by Roan Parrish
All the times they’d hugged Rhys and, I’d thought, ignored me, reorganized themselves into a different shape in my mind. Was it possible that what I’d thought was antipathy was actually consideration?
“I…oh. No. Well, yes. I don’t much. But not—I wouldn’t mind from you guys,” I garbled.
“Yeah?”
I nodded, my face heating with awkwardness.
But Theo just gave me a quick hug and smiled. “Later,” he said and swung his keys as he sidled off to Caleb’s truck.
“Later,” I said to his back.
Inside, I took my drink and the rest of the pie to the living room, and pushed my phone back and forth for a while. I wanted to call Rhys, but I was never sure when he had to be backstage and I didn’t want to interrupt him. So I texted him, You around? The phone rang in my hand, and I nearly dumped my drink all over myself.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey, baby. How’d it go?” He sounded like a big excited puppy.
I snorted. “I’m not a kid with a play date, Rhys.”
“I know, I know. But how’d it go?”
I laughed. “It turns out Theo doesn’t hate me after all.”
“You thought Theo hated you?”
“No, I guess not.” I swallowed more of my drink and dug into the pie.
“So, what’d you guys do?”
“We wandered in the cemetery and I tried to tell him the Ramones thing only I forgot the band and the song, then we got food and Theo made drinks and now I’m eating pie and if you were here I’d kiss you and then you’d know what kind.”
“Mm, that sounds nice. Theo made drinks, huh? I can tell. You like Theo, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, you were right. You’re very smart and right.”
Rhys chuckled and I downed the rest of my drink. I wanted another one. Wanted this fuzzy summer peach feeling to last. But when I went to stand up I decided it was better not to.
“Am I your real-life person?” I blurted, leaning my head back against the couch.
“You’re my everything person,” he said. “But what do you mean?”
“Nothing, it doesn’t matter, sorry. How’s tour?”
“No, no, absolutely not. Tell me what you mean.”
The no-nonsense tone of Rhys’s demand made my heart flutter. If he’d been here in person I’d have shaken my head slightly and he’d have closed his fingers around my wrist to keep me from running away and tipped my chin up and forced me to look in his beautiful eyes and tell him things, the way we both liked it. But Rhys wasn’t here.
“Matty. Tell me what you meant.”
I bit my lip. “I thought you and Caleb couldn’t be together anymore when he started using too much and because he wasn’t your person. But Theo said you guys broke up because tour isn’t real life and Caleb didn’t want to be your real-life person.”
I bit down on my tongue to stop the stupid slurred words from coming out and listened to Rhys breathe.
“Well, Caleb and I worked well together; we made a good team. We loved each other as friends. Sometimes we loved each other romantically. We were sexually compatible.” I bit my tongue harder, and the taste of iron overwhelmed the peach. “But all of those things don’t add up to mean that you should be with someone forever. You know?”
“What do we add up to?” Fuck, why couldn’t I just shut up.
“Matty, are you okay? If something’s going on, you need to tell me.”
“No, sorry. I’m fine.” And that wasn’t the right thing to say at all. “I mean, I’m not—nothing’s going on. Thanks for sending Theo over. He really is a cool guy.” I tried to change the subject before he could respond. But he didn’t take the bait.
“I know it must be hard. It’d be hard for me if you had an ex you were still friends with who knew you really well. Caleb and I have a lot of history. But you’re my future, baby. You know that, right?”
And, fuck if that didn’t make my heart beat faster.
“You’re cheesy,” I said, but my voice was just a scratch and I swallowed hard, wishing he could say it again and again until it drowned out all the other noise.
“You like it.” He paused. “This is hard. Harder than I thought it would be.”
My chest loosened at his words. So far, I’d heard how great tour was, how exciting it was to hear the crowds cheering his name, and how cool it felt to finally be the center of attention after a career of being in the background.
“Yeah? Me too,” I murmured.
“Only another two weeks, and I’ll be home for the weekend.”
“Yeah, we should do something for your birthday.”
“I wanna do you for my birthday,” he growled.
“Cheesy. But yes, please.”
“We’ll figure it out, baby.”
His voice had gone all soft, and I knew he didn’t just mean his birthday. I knew what his mouth would look like, turned up in a fond half-smile. I knew his eyes would be soft if he were looking at me. He’d slide his big hand around the back of my neck and pull me in, hold me. Wrap his arms around me until my body convinced my mind it could believe what he was saying.
Then he cleared his throat and added, “Right?”
And I could hear the anxiety there, the fear that he’d always carried around: that he would have to choose between his career and having a marriage.
“Yeah, of course,” I reassured him. “We’ll figure it out. And I can’t wait to see you in two weeks.”
Couldn’t wait to feel Rhys’s arms around me. To relax into the feeling of just being that I had when I was with him. To let him make the world sparkle for me the way only he could. The way only he ever had.
“I love you so much, Matty.” I could picture the slight wrinkle he’d have in his brow—the one that made him look so sincere and stern sometimes.
“I love you too. It’s…I’m…I miss you a lot,” I choked out. “But I’ll see you in two weeks. It’ll be okay. God, sorry. I think I’m drunk. Sorry.”
