Back when I’d left home all those years ago, I’d told myself I’d finally figured it out—I’d seen that garage go up in flames, scared sick, and I’d sat in that detention facility for months, thinking over how bad I’d screwed up, how dangerous I’d been. And I told myself I’d do the grown-up thing: get serious about school, keep my head down until I could get out of town and start over. It’s not as if I’d made a terrible decision—I’d learned a lot, made friends, been successful, seen the world. But I’d missed things too—missed home, and my dad, and the business that was part of our family. Back then, I didn’t—couldn’t—see any other way.
I decide something then. Being with Kit, seeing her choose everything so carefully for her house, watching her with her friends, sitting with her through the sadness she’d felt over her brother, hearing her talk about her colleagues and her work—all of that, I realize, taught me something I hadn’t really managed to teach myself in all the years I’d been out here on my own. Kit was deliberate about her life, her choices, even when they weren’t perfect or easy to make. She’d been lucky, winning that jackpot, but she didn’t rely on luck. She didn’t let life just happen to her. She wasn’t reckless or one-track minded.
So for once, I’m not going to be, either.
Chapter 21
Kit
When it’s been a month since I’ve seen Ben, when I’ve worn out all my memories of him in my house, in my bed, even those brief times he was with me at work, I go to the salvage yard.
I’ve been back for a couple of weeks now, my dad settled into the trailer with Candace, and Alex opting to stay in Ohio for a month or so to keep an eye on things. I’d offered to stay too, had winced at the thought of Alex being there on his own, but he’d insisted. “You need to get back, Kit,” he’d said. “You need to be home.”
He was right. I did need to be home, and anyways, I think Alex needed to be in Ohio, or, at the very least, needed to be in one place for a while. At work, things have been slow, a summer lull, Dr. Singh and I adjusting to the awkward aftermath of the Beaumont offer and our subsequent conversation about it when I’d come back to town. “I need more time,” I’d told him, the first day I was back in the office, and he’d said, “I don’t think you do.” We’d gone to lunch that day, a winding, two-hour affair at a Chinese buffet which provided a perfect opportunity for breaks to plate-reload when the conversation got hard. I’d told him my reasons for not wanting the job—the professional and the personal reasons, though I’d left out everything about Ben. And Dr. Singh had told me he hadn’t wanted to take the money, that he was nervous and unsettled by the contract requirements anyway. I told him about the lottery. I told him I understood if he wanted someone else to have the job. And he told me there was no one else who could do the job the way I could, and the whole department wanted me on board for as long as I was happy.
Once we’d settled the bill, I’d asked him, hot-faced and fidgety, who it was that had called him from Beaumont, but deep down, I already knew the answer: not Ben.
That evening, I’d made an offer to my contractor to move up my kitchen renovation, and then I’d added, on a reckless whim, a contract to work on my upstairs bath. Basically, I’ve made it very, very difficult to live there comfortably, and so most days I’ve stayed with Zoe or Greer. I know I’m lying to myself about why I’ve done this. I say it’s because it’ll be better to get the major renovations done before the school year starts up again. I say that since money isn’t really an issue, I might as well pay for the rush jobs, even though this kind of spending is entirely out of character for me. But really, it’s because I’m rattling around in that house, too upset to be alone with my thoughts, missing Ben so much that I’m restless with it, unable to sit still. I suspect Zoe and Greer know this too, though they don’t say anything.
So going to see Henry at the salvage yard—I say it’s to look into the restored clawfoot tubs he has—is only one of the decisions I’ve made since I’ve been back that has more to do with Ben than I’m willing to admit.
It’s Sharon who’s out front when I arrive, and judging by her face, I’ve not been missed around here, or at least I’m no one’s favorite. Somehow, even when she says hello, her lips seem to stay pursed, displeased. She asks how I’ve been but it seems pinched and obligatory. If anything, this oddly makes me like Sharon even more—I don’t think Ben quite realizes it, but Sharon watches him as if he’s her very own. At the Crestwood party, Sharon had flushed with pride when Ben had told her that she looked nice, a genuine reaction that seemed so different from the way Ben interacted with his mother. But I still don’t relish the thought of being under her gaze, and she also seems relieved when I ask for Henry.
