Page 41 of Sprog
I stop wiping the table. I look at the cloth in my hand.
"An old friend," I say again.
Millie picks up her bag. "I'll see you tomorrow." She pauses at the door. "For what it's worth, he looked at you the way people look at things they thought they'd lost."
She leaves before I can answer that.
I finish cleaning in silence, and I lock the front door, I turn off the lights room by room and I go upstairs to the apartment.
It's small and its mine and normally I love it for exactly those reasons. Tonight, I sit down on the sofa, and I don't turn on a lamp. I sit in the dark for a long time. Images flicker there, in the darkness.
EJ's face when he was trying to be brave. Austin's hands in his son's hair. The way he said please save my boy with his voice doing the thing it did.
I hadn't realized until today that he had a son. I'd known, in the abstract way you know things you've heard from other people, that there was a child from the situation with the woman from the club. But knowing it in the abstract and then seeing the boy's face and knowing immediately whose son he was, that's different. That's a thing that takes up space.
And the boy himself. EJ, with his focused questions and his careful bravery. His simple certainty about what his father is and what the club is. He didn't perform for me or try to impress me. He just wanted to understand things. He was nine years old and the most straightforward person I've spoken to since I got back to this town.
Austin made that child. He raised that child. Whatever Austin is now, ten years and a patch and whatever the Black Saints havebuilt in this town, that boy is the evidence of who he became when I wasn't here to see it.
I don't know what to do with that either.
My phone lights up on the cushion next to me.
LUKE
Hey Sav. How's the small town treating you? Miss you.
I look at it for a moment. Then I pick it up.
SAV
Miss you too. You need to come down on your next days off. I'll show you around. It'll take about fifteen minutes and then we can find somewhere that sells wine.
LUKE
Sounds like a plan. I actually have this weekend off. Am I invited?
SAV
Hell yes. Come Friday after your shift. I'll send you a pin.
LUKE
It's a date. Well. You know what I mean.
SAV
Unfortunately I do. See you Friday.
I set the phone down and look at the ceiling.
He called you Sav. Like he's been calling you that his whole life.
He has been. That's the problem. Some things don't stop being true just because you need them to.
I get up and make coffee, then I stand in my small kitchen in the dark and I think about Austin's eyes when he walked in with EJ in his arms. I think about the way the fear in them shifted when he saw me, and I think about what Millie said. I think about EJ asking me if I was going to be a doctor when I grew up.
I think about all of it.
