Page 30 of Tempted By the Safety

“I’m listening carefully.”

“Uh-huh.” He lowers the phone, smirking. “You’re an awful liar for a man with a face like that. Do you want me to say the chicken part again?”

“I heard the chicken.”

“Did you, though?”

I take another drink of water so I don’t have to answer that.

Out on the field Dalton is yelling something at Knox about the fifty bucks, and the sun’s coming through the top of the stadium and lighting up all the mowing lines, and my legs ache in the good way, and I let myself have about one uncomplicated minute of this.

Then his phone goes off in his hand.

He looks at the screen and his thumb comes down, and the ring cuts out, and he goes right back to the calendar.

“Anyway, I also called about your—”

It rings again.

He turns it face down against his palm and keeps going, and this time his voice goes flat, which is what it does when he’s managing something.

“Take it,” I say.

“It’s fine.”

“Twice in ten seconds isn’t fine.” I nod at his hand. “Take it.”

He looks at the phone, then up at me.

“You sure that’s okay?”

“Milo.”

“Because I told you I’d keep it outside work hours, and it’s—”

“Take the call.”

“Okay.” His shoulders come down half an inch. “Thanks. One second, I swear.”

He turns half away from me and puts it to his ear, and I hear the voice come through before he’s got it all the way there. A woman’s voice, pitched high and fast, running words together. I can’t make out one of them, but I don’t need to. I’ve heard that register in stadium tunnels and hospital hallways, and it doesn’t matter what language it’s speaking.

Milo’s face empties out.

It happens in less than a second, everything I’ve been looking at for the past ten minutes gone off him like a hand wiped a window, and he’s already moving, three steps away from me and then five, one hand coming up to cup around the phone.

“Ma. Ma, hey, slow down.” He’s walking toward the tunnel, fast, shoes slapping the track. “Mom. Take a breath and tell me exactly what happened.”

12

Milo

My mother hangs up on me, but I keep the phone against my ear anyway, standing in the tunnel with my back to the cinder block.

Ten thousand dollars. That’s the part that keeps looping. Ten thousand dollars, which my mother said twice, the second time slower, to make sure the number landed.

I open my banking app because I can’t resist checking a wound. Eleven hundred and six dollars, which is one paycheck minus my mother’s water heater, and four hundred of it is technically already gone to my phone bill and the loan payment that hits Friday. So: seven hundred, generously. I’ve got the knife roll, worth maybe six hundred if I found a line cook with cash, and a pair of sneakers with the stitching coming apart, and nothing else that converts.

Fine. Okay. Trains. There’s the subway, or the Long Island Rail Road if I want to spend money I don’t have, to save forty minutes, and then I stand in front of a clerk and say the phrasewhat are my optionsin the tone of a man who has options.