He’s in the office, at the workbench, working on rewiring a light fixture that right now is only a small bulb on a wire, but I’ve been around here enough times to know it probably goes to something beautiful and unique and old. At first, I hover in the doorway, unsure if I’ll be able to handle a similarly chilly reception from Henry. I think if I do, it might break me, might ensure that I never come back here again. But when he turns, there’s a familiar light in his eyes, and he stands from his stool to greet me.
“Look at you!” I say, noticing that he’d been able to stand without his cane, without using the table for leverage.
“Still can’t walk without the cane,” he says, smiling. “But I’m up and down mostly on my own now, especially if I’m up high enough. Feeling pretty good.”
“I’m so glad,” I say, still staying in the doorway, still unsure.
“How’s your father doing?”
“He’s doing better. He’ll be okay, I think, so long as he takes care of himself a little more.”
“Good of you to go there to be with him,” Henry says. “It makes a real difference.”
I barely manage a nod to this, look down toward my feet. I don’t know if it made a real difference to my dad that I was there, not how it mattered for Henry to have Ben. I’d arranged to take care of expenses, and I’d done my best to get to know Candace better, to steer clear of any ugly topics between me and Dad. But he mostly seemed embarrassed by my presence, once he was more awake, and the only day I saw him relax a bit was the day Alex took me to the airport to fly home. Ben is so lucky to have Henry. I wonder if he knows that.
“Come on in,” Henry says, gesturing toward the small table where I once sat with Ben and River, talking about physics. “Keep me company while I do up this wiring.”
“Sure,” I say, but then quickly add, “I mean, I really came to look at some bathtubs.” I don’t want him to think I’m doing what I’m really doing, which is checking up on him, mining for any information I might be able to get about Ben.
But Henry sees through me, same as everyone else does, I guess, and waves me in. “Sure. I can show you some if you give me a few minutes on this.”
I settle in at the chair facing his workbench so I can watch him tinker—it’s hard to believe that when I met him, he was in a wheelchair, his arm bound close to his body. We sit like that for a while, quietly, comfortably, and it’s such a contrast to the uneasiness I felt in Ohio, even in spite of the awkwardness of the situation between us. It’s that comfort, I think, that emboldens me now.
“How’s Ben?”
Henry’s hands barely pause in his task, but I’m watching him so closely that I notice. “He’s all right. Working a lot.”
“Yeah,” I say dumbly, as if that’s to be expected, as if I know Ben’s work habits in Houston so well. “Well, I’ll bet he’s glad to be back.”
Henry’s response to this is a hum of something—not assent, but not disagreement, either. I wish I hadn’t asked now. It’s spoiled the easy silence that was between us before. When I’m about to excuse myself, tell him maybe Sharon can show me around, he speaks up.
“You know, when he was a boy, about a week after his mother moved out, he snuc
k out in the middle of the night, took his bike.”
I stiffen in my seat a little, bracing myself. When I was with Ben, I’d been desperate to hear stories from when he was a kid. I’d shared things—embarrassing, sometimes sad things—about the way I’d grown up, but Ben had kept things close. I don’t know if hearing this now is what I want or what I shouldn’t want.
“I about went crazy with worry,” Henry goes on, seemingly unaware of my discomfort. “Back then, I did a lot of that with Ben. He was always in trouble. He finally showed up at home a few hours later, didn’t say a word, just sat in a chair while I screamed my head off at him.” Henry pauses, stretching his left hand, fingers out and in, wrist back and forth. “That night Laura calls, all upset, asks how he’s doing. She told me he’d ridden his bike to where she’d worked, waited outside for her until she showed up. Begged her to come back, promised he’d be a better kid. He cried his heart out, I guess, and Ben wasn’t much of a crier, ever. She had Richard bring him home, but Ben insisted on getting dropped off a few blocks away.”
