Page 31 of Take the Fall
I didn’t answer that, because there was no answer to it that wasn’t either a lie or the truth, and I’d run out of room for both.
The kitchen had gone very still around the two of us.
“Are you telling me something,” he said.
Three feet of table. Both our hands up where I could see them, his flat on the wood, mine around the cooling bowl. I was aware of every inch of the distance and aware that he was too.
“Not right now,” I said.
He read the qualifier the way he read everything. Notno.Notthere’s nothing.The careful man’s answer, and he took it for what it was, which was a door left open the width of a hand.
“Not right now,” he said back. Testing the weight of it. “But a now exists. In that sentence. Somewhere.”
“There’s a thing I’ll tell you when it’s a thing I can tell.” Every word of it true, which was the only way I could get it out. “And it won’t run as long as it’s running now. That’s as far as I’ll go tonight, and I shouldn’t have gone that far.”
He sat with it. His jaw worked once, the small flex that on him meant he was holding a sentence back. Then he chose not to hold it.
“Okay,” he said. And, lower, like it cost him: “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything.”
“That,” he said, “I don’t believe for a second. But I’ll let you have it.”
He stood and gathered the bowls before I could move for them, and ran the tap, and I got up because two men don’t sit while one washes, not in a kitchen this size, not anymore. I tookthe towel off the rail. He washed, I dried, and the kitchen was narrow enough that we’d long since stopped charting the other one’s position in it; we just moved, the way you move in a room your body has learned.
He passed me a bowl. Reached past me for the next without looking, the counter too short for two grown men to share with any grace, and the back of his wet hand dragged across mine.
Not deliberate. The space was small. It would have meant nothing in a wider kitchen.
He didn’t take the hand back. He looked at it, where it had crossed mine, and then he looked up at me, and the look had a question in it that the whole evening had been circling.
I kept my hand where it was. I didn’t turn it over and I didn’t pull it back. I held it exactly where the day had found it, the way I’d held my hands still once before at the edge of a bed, working harder than the stillness ever showed to do the right small nothing.
He was close. Close enough that I could see the day in him up near, the gray worn under the eyes, the careful hair given up on hours ago, the hand that hadn’t moved off mine. His breath had gone shallow. So had mine, and I knew he could see it; reading a held breath was the easiest thing in the world for a man like him, and there was nowhere in a kitchen this size to take it where he wouldn’t.
“You could,” he said. Low. Not finishing it. He let the two words stand there with everything they didn’t say loaded behind them, and his eyes stayed on mine, asking the rest.
“I know,” I said.
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not.” It was the most I’d let out the door all night, and it cost me, and he heard the cost. “It’s not right now. There’s a difference, and tonight it’s the only thing I’ve got that’s true.”
His thumb moved, once, where his hand lay against mine. The smallest pressure. Then he understood what I was holding and why, even without the shape of it, and he eased the weight of his hand off mine, slow, the way you set down a thing you mean to pick up again.
The tap ran. Down the building somebody’s television came on through the floor.
“Right,” he said, after a moment. He turned back to the basin. His voice had gone slightly rough and he steadied it on the next word. “There’s one more in the pot. I’ll wash it. Go sit before you fall over standing up.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re swaying, Hawley. Go.”
I hung the towel on the rail and didn’t go, and he didn’t make me, and we stood there a foot apart with our hands not touching and the dish water going cold in the basin, and it was the closest thing to peace I’d had since the night on the kitchen floor weeks ago that started all of it.
Then he pulled the plug. The water went. He dried his hands on his own jeans, which he knew annoyed me, and did it looking at me so I’d know he knew.
“Goodnight, Luke,” he said.
