Chapter 5: I'll Go

I’ll Go

The suitcase was still on the floor between Walter and Milo, and both of them still had a hand on it.

Milo looked up fast — not the way a man looks up when somebody comes into a room. The way a man looks up when the room has said something.

Adrian let him look.

A month ago a man had come through that door with two suitcases, and Adrian had married him. He had not said one word to him since. Not at the table. Not in the hall. Not once.

It was all over Milo’s face now.

The color came up his neck first, then his cheeks, and he turned his head down and away, as if that were something a man could do something about.

Adrian watched him do it. Somewhere in the middle of it he was looking at the man’s eyes, wide and round with nothing arranged behind them, and he had a thought he did not stop to inspect, which was that this was, right now, cute.

He felt the corner of his mouth start to move. He stopped it.

“I—“ Milo said. Then he got ahold of it. “Yes. Just. Just got back.”

Adrian looked at the case. Then at him.

“Grandpa wants me up at the house tomorrow for lunch.” He said it flat, the way he said things he had already decided. “You’re coming with me.”

Milo didn’t answer. He didn’t move. The hand stayed on the handle.

Walter had started to say something. He didn’t.

“Or do you have something tomorrow?” Adrian said.

That one came out with something under it that he had not put there on purpose.

“No. No, I—“ Milo said, and then, before the sentence was finished: “I understand. I’ll go.”

He said it fast, the words running into each other. Then he stopped.

Neither of them said anything.

Then the phone in Adrian’s pocket started up against his leg, and Milo moved, quick, like a man who had just been told he could go.

“I’ll be in my room, then,” he said, and got his grip back on the case, and went up, and the case knocked the edge of the bottom step on the way.

“There’s the kitchen to close,” Walter said, to no one, and went.

Adrian took the phone out and looked at the name.

The frown came first, before he had decided anything. Then it went, and what replaced it was a smile, small and not warm, and the smile stayed there exactly as long as it took him to lift the phone to his ear.

“It’s me.”

Julian Crane had never once had to say who it was. Years of it, and he still came on the line like a man who was already known.

“I’ve got tomorrow off,” Julian said. “Nothing to do with myself all day. Do you have time? Let’s go get something to eat.”

The voice came through low and unhurried, a man asking for something he had never been refused.

“I’m busy tomorrow,” Adrian said.

The line went quiet.

“Okay,” Julian said. “Busy with what?”

“Nothing much. Lunch up at the house.”

“Oh.”

Adrian heard the whole thing happen inside that one syllable. The drop, then the climb back up, then Julian doing arithmetic he had done a hundred times before. The house. Arthur Hale. Nobody’s invitation.

“Then some other time,” Julian said. “Are you home now? What are you doing? I could come over.”

“No. It’s late. Get some sleep. We’ll do it another time.”

“All right.”

And then, still in that same soft voice: “Get some rest too. Take care of yourself. Good night.”

“Good night.”

He looked at the screen for a second after it went black.

Not yet.

One man on the other end of a phone line, and he needed the rest of them. There was more than one — he had known that for a long time now, long enough that sitting on it had stopped costing him anything.

He put the phone away.

Julian took the phone from his ear and looked at it and set it down on the arm of the couch, screen up, because that was where it went.

He went back through the call. The day off first. That had been a mistake — it made it sound like he had spent the week clearing a space in it.

But it was the house. That was fine. Arthur Hale asked for a lunch the way other people took a breath, and nobody in that family got to say no to it, and tomorrow instead of some other day was a fact about a calendar and not a fact about him.

He knew where he stood with that house. He had known it the first time he walked in and every time after. Nobody was going to write his name into anything, and he had stopped waiting on it years ago.

Which left the other one. The husband. A man who had been given a name and a room and a seat at the table, and had taken all three and stayed out of sight, and had gotten nothing else.

A month in that house. Adrian did not speak to him — Julian had gathered that much without asking anybody. A man at the end of a hall who came down for meals.

So it didn’t matter. Tomorrow was a lunch. As long as the one Adrian wanted was still him.

And it was.

He picked the phone back up and turned it over once in his hand and set it down again, screen up, where it went.

Milo sat down on the edge of the bed with his coat still on and did not turn on the lamp, and looked at the wall, and it did not make any sense.

He sat like that for a while. His face did something small and confused, and then stopped.

He had carried the sentence up the stairs with him. Grandpa wants me up at the house tomorrow for lunch. You’re coming with me. It sat in the room with him, and he turned it over and over, and it did not get any smaller.

Then the other one, the one that kept coming back. Or do you have something tomorrow?

He could not do anything with that one. The first was information. The second was not information, and there was no word he was willing to sit here and go looking for.

He lay back on the bed still dressed and put his hands flat on his chest and stared at the ceiling. His heart would not slow down. The sentences went around again.

He was grinning. He could feel it, and there was nobody in the room, so he let it stay.

After a while he made himself stop. He had done this before — taken a thing that was almost certainly nothing and held onto it long enough for it to start looking like more. A man had asked whether he had plans. Men asked that. It was a courtesy, and people forgot the courtesies they had paid before they reached the car.

It wasn’t anything.

All right. It wasn’t anything.

He meant to get up and hang the coat. He was asleep before he got to it.

Adrian’s room was the first door past the stairs. He stopped in front of it with his hand on the knob.

The hall ran the length of the floor. There was one door at the far end of it, past the guest rooms, and it had been shut every night for a month by a man who came down for meals and went back up afterward. Adrian stood at his own door with his hand on his own knob and did not turn it.

Then he walked down the hall.

The door at the end wasn’t locked. He turned the handle, opened it about a foot, and stopped.

The room was cold. The lamp was off, the drapes were open, and the light from the driveway was enough to see by: the case on the floor at the foot of the bed, the coat still on, one arm hanging off the mattress, and the man himself curled onto his side and frowning at nothing, with no blanket on him at all.

Something scraped once across Adrian’s chest, and he stood there.

Then he noticed his own hand. He had the blanket off the chair and up over the man’s shoulder, and he did not remember the two seconds in between. He pulled it the rest of the way and tucked the edge down at the side of the mattress and took his hand back.

Milo turned his face into the blanket and settled and stopped frowning.

Adrian should have gone then. He stayed.

He looked at him for a while. He had never once seen this face with nothing going on behind it. At meals the man set his shoulders a certain way and looked at the floor and said thank you when things were put in front of him, and that was all Adrian knew about him.

He took his hand off the blanket. He pulled the door shut behind him, slowly, until the latch slipped in without a sound.