“Okay,” he chuckled. “Go eat something, babe.”
I mmhmmed, and he added, “Not pie.”
I smiled and pulled the pie toward me as we said goodbye, the sound of I love you lingering like the flavor of the summer peaches.
Chapter 5
Every day at work, I watched the ghosts of pain, injustice, and shit luck follow my clients in and out of my office. The ways the system had failed them, disadvantaged them, betrayed them. It was easier to be angry, disgusted, righteous, than it was to feel the full weight of grief.
I’d had days when I felt it. Days in St. Jerome’s, or a few in the families I’d been placed with before that. It had crept in like fog, the sense of violent injustice—that there were people who got to be loved, who got to be wanted, kept, cherished. And that I hadn’t been. But it was a poisonous fog that settled into your bones, if you let it, pocking them until the strongest stuff inside you began to crumble at the lightest blow.
So I’d pushed the grief away, painted over it with distraction and reckless daring. I’d closed the door on it and locked it deep inside.
When I’d begun working at Mariposa, though, it had come tapping at the windows, forcing me to face over and over the ravages of what I’d left behind. But every time I was able to help—every time I could give someone a chance that wouldn’t have been available to them otherwise—it felt like balm on a wound that never quite healed.
Noé Caldera dropped a mustard-dabbed résumé on my desk and slumped dejectedly on the seat.
“Hot dog?” I asked, picking it up by the corner.
“May as well have wiped my ass with it,” he said.
I scanned the scant words on the page and snuck a glance at Noé. His mouth was slack, eyes empty. Today he needed a soft touch, not banter.
“We need to go fo
r a skills-based approach. Here.” I pointed to Chester’s Photo, Feb 2015–August 2016. Tell me what you did during a shift.”
Noé listed his duties, and I scrawled them in the margin.
“See, that’s great. Those are specialized skills that prepare you to work in another photo shop, if you want.” I thought I saw a glimmer in Noé’s eye, but he shrugged. “Why’d you leave the job?”
“Got fired.”
“Why?”
“My fault,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He sighed. “My buddy came to pick me up one day as Chester was leaving with the bank drop. He, uh, wanted to roll Chester for the cash.” Noé squirmed in his seat. “Chester was a cool dude, you know. A nice guy and he gave me a job, never gave me any shit. And he was old, man. He coulda got hurt. But my buddy’s not real good with no, so I just told him, nah, there’s never that much cash, but you come in the store when I’m working, you could take a camera and get a lot for it.” Noé looked down at his hands. “He came in but I didn’t know Chester had a new security cam. He could see me look the other way.”
I nodded. It was a familiar story.
“Guess I shouldn’t put ole Chester as a reference, huh?” he tried to joke.
I glanced at the next entry in his résumé. “If you get asked why you left that job, just say you loved the work, but unfortunately you needed something that paid better.”
“The restaurant didn’t pay better.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Yeah, I know, Noé. I hate to break it to you, but the world of job seeking isn’t any more honest than the rest of the world.”
Noé shook his head in mock rebuke. “Mr. Argento, I’m really shocked. Shocked and disappointed.” Then he dropped the pretense, and a look of genuine disappointment crossed his face. “Sucks we gotta lie to get the next in a string of shitty jobs, huh? It’s all I do. Lie to maybe get what I need, or tell the truth and get zero.”
I nodded. It was a systemic problem. Kids in the system slipped through the cracks in school because they didn’t have a support system. They didn’t have people helping them with their homework, or telling them they could live their dreams if they worked hard or joined extracurriculars so they could go to college. A lot of them skipped school because they needed more hours at work, or dropped out entirely, knowing that as soon as they turned eighteen they’d need to be self-sufficient so they may as well start early. And that was to say nothing of the kids who had it bad.
One of the kids I’d worked with last year had a similar story to the one Noé just told me. She was applying for a job and knew they’d ask about it in the interview, and I’d told her that if that happened, she should have them call me. When they’d called, looking for an explanation, I’d told them in every way I knew how: Carla had made a mistake. Carla’s best friend had needed the money. It felt to Carla like life or death for her friend. Their response had been predictable: Carla should’ve acted right instead of valuing her friend more than her responsibilities. I’d lost my temper, shouting at them, “What do you think a kid like her has except the people who’ve proven they’ll stick around? Of course she cared more about the one person who loved her than about a hundred bucks that her boss could afford to lose. Have a fucking heart!”
Carla hadn’t gotten the job. I knew she probably wouldn’t have gotten it anyway, but I’d been beside myself at the thought that she might have had a chance without my fuckup. I’d told Imari she should fire me, but she’d just shaken her head and sent me back to work.
“Listen, Noé, what would you want to do? If you could do anything?”
Noé glared at me. “Doesn’t matter, man.”
“It does! Please, just…if you could spend your whole day, every day, doing something, what would it be?”
He stood up and shoved the chair away, furious. “That’s shit, Matt. Fuck you, that’s a shitty thing to ask!” And then he was gone.
