Page 181 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"You got kicked out?"

My mother says it the way she used to ask whether I'd tracked mud across her clean floor — quiet, level, already knowing the answer and just waiting for me to be man enough to admit it.

She's standing at the stove with a spatula in one hand and a dish towel thrown over her shoulder, her silver-threaded hair pinned back off her face, an apron dusted white at the hip where she wiped her fingers.

Behind her, a pan of batter is going gold at the edges, filling the whole kitchen with the warm, buttery smell of pancakes.

Pancakes. Naturally.

The universe has a sense of humor, and it is not a kind one.

I didn't decide to come here.

Beckett decided it for me — pointed at the door with that flat, granite calm of his and told me to go sit at my mother's table until I understood what I'd done.

Like a kid sent to his room.

I drove the back roads out to the house I grew up in with my jaw clenched the whole way, rehearsing all the reasons I was right, and every one of them evaporated the second I caught the smell of my mother's kitchen through the screen door. This house does that. It strips the armor off a man before he's cleared the threshold.

I shift in the hard wooden chair I've sat in for thirty years of Sunday mornings and try to hold onto the last scrap of my certainty.

"I wasn't kicked out. I was asked to take a day. There's a difference."

"Is there?" She flips a pancake without looking at it. Nutmeg and browned butter and the faint salt-brine that clings to everything in this house drift off her, her scent as steady as she is, and it makes the sour, jangling mess of my own —spiced rum gone sharp, blood orange curdling at the edges— feel loud and childish by comparison.

Across the table, Theo snorts into his coffee.

My little brother is folded into the chair opposite me like he's been poured there, all long limbs and bedhead, a faded college hoodie swallowing his frame.

He's got Mom's dark eyes and somebody else's jaw, and right now both are aimed at me with the particular delight of a younger sibling watching an older one squirm.

Bergamot and cut cedar roll off him, bright and green and irritatingly clean.

The kitchen hasn't changed since I was small.

Same yellowed clock, same chipped blue tile, same crowded gallery of photos climbing the wall beside the door — Theo's graduations, my mother behind the Tide Table counter, the two of us as gap-toothed kids out on the dock. There's a gap in the arrangement up near the top, a rectangle where the paint sits ashade brighter than the rest, where a picture used to hang and doesn't anymore.

Nobody has ever mentioned taking it down.

Nobody has ever mentioned the man who used to be in it, either.

"Oh, this is good," he says. "This is so good. Why do I have a feeling you fucked up, because you just signed some temporary contract, didn't you?" He sets his mug down and spreads his hands. "How'd you manage to get booted this fast? You're like one of those little penguins that waddles up to the wrong huddle and gets shoved back out onto the ice. Rejected by your own colony."

"I'm not a penguin."

"You're absolutely a penguin right now."

I'm supposed to be good at this.

Reading a room, I mean — it's the one thing I've always done better than anybody: walk into a space and take its temperature before a word gets said, know which grin to hand over, which joke will land, which wall to lean against. It's how I make my living.

Right now the entire room is readingme, and every instrument I own has gone dead in my hands.

Mayday.

"Can you not?"

"Explain it, then." He leans back, arms crossing over his chest. "Walk me through how a grown man with a house and a pack and a signature on a federal document ends up back at his mama's table before noon."