Page 42 of Take the Fall
I sat down across from him. And I tried to find where to start, and there wasn’t a start, so I just went.
“I’ve never told you my real name,” I said. “Not the one that matters. My father is Robert Branford.” I made myself look at him. “Branford Industries. The name’s on three towers downtown. You’ve walked past all of them.”
He went still. Not surprised. He took it in and kept his face even, because he knew the worst thing he could do right then was make a face.
“Branford,” he said. Quiet. Giving it back so I’d know he caught it.
“Carlson was my grandmother’s name, from my mother’s side.” I turned my hand over on the table. “The only one in that whole house who ever said my name like it was a name. Not a job that needed filling.”
“I didn’t know.”
“At nineteen, I told him it was so I could make my own way. He’s called it a phase for twelve years. He’s still waiting for me to come back a Branford and take my rightful place.”
And then it started coming out of me, and I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t try.
“You don’t grow up in a house like that,” I said. “You get groomed in it. There’s a difference. Every room’s a stage. Every dinner’s a test. I learned to read a table before I could ride a bike. Who was angry. Who was lying. Who I could go near. Because reading it was the only way to stay a step ahead.”
“Ahead of what.”
“Of being wrong.” My voice did something. I let it. “There was a right way to be and I was never it. Not once. Not one day.”
He didn’t move. His hands stayed where they were.
“He never hit me,” I said. “I want to be clear. Nobody hit me. There’d be a name for it if they had. There’s no name for what he did.” I pressed my thumb hard into the table. “He just looked at me like I was a draft of something. Like the real version was in there and one day all the wrong parts would come off and there I’d finally be. Patient about it. So patient. He never raised his voice. He didn’t have to.”
“Ryan.”
He didn’t say it yet. I didn’t hear it yet. I kept going.
“You know what that does to a kid.” My throat was closing. I talked through it. “To be picked apart and a disappointment every step you take, every word you say. You spend your whole life trying to figure out which parts to take off. And you can’t. Because it’s all of you. It’s just all of you.”
My eyes were stinging now. I blinked and it got worse.
“And I built this.” I made a small motion at my own face. “The smile. The charm. Walking into a room and finding the temperature and turning it. Nobody taught me that. I made it. In his house. Because it was the only thing that was mine and they couldn’t take it off me.” A breath that shook on the way in. “And it’s the thing he hates most. He looks at it and sees a weak boy who needs to be liked. He doesn’t know I built it against him. To get out of there alive.”
“You got out,” Luke said. Low.
“I got out at twenty-three.” It cracked clean in half and I let it. “I walked into a squad room. People who had no idea who I was. And nobody in that room wanted me to be anything except a cop who did the work. And I could do the work. God, I was good at the work.”
“You’re good at the work.”
“It was the first room in my life I wasn’t performing in.” The tears came over and went down my face and I let them. “It was mine. I found it myself. Nobody handed it to me. It’s the only thing I have ever loved that I picked. And they took it.”
“Who took it.”
“That’s the thing.” I was crying now and I didn’t stop talking, the words coming out wet and broken between breaths. “I’ll never know. The job, or his friends, over white tablecloths. His reach goes everywhere. Into every room I’ve ever called mine. And I can’t prove a hand and I can’t prove there wasn’t one, and that’s what it is to be his son, there’s no bottom to it, it just goes down and down.”
I had to stop. I was breathing in pieces.
“He put his hand on my shoulder,” I said, and that was the thing that took the floor out from under me. “David. On his way out. My father’s never done it. Not once. And David has, and tonight he sat in that chair and took every soft thing he ever gave me and used it as a handle. All of it, tonight, turned into a way to move me.” My voice came apart on it. “And the worst part is I still can’t tell you if he meant it. I don’t think he can either. The one person in that family who ever loved me, and I can’t find the line where the love stopped and the job started. There isn’t one. There was never one.”
I put both hands over my face and I broke.
It wasn’t quiet. I’d cried quiet my whole life. This wasn’t that. It came up out of somewhere thirty-one years deep and it shookme apart, ugly, my breath going in pieces, my shoulders going, all of it.
The chair across from me scraped.
I heard him come around the table. Felt him there. His hands closed on my shoulders and he pulled me up out of the chair, not rough, just sure, and he took me into his arms.
