But she’s already settled a pair of headphones over her ears and turned away from us.
“We’ll just have to wait until someone wanders up here and rescues us,” Cal mutters, letting his hands drop to his sides before he walks back over to where he was sitting before. “And hope they don’t commit Alena to the mental health center.”
“Don’t fucking talk about my sister,” I snap, turning to him just in time to catch his eyes rolling. He drops into the chair with an amused huff.
“What?” I prod, feeling some of my anger and frustration bubbling to the surface.
“What,what?”
“The eye rolling. The sigh.”
Cal slowly raises his eyes to mine, giving me a look, “You really want to talk about it?”
I glance at the door and only see my sister’s back through the glass. Letting out a low, quick growl, I scrub my hand over my face and say, “No, but doesn’t look like we have much of a choice, do we?”
Cal stares at me for a moment, then says, “You always do that. Act like you have more claim over things than I do.”
“…are we talking about Alena? Mysister?”
“It’s not likesisteris this be-all, end-all fucking label,” Cal says, snapping the patient file shut and pointing his hand at me. “You want to talk aboutyour sister? Then maybe consider this, Russ—which of us has been here, in Chicago, the entire time? Who watched her kids so she could go on an anniversary trip with Matt? And who hired the private detective to finally pin the fucking weasel for cheating on her?”
I can’t stop my mouth from falling open. “…you did? You knew about that?”
Once again, Cal rolls his eyes, “Yeah, in case you were unaware, the other people in your family actuallylikeme.”
“I don’t—not like you, Cal. It’s never been like that.”
“Oh, it hasn’t? It hasn’t always been me against you, fighting for Frank to throw us a fucking bone?”
The way he spits outFrankis new to me and loosens something in my chest. Normally, I might take it as a chance to remind him that Frank is my dad, and that he’d better not talk ill of the dead, but there’s something different about this, now.
“Yeah,” I admit, pulling out a chair and sitting down, placing my palms flat against the surface of the table. “I guess it was, when we were kids. But I thought when I moved away that was pretty much over.”
Cal laughs, “Nah, man. Even when you were gone, Frank never let me forget that your grades were higher than mine. That you did that accelerated program. Even if it was subtle, it was there. Never mind the fact that I’m the one who stuck around, who went with him to chemo every week.”
I wince, the guilt I carry with me worming a little deeper into my chest. “I never said thanks for that, did I?”
“You don’t have to,” Cal mutters. “Frank was my family, too. Even if he clearly didn’t think so.”
“What does that mean?” Unlike other times, this doesn’t come out antagonistic.
Cal raises his eyebrows, “You don’t know? I thought you did. I thought that’s why you were rubbing the wholeinheritancething in my face, at that meeting.”
My brow knits together, “The hell do you mean?”
Letting out a breathy laugh, Cal stares down at the table and says, “Frank didn’t leave meshit, Russ.”
For a second, my brain struggles to catch up. All this time, I’d taken it as a fact that Dad left Calsomethingin the will, I just had no idea what, specifically, it was. Maybe a property in the city and some cash, a family heirloom or two.
“The hell are you saying?”
“Nothing,” Cal whispers, still staring at the table, his voice thick with emotion. “You know, I might have thought of Frank as a father, but heneverthought of me as a son.”
It reverberates through the room, and I have to sit in the discomfort.
I’m used to being around other people, used to trying to figure them out. It’s not like I’m able to drift through life without considering how the people around me might be suffering, but this is the first time I’vereallythought about Cal, other than as some sort of flattened caricature from my childhood.
He and I have never really talked about my dad. Never really compared notes on how we were treated. And in all the time that this weird, competitive space has existed between us, I never thought Cal might have been on the other side, lonely. Nobody in his corner as he suffered through something pretty fucking similar to what I was going through.
