said.
“It’s gone enough.” He sat back down. The performance had thinned right out of him; what was left was plain. “Sorry. You’ve had a day and I’m using you for a wall to bounce off. Tell me something that isn’t this. Tell me a Saunders story. Tell me the man’s still wearing the tie with the gravy on it.”
“He got a new tie.”
“No.”
“Same stain. Different tie.”
