Page 38 of Take the Fall
“You kept the stew.”
“Yeah.”
“Hawley,” he said, settling back into the seat, the whole length of him easing, “that might be the single most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, and I’ve decided not to interrogate it, and you’re going to let me have that.”
“I’m going to let you have that,” I said, and went home.
Chapter 12: Three Things
Ryan
I wiped the counter down and got the plates out. I’d set out the good glasses for the beer. Stupid, for takeout. I did it anyway.
Luke had gone twenty minutes ago. Dumplings and beer that wasn’t in the building. First closed case back deserved a proper drink, he’d said, pulling his jacket on. He’d be up the stairs any minute, cursing the lock.
A celebration. The word neither of us had said.
First case since they’d let me back in. A gnome. A ceramic figure in a flower bed and an old man who missed his wife. Shouldn’t have mattered. It did. I’d been useful today. Felt the weight of the work in my hands and knew what to do with it. Luke had stood back the whole afternoon and not said a word, and that quiet had said everything.
Smiled at the sink when the knock came.
Both hands full, I thought. Beer in one, dumplings in the other, kicking his own door because the keys were in the pocket he couldn’t reach. I was already grinning when I opened it.
“It’s my turn to laugh at you,” I said. “We have to talk about the keys.”
It wasn’t Luke.
The man in the hall was shorter than I remembered him. Older. The salt-and-pepper had gone further since the last time I’d sat across a table from him, at a family dinner neither of us had wanted to attend. He had on the good wool coat, dark, the one he’d worn to my grandmother’s funeral when I was seventeen and again at one of the firm’s many anniversary dinners and again at whatever other occasion required that he show up in a coat that saidpresent. Same easy set to the shoulders. Less precisely assembled than my father had ever been. Robert wore a suit like a man who understood that authority lived in the cut. David just wore the coat.
The smile arrived when he saw me. Genuine. That had always been the thing about David. The smile came without the performance behind it.
“Ry,” he said.
I stood in the doorway and didn’t say anything for a moment. You can know a thing is coming and still not have the right face ready when it walks up to your door.
“Uncle David.”
He held up one hand. “I know. No warning.” He looked at the door, then me. “Can I come in for a minute?”
I knew the right answer and I couldn’t make myself give it. David had been the one who showed up at the gate when I was twelve and my father was in Hong Kong for a month. The one who’d slipped me twenty dollars at Christmases with a wink and never made me account for it. The one whose house I’d been to once as a teenager after a school thing had gone badly, and he’d sat at his kitchen table across from me and said nothing useful and nothing useless and just stayed there until I’d drunk the coffee and been ready to go home. You don’t close a door on that.Even when the door leads somewhere you know you shouldn’t walk.
I stepped back.
He came in and looked around the way people do when they see a place for the first time, taking in the kitchen, the counter, the evidence of two men living alongside each other. His face did something small and approving.
“You comfortable here?”
“It’s spartan but nice.”
“Your mother will be relieved to hear it either way.” He pulled out the nearest chair and sat without asking, easy, the weight of a man who had known the nephew long enough to know where the chairs were. He looked at me. “You’ve got the look of someone who’s had a good day.”
“I worked a funny case,” I said.
“See.” He opened both hands. “Small joys matter.”
I looked at him.
The warmth was still in the room. Underneath it now, something with weight.