* * *
—
I slunk to the train after work that evening, too worn out to even wander around. As I watched the city fade, I pictured Noé’s expression just before he ran out the door.
Hope was the scariest feeling.
As I walked home from the station, I called Grin.
“Yo, yo, Grimace, it’s been a thousand years!”
“I know,” I said guiltily. “Sorry.” I kicked at a rock and watched it skid across the street and bounce into the tall grass.
“Hey, don’t be like that, Matty, I’m glad to hear your voice.” Then he paused and lost the jocular enthusiasm he always answered the phone with. “What’s wrong, bro?”
“Nothing.” I cut over through the cemetery. “I have this client. Man, he reminds me so much of us.”
“Too smart for his own good and devilishly handsome?”
“Yeah, exactly. I think I kinda fucked up with him.”
I told Grin about Noé’s sudden flight.
“Aw, man. Yeah. It’s hard to think it if you don’t think you can have it. Worse to know.”
“Yeah. And ordinarily I wouldn’t have asked. I can usually tell who’s in a place to talk about that. I think it’s because he reminded me so much of us. I pulled a big brother act instead of doing my damn job.”
“You care so much, man. No, it’s a good thing,” he said when I made a noise of censure. “Now that kid knows someone cares enough to ask. Besides, if he freaked that hard, he probably already knows what he wants. So you didn’t raise the issue, just said it out loud.”
“Fuck, talking to you always makes me feel better. Why don’t I call you more?”
Grin snorted. “Cuz you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”
I unlocked the front door and dropped my keys and wallet on the table. Still no Rhys. Still just emptiness.
“So where’s your boy at now? I been watching him on Twitter.”
“You’re on Twitter?”
“Come on, now.”
I walked to the fridge and ran my finger down the list of tour dates. “Phoenix tonight.”
“You should tell him to come to Miami, and I’ll go see his white ass play.”
“I’ll tell him. Oh hey, you’re good at this shit. Rhys’s birthday’s in a couple days and he’ll be gone, but I wanna do something nice for him when he’s back next weekend. Ideas?”
“Psh, you’re married to the guy and you’re looking at me for ideas?”
“Uh. Yeah, but I just want it to be great. You know, because he’s been gone and everything.”
“Well, listen, bro, I don’t think you can go wrong with answering the door in some lingerie holding a bottle of champagne, ya know?”
“Um, yeah, I’m not doing that.”
“Aw, Matty, come on. It’d be sexy as hell. You’d stand there with your terrible posture, wearing some lace fuckin’ thing and scowling so hard Rhys’d think you were gonna clock him with the champagne bottle. Happy fuckin’ birthday, honey.” He dissolved into laughter and I had to smile, picturing the way he threw his head back when he laughed and how his eyes crinkled.
“Ha ha. Never mind.”
“Okay, okay, no lingerie. You could have a party? Nah, he’s been with all these people on tour, he’ll probably want some peace. What about just a nice dinner? He’s kinda old, right, so he don’t need to go out dancing or anything.”
“He’s not old,” I muttered. “I can’t really cook.”
“No kidding. I didn’t mean you should poison the man on his birthday. Get some food from a nice damn restaurant, jeez.”
“Fuck, I just want to do something nice for him. I want it to be perfect.”
“What’s going on, man? Stuff not okay with you and Rhys?”
I sighed. “No, it’s okay. I just…miss him.”
“Sucks. But he’ll be back.”
“I k
now.”
“Speak, Grim.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and heard Grin saying that to me a hundred times, a thousand, over the years. At first because I never said a word. Then, later, because I only said the words that didn’t matter. I’d gotten a lot better.
“Rhys and I bought a bedroom set. For the spare room. And…I have five pairs of shoes. A coffeemaker. I picked out the rug for the living room after Rhys dropped a can of paint on the old one. My stuff doesn’t fit in a duffel bag anymore. And Rhys…he loves me.” There was a long silence. “I just meant that I’m doing good now. Not like before. But I still dream about it. And I’m…with Rhys gone it’s harder to feel like things are really different. It feels, I don’t know…precarious.”
Another silence, then Grin cleared his throat.
“Yeah, I…I know what you mean.”
“We promised,” I said softly. “We made a pact. I want to keep it.”
“I think we’re doing pretty well there,” he said. “We’re not in prison; we haven’t fathered and abandoned any random kids—uh, at least I haven’t. Don’t know about you.” I snorted. “We’ve got jobs. You picked out a rug. The rest…we’re working on. We’re doing okay, Matty, for real.”
* * *
—
I decided to believe Grin. About us doing okay, not about the lingerie. But…lingerie aside, I did want to do something to celebrate Rhys’s birthday. I got home from work and sent him a text, then I opened the computer and waited for his video call.
I couldn’t help but smile when I saw him. He was peering into his phone so his nose took up the whole screen. He pulled the phone away and grinned at me.
“Hey, baby!”
“Happy birthday.”
I missed the next thing Rhys said, distracted by the lines of his face. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in months.
“Sorry, what?”
He shook his head, expression tender. “Nothing. I’m just really glad to see your face.”