Page 80 of Slander
"You created it," I tell her.
"Wedid."
"You built it." I take her hand on top of the too-big table. "I just paid the rent."
Down the table, Hannah's watching us, and when I catch her eye she doesn't look away, the way most people would.
She holds it. Then she mouths two words at me, quiet, only for me, over the noise of my whole loud family.
Thank you.
I shake my head, because she's got it backwards.
Sophie's the one who saved Sophie—stood up in a parking lot, said no to her father, drove out of a town that threw eggs at her—and all I did was hold the door and refuse to let her shut it on herself.
But Hannah keeps looking, so I mouth it back because some things you just take when family hands them to you.
You're welcome.
Later, when Boden’s asleep in the spare room and the wine's mostly gone, and Bjorn and Regnor have taken their argument to the porch, I find a minute alone by the kitchen window with my father.
He's got a cup of coffee because he doesn't hardly drink these days either, and we've never once talked about why we share that.
He looks out at the yard for a while.
"You got patched two weeks ago," he says.
"I did."
"I didn't say anything that night. Too many people. You know how I am." He turns the cup in his big scarred hands. "But I want to say it now, with no audience. When they put that patch on you, your mother cried in the truck the whole way home. She was so proud, son, and so am I."
His jaw works. "Seven years ago, I drove you to a locked door and I didn't know if I was getting a son back. I made my peace, on that drive, with the idea that I might not. And then I spent every week refusing to believe the peace I'd made."
"Dad."
"Let me finish, I only do this once a decade." He sets the cup down. "You walked out of that place, and you did the work, and you came back. Then you went and found a woman the whole world had decided to throw away, and you didn't throw her away. You stood in front of her. You did it the right way when everything in you was screaming for the other way. I know what that cost you, because I've got the same wiring, and I've spent forty years choosing the cold road over the hot one, and it never once got easier." He puts his hand on the back of my neck, heavy and warm, the way he's done since I was small enough to fit under his arm. "I'm proud of you, son. Not for the patch. For the man wearing it."
I don't trust my voice, so I nod, and he lets me.
We stand at the window a while not saying anything, two men with the same broken wiring who both learned to live anyway.
The night winds down the way good nights do, slow and reluctant, everybody finding reasons to stay ten more minutes.
Before they go, Bjorn pulls me aside by the door, lower now, the joking set down.
"Heard the table's talking about a run up north," he says. "And that they might want me on it. Bodul too." He shrugs like it's nothing, and I know when he's circling something. "He’s been doing a lot of work these last couple weeks. My guess is, he saw you get patched in after all these years and he wants his patch next. On top of it, Tor's girl's been hanging around the new shop a lot. Tindra." He says the name carefully, like it's molten lava. "Meghan's about ready to skin him alive."
"That's a fire you don’t want to be standing next to," I tell him.
"Who said anything about standing next to it?" He grins, but there's a flicker under it, the same restless thing he's carried since the leg. "I'm just saying. Things are moving up there. Might be I've got my own road coming."
"Might be." I clap his shoulder. "When it comes, you call me. Whatever it is. However it goes."
"Yeah." He holds my eyes for a second. "You too, brother. You too."
I walk the last of them out—Hannah with leftovers Ma forced on her, Everly with Boden, boneless and drooling on her shoulder, my parents last, Ma cupping Sophie's face in both hands at the door and telling her she did good with the cornbread, which from my mother is roughly a knighthood.
Then it's quiet, and it's just us, and the dog, and a sink full of dishes we're both going to pretend not to see until morning.
