Chapter 11: You Might Like Him Eventually

You Might Like Him Eventually

The engine was still running, and his mother had not gone back inside.

He could have left. She had come out to the gravel and said what she had come out to say, and he had given her the only answer he was going to give, and he was still sitting there with both hands on the wheel and the car in park.

There was one reason he hadn’t. The reason was inside the house with his hands flat on his knees, being polite to an old man, and he would be out in a minute.

Once, at the end of a long night, in a building with nobody else in it, he had let a man stand at his back. He had learned what that cost him. He had never been tempted to try it a second time.

What his mother wanted was a sentence out of him: that a person could still be trusted. He wasn’t going to say it.

He already had one of those under his own roof, if he wanted one. Nine years of him saying yes, and thank you, and whatever you like.

Unless —

That was as far as he got. He put the car in gear, took it back out again, and put his hand back on the wheel.

His mother came off the gravel and walked the length of the car and stopped at his door. She didn’t knock on the glass. He rolled the window down.

“Home first,” she said. “Then the office.”

“I know.”

“Look at me.”

He looked at her.

“When I say home first, I mean first. Not the office and then home whenever you get around to it. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not whenever the meetings run late.”

“Home first,” he said. “I’ll take him home.”

“Thank you.”

She didn’t move. Her fingers were on the frame of the window, and she had turned her ring around so the stone sat on the inside of her hand.

“You came today,” she said. “You didn’t have to. You’ve been finding reasons not to be in this house for two years, and today you came, and you sat through the whole of it and you didn’t once look at the door.”

“I watched him at that table,” she said. “Nine years under this roof and he still doesn’t know where to put his hands.”

Adrian turned the vent down until nothing was blowing on his shins.

“I’ve spent the whole afternoon trying to work out what’s different in you, and I’ve given up,” she said. “I’ve decided I don’t care what it is. I’ll take it.”

“All right.”

“Bring him when you come.”

“I will.”

“Good.”

She straightened up and stepped back and stood in the driveway looking in at him through the open window.

“Go inside,” he said. “It’s cold.”

“I’ve been cold before.”

She went a few steps up the drive and stopped and turned around.

“You might like him eventually.”

He didn’t answer that.

She went up onto the porch and reached for the door, and it came open from the inside before she touched it, and Milo came out.

Arthur came after him and stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, which he didn’t do for everyone.

“Come back and sit with an old man sometime,” he said. “I have all day and nobody in this house who’ll sit still.”

“I will, sir. Thank you.”

He lifted two fingers and let them drop. From him, that was a goodbye.

Milo came down the steps and stopped at the bottom, in front of Vivian.

“Thank you for lunch, Mom.”

She looked at him for a second.

“You’re welcome,” she said. And then, past him, at the car: “Drive safe. Both of you.”

Milo came out past the front of the car and stopped at Adrian’s window, where his mother had been standing, and looked in.

Adrian looked back.

The two of them stayed where they were up on the porch and watched, and neither of them moved.

Then Milo went around the hood and got in on the passenger side, and pulled the door shut, and put his hands flat on his knees, and looked straight ahead.

Adrian put the car in gear.

They went down the drive and out through the gate.

Vivian stayed out on the drive until the car was through it, and then she went back inside.

Arthur was back in his chair by the window, his cup at his elbow where he could reach it without looking.

Vivian came in and stood behind the couch for a moment, then sat down at the end of it.

“Gone,” she said.

“I heard the gate.”

“He said he’d bring him. Next time.”

“Did he say it,” Arthur said, “or did you?”

“I asked him to say it out loud. He said it out loud.”

“Then he’ll do it. I’ve known him his whole life and he has never once told me a thing he didn’t then do. It’s the only thing about him that’s ever been reliable.”

The hall clock struck the hour. Neither of them looked at it.

“He was different today,” Arthur said.

“He was.”

“I’ve been trying to put my finger on it since the table. I can’t get hold of it.”

“You won’t.”

“No.” Arthur moved the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. “He looked at that boy twice at my table. I counted. In two years I’ve never seen him do it once.”

“He didn’t leave the room when I brought him up, either. He stayed for it.”

“No.”

“Whatever it is,” Arthur said, “it’s in the right direction.”

“Mm.”

Vivian turned the ring on her hand.

“I don’t know what to call him.”

“Who?”

“Milo.”

She waited. Arthur didn’t say anything.

“He calls me Mom,” she said. “He started that this afternoon, at my own table, because somebody called him Mrs. Hale and I said not to, and he heard me do it. Nobody told him to. And I still don’t know what I’m supposed to call him. I said goodbye to him at my own front door ten minutes ago and I didn’t call him anything.”

“You call him Milo.”

“I call him Milo.” She turned the ring back the other way. “That’s his name. That isn’t the thing I’m asking about.”

“There isn’t a word for the thing you’re asking about,” Arthur said. “There’d be one if he were a girl. There isn’t one for him. People are going to make one up, and it won’t be any good, and you can spend the next ten years correcting them or you can let them have it.”

Vivian didn’t answer.

“Lila’s coming home,” Arthur said.

“When.”

“Two weeks. Three.”

Vivian looked at her hands.

“She’s asked about Adrian every time she’s called.”

“Since she was nineteen.”

“And she cried,” Arthur said, “when she heard he was with somebody. That got back to me.”

“That was two years ago.”

“Mm.”

“She’s a good girl.”

“She is.”

“It’s a pity.”

“Mm.”

“Conrad Ashby’s been pleasant to me twice this year,” Arthur said. “I don’t like it.”

“Conrad Ashby is a man who counts.”

“That isn’t what bothers me. He makes his own choices, and I’ve never once liked one of them.”

“When that girl gets off that plane,” Arthur said, “there’ll be no peace in this family for a month.”

Vivian stood up and picked up the coffee pot.

She carried it as far as the doorway and stopped and looked back.

Arthur had his eyes closed. Two fingers came up off the arm of the chair and fell back.

She pulled the door to behind her.