Page 40 of Take the Fall
“The firm.” He didn’t rush it this time. “You’ve heard Robert’s version, so I’ll spare you the speech. You know what your grandfather built. You know what your father’s carried for twenty-five years, on his own, while you went off and played at being a cop.”
“Played.” I said it flat.
“His word. Not mine.” He shrugged, easy.
“I don’t want it.” I pushed off the counter. “Any of it. The firm, the name, the chair. I’ve said it for twelve years. Say it back to me so I know it landed somewhere.”
“It landed.” And the warmth I’d walked him in on folded up and went away, like a man getting tired of holding a door. “It also doesn’t matter. You’re the only blood he’s got. Wanting was never part of this. It comes to you whether you reach for it or run.”
“Then it sits empty.”
“It won’t.” He almost smiled. “You’ll get tired. Or they’ll pull the badge again and not give it back, and you’ll be forty with nothing that’s yours and one number left that still picks up. You’ll call it. Everyone calls it eventually. I’ve watched harder men than you make that call.”
“That’s a threat.”
“It’s a forecast. I don’t make threats, Ry. I don’t need to.” He spread his hands. “I just know how these things go.”
“You’re working me.”
“Obviously.” Not a flicker. “You think I’d drive across the city for your father and improvise?”
“You came in warm. You sat down, made me laugh, let me bat the condo away so I’d feel like I’d won one.” I kept my voice level.It cost me. “Then the chair. It’s a sequence. It’s the order you’d brief it in.”
“Of course it’s a sequence.” He didn’t slow down. He’d never lied to me that I knew of, and tonight he’d worked out the truth would do more damage than any lie. “I put it together on the drive over. The warm parts are real. That’s what makes them work.”
“At least Robert doesn’t pretend it’s love.”
Something crossed his face for half a second. Then he set it down, the way he set everything down.
“Love isn’t the opposite of this.” He looked at me steady. “You’re too old to still think it is. I can mean every word and still be sitting in your kitchen to bring you home. Both. You were always the one who could hold both at once. That’s why he sent me. Anybody else, you’d have shut the door.”
He looked around the room again. Slower.
“And you’ve got more to lose now than you used to.” He said it gently, which was worse than if he’d said it hard. “Not long ago there was nothing here for anyone to get a hand on. Safest you’ve ever been, and you didn’t even clock it. Look at the place now.” He let it sit. “I wouldn’t use it. But I’m not the only one who can see it. And you know your father too well to think he can’t.”
The kitchen went cold around me.
“Get out of my home,” I said. Quiet.
“One more thing, then I’m gone.” He didn’t move. “And you’ll want this one, even if you don’t want me carrying it.”
I knew it was coming. The first two had been the walk up to it.
“Your father’s heart is going,” he said. No catch in it. He’d have given me the catch if he thought it would move me, and he’d already read that it wouldn’t, so he handed it over flat, and that was its own kind of cruel. “Two procedures this year. Quiet ones. There’ll be more. Men who live the way he’s lived don’t get the years back once it starts.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find it.
“He made me promise not to tell you.” A pause, set down exactly where he wanted it. “I’m breaking it because it’s the one thing left that might still get through you, and I’d sooner be honest about that than dress it up. You’d see through anything else.”
“You’re using his heart on me.”
“I’m using everything I’ve got.” He didn’t blink. “He’s dying. That part’s just true, no angle on it. What you do with it is yours. But you don’t get to not know. I won’t hand you that. You’d call the not-knowing freedom and it would eat you alive, and I’d be the one who could have said something and chose the quiet. I did that once already in my life. I’m not doing it again on you.”
I had to sit down.
I pulled the chair out and sat. My legs didn’t want to hold it.
My father. In a hospital bed somewhere in this city. The suit on a hanger and just the man underneath. Bad heart.
