Page 11 of Rhodes

I read it twice. There's the family, and there's the business, and I have never once in my life been kept after either one.

I put the phone back on my leg without answering it.

We finish one more beer, load the bikes onto the trailer, and say our goodbyes. He takes off. I stand there a while, watching the taillights swing down the long gravel drive and vanish where the trees close over the road, and then head back to the city to play businessman with my brothers.

FOUR

Tilly

The Shotgun House: Rooms open directly into one another with no hallway, so there is no way to reach the back of the house without passing through every room in it. Privacy in a shotgun was never a matter of architecture. It was an agreement between the people living there.

Coop has been standing in my kitchen for ten minutes explaining why moving in with a man I want to push into traffic is a great idea.

"What about your apartment?"

"I'm graduating after Spain, so I don't need to keep it. This saves money and lets you spend time with Rhodes. You have a plan to live with Jo in the fall, so it's perfect."

"You don't need to save money. We both know that isn't what this is about."

"It's a good setup, Til. That's all I'm saying. It's a good setup and you're acting like I'm shipping you off to boarding school."

"I'm already leaving one bad roommate situation. I was really looking forward to having my own place until Jo and I find something for next year."

"Rhodes isn't a bad roommate. He's practically your brother."

"Exactly. I don't need a babysitter, Cooper. I know what you're doing."

He opens my fridge, looks at the sad contents of it, and closes it. He's been doing that since he got here, moving around my kitchen, touching things, because Coop can't have a hard conversation standing still. "Nothing changes. You go to class, you go to your lab, you do your reef thing, you go to your meeting."

"I knew something was up when I talked to Dad on Friday. I knew y'all were going to pull something."

"Tilly." He pinches the top of his nose. "It's about me getting on a plane Wednesday and not lying awake for four months in a different time zone wondering if my little sister's okay by herself. You've got to understand where I'm coming from. I can't go if you're in this city alone, with no one."

"I'm not by myself. I have tons of friends, I have school, I have my reef projects."

"Please don't fight me on this." He says it gently, which is like salt in my guilt wound.

"Say the real thing," I tell him. "Just say it. You want somebody watching me."

"I want somebody who'd know," he says, and doesn't flinch, which I'll give him, because at least he isn't gaslighting me the way Dad does. "Yeah. I do. Somebody who's family. Somebody who'd call me if it was bad. Is that so insane, a month after we buried Mama, that I want to know there's one person who sees you regularly who'd pick up the phone if you needed help?”

I don't have a clean answer for that, because when he puts it that way, it isn't insane. It's love. The only problem is it's love with a leash built into it. Those two things have been the same thing in my family for so long that I've stopped being able to pull them apart.

There's one thing I could say right now that would end this conversation.

All the way through the end of Mama's life, there were bottles of oxycodone in that house. On her nightstand, in the bathroom she and Daddy shared, and out on the counter next to her water glass some days. I slept twenty feet from them, and there was nothing. Not a pull, not a bad hour, not one time I had to get up and leave a room.

Nobody knows that. Every one of them was in that house with me, and not a single one of them acknowledges that I didn’t slip while around all of that.

I don't say it, though, because the second I hold a thing like that up as proof, it stops being true and turns into a girl arguing. So I go at the part I can actually win.

"Fine. A witness, sure. But of all of them, Coop, you think Rhodes is your guy?” I pick up a flattened box and set it back down without folding it, my one small flag still flying. "Your genius plan is to pair me with the biggest adult kid you know, the guy who's on the payroll of a company he's never worked a day for? That's your idea of a responsible person?”

"I want one person in this city I can call and trust him when he says everything is copacetic. That's it."

Coop is quiet for a second, and then he stops fiddling with the paper towel roll and goes still. He leans back against my counter and folds his arms, and looks at me. It's the look our dad has, the one Grandbank has, the Maybank look that means the joking part is over.

"You've always had him a little wrong. He does the whole nothing-matters thing real good, I'll give you that. He's been doing it since we were kids. Hell, he hasn't had a mom since he was four. But I have known that man my entire life, and I'm telling you there is nobody, and I mean nobody, I trust more than him. Not our cousins. Not Libba. Him." He lets that sit.