I think about how Ben makes his living, about how every aspect of his business is about saying the right thing to get someone to come with him, about how he’d never, not from that first day we met, managed to say the right thing to me. That night at the Ursinus, and after he’d said he loved me, I’d wanted him to say something about the two of us, about how we could be together, but he’d never quite managed that. He’d never put himself out there. I think, horribly, about that moment he stood before me in the hospital: I’ll do anything. “That’s…terrible,” I manage, around what feels like a big ball of cotton swelling in my throat.
He shrugs, swallows thickly before clearing his throat. “It was my idea, to have Ben. I pushed and pushed. And after, I could see Laura wasn’t happy. She wasn’t so happy before, probably, but at first, we had something. I was stupid, young. I thought a kid would make us closer, how we’d been before. Worst thing I ever did, and that’s the truth—trying to force her into a life she didn’t really choose for herself.”
I wonder if he’s told this to Ben, if what I’d said about not getting shuffled around by circumstance and about choosing for myself, had rung some kind of painful, pealing bell for him. He’d been so quiet after that.
“Ben’s the best thing, the best thing of my life, and I don’t regret him, not for one second. But I’m sorry for Laura. I’m sorry that my wanting Ben cost her, and forced her to do something I know she feels bad about. But it was the right thing, for her and for him. She loves him. But she couldn’t be a good mother to him, not that way. She had to choose something else for herself.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes, Henry tinkering, me thinking. I don’t know for sure why he’s telling me this, telling me something I doubt Ben knows himself. The quiet grows almost comfortable again, against all odds, against the fact that I don’t have any real reason to be here, any real tie to Henry anymore. “I don’t think it’s right. I think she should’ve chosen him. Even if she didn’t stay with you, she could’ve—been around. Been a mom to him,” I say.
Henry sets down his tools, turns in his chair and looks at me. “Don’t think he ever let her, not after that day. He never asked her for anything again. Everything she ever gave him—her attention, a gift, her help when he got into trouble—she had to force it on him. Cost him a lot to go to her back then. He’s been—well. He doesn’t like to ask after what he wants, not much since then.”
Aha, I think. This is why he’s telling me.
“He doesn’t get off the hook, Henry. For not telling me about what he’d done with Beaumont. He doesn’t get to say—you don’t get to say that it’s hard for him to open up, and have that be enough.” But even as I say this, I wonder: What would have been enough? What would have been enough for me, in that moment, when Dr. Singh had told me about Beaumont’s offer, when I’d felt small and scared and like Ben was going to take everything good in my life away from me?
“I’m just telling you, Kit. I expect he feels as bad as he can feel now, about how it happened with you. I know that boy same as I know my own self, and he’s crazy about you. But don’t think he’ll come back. I don’t know if he has it in him anymore.”
And that’s the worst of it, what Henry has said. Because hearing it put this way, with this kind of finality, makes me admit to myself that I want him to come back, that I’m waiting for him to come back and try again. That’s what I’ve been doing, tiptoeing around work, avoiding my house, constantly telling Greer and Zoe I’m fine. I’m waiting. I’m waiting for him to call or to show up here, to talk to me about what went wrong with Beaumont, to sell me on him and on us. For all my talk to Ben about choosing for myself, I’m not choosing anything right now. I’m waiting for more options to present themselves—I’m waiting for him to present himself, again, the right way this time, some way that’s going to convince me to go all in, to not be freaked out by tying myself to someone else, someone who could really have an effect on all my future choices.
But if he doesn’t come back…
Henry slaps his hands on his knees, casual change-of-subject time, and says, “Ready to see some of those tubs?” Like he hasn’t just punched me right in the gut with this story of little boy Ben, trying so hard and failing, to get someone to choose him.
