Page 58 of Blind Spot
I got up. I made the guest bed, tucked it in tight, like my mother taught me.
My phone lit up on the nightstand. It was Mom with the photo on the screen I’d set years ago—her in the Minnesota kitchen, mid-laugh, with a wooden spoon held up like a baton.
You don’t not answer your mother. I sat back on the bed I’d just made.
“Anyu.”
“You’re home? You’re back?”
“Landed last night. Late.”
“Your father taped the game. He found a feed somewhere, I don’t know how; he’s got that dish pointed at half of Europe now. He watched it twice.”
There was a clatter in the background. “The dog went into the part of the lake that isn’t frozen and came back smelling like dead fish. Your sister’s washing him in the yard, she says hello, and she says you never call her. Are you eating?”
She doesn’t wait for responses. She never has. You don’t answer my mother so much as wait for a gap and put something in it.
“I’m eating,” I said. I pulled the wooden bird into my lap so I had something to hold. “I’m a professional athlete. Eating is part of the job.”
“Good food then,” she said.
“Eating, sleeping, doing laundry, and an hour or two on the ice. That’s the entire job. I did four loads of laundry last night. They send us on the road for ten days and I come home as a laundromat with a contract. I folded socks at midnight like a—“
“Mm.”
”—and the dryer in my building, I’ve told you, it doesn’t dry, it just tumbles things warm, so everything’s still damp and I’ve got shirts hung over every door—“
I kept going. She knew her son as an apartment dweller, not one with a long-term boyfriend and a house.
She let my stories run. Then, in a small voice, “You sound tired.”
“It’s early. You called early.”
“Hm.” I didn’t fool her. “You’re sleeping?”
“Like a baby.” I didn’t tell her I was sitting in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house she didn’t know existed, holding a bird my grandmother gave me because last night I’d shut the door on the man who was my world.
“Your bed’s still made up,” she said. “For when you come. The dog sleeps on it.” A pause. “Anyone you want to bring, there’s room.”
“Just me. You know me.”
“I know you,” she agreed.
I told her I had practice. She told me to eat something that wasn’t from a restaurant and to call my sister. We both said goodbye.
I sat there for another second with the phone dark in my hand. Then I went downstairs.
The kitchen was clean. It was beyond-normal clean. The takeout menus that lived at the end of the counter were squared into a stack, and the junk by the fridge had been sorted into a drawer. He’d put away the three spice jars that always lingered on the counter—garlic powder, cumin, and paprika. At five a.m., he woke up and went through the kitchen, straightening things that didn’t need straightening.
Rook stood at the counter. The coffee maker was on. I’d gone to bed without setting the timer. He got up and made the coffee himself.
“Practice at ten,” he said.
“I know.”
He turned with his coffee, and his free hand reached out toward the back of my neck and stopped. He put it on the counter instead.
I was still mad, but I would have let him. I think he knew that, and that’s why he stopped.