An hour and a half later, I’ve picked out a slipper-style clawfoot tub and Henry’s promised he can switch out the feet, since the ones that are modeled after lion’s paws give me the creeps. I stall because I hope he’ll say something else about Ben, but he doesn’t. When I leave, I don’t go to Zoe or Greer’s. I go home, and wander through the wreckage of the kitchen renovation, getting a good look at that brick wall that’s being exposed behind the place where the stove will go. I wash my face in the downstairs powder room. I go up to my bedroom, but only to bring down a pillow and extra blanket for the couch, which is where I’m going to sleep. Or not sleep, as the case may be, since I lie awake staring at my ceiling for hours.
Until I make a choice.
* * * *
A week later, I’m in Houston.
It’s seven o’clock at night and still ninety-three degrees. August, I’ve heard, is brutal around here. I’d given myself all of today to wander around the city, to follow a few suggestions from a local I’d talked to on the flight, and from the person who served me coffee at the hotel Starbucks this morning. I’d gone to the Museum of Natural Science and spent too much time in the exhibit about minerals. I’d eaten lunch at a Tex-Mex place that had no air conditioning, but amazing food. I’d walked around a park called Discovery Green, studied a map of the city while sitting on one of the park benches, skyscrapers looming behind me. When I’d gone to leave, walking through a shady grove of pine trees, I’d spotted a sculpture, a big bronze-cast heart mounted on slats of wood. From a distance, the heart looked roughed-up, lumpy, but up close, embedded in the heart, were tools—an axe, a hammer, other things I wasn’t quite sure about. It was called The House. I’d snapped a picture before heading back to my hotel to change for my meeting with Jasper, which I’d insisted on having in the hotel restaurant. I’d insisted on a lot from him, actually, including complete confidentiality, but he hadn’t balked at any of it.
Jasper tells me many things during our two-hour conversation, but the most important is that the Beaumont corporate offices are where I’m most likely to find Ben. He works late these days, especially when he’s not traveling. In fact, Jasper tells me, I’m lucky to be catching him this week, because the last two, he’d done three trips, all in different time zones. He watches me with a careful, measured suspicion, and at first I think this is because he distrusts my out-of-the-blue interest in talking more about Beaumont. But as we talk, I realize it’s because he distrusts my interest in Ben. When he stands to shake my hand at the end of our conversation, he holds it a beat longer than makes sense for a business meeting, looks at me through deep brown eyes that reve
al nothing. “End of the hall, fifty-eighth floor,” he says. “Good luck.” And then he strides away, not looking back once.
So here I am, wandering a long corridor of sleek, frosted glass doors to darkened offices. Every once in a while, the space opens to a large conference room, and midway down there’s a lounge space with low, modern black leather sofas, two impossibly thin, mounted televisions, both off. I imagine they stay mostly on during the day, stock prices trolling along the bottom of the screens. Up ahead I can see a door open, light streaming out, and I pause next to one of the sofas, set my hand on its cold surface, steady myself in these insane, soul-destroying shoes. This entire outfit is borrowed, from Zoe. I think I look ridiculous but also like I completely belong here. Suddenly, I think: This was a stupid idea, this whole gesture. You should have called him. You didn’t have to go through all of this.
But when I close my eyes against the nerves, I see Ben, and this steels me anew. I can’t wait to see him in person. I can’t wait to be near him, finally. I have no idea how this will go, but just that I get to see him—it counts for something, and it gives me the courage I need to keep walking.
He doesn’t hear me walk up to his open door. He has earbuds in, and his hands are typing furiously on the laptop he has set up on the glass surface of his desk. There’s a blue necktie heaped next to his arm. He’s wearing a white dress shirt, the top button undone. I am heart stoppingly pleased that he has not cut his hair, which curls a little across his brow, and his jaw is stubbled, the way I’m used to seeing it. Behind him is the sky turning purple-orange, some of the city lights starting to twinkle on.
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