He doesn’t pull from his cigarette. He lets it burn as it rests between his lips, until the ash at the end of it is long enough to force him to make the move to flick it away.
Pulling up his phone, he checks for a call at least six times in the span of three minutes, and I take the phone from him to slide it into my own pocket.
“He’s a bad person,” he tells me. “Straight up fucking evil. They both are.”
“I know they are.”
“He took my brother away from me.” I nod as he tosses his spent cigarette onto the ground in front of him to stomp out the ash with his toe. “His son wasdyingand he wouldn’t let anyone help him to the fucking bathroom. He turned my sister into such a Stepford wife, I can hardly even look at her, most of the time.”
Turning to face me as I massage his thigh, he shakes his head. “I hate him. Hedeservesto fucking die. I’ve wished for it over and over andfucking overagain. But—”
“You don’t want it to happen,” I say plainly.
His head drops, his chest rising with a long inhale before he blows the air out again through his lips.
“I thought I did.”
Climbing into the open space behind him, I settle with my chest against his back and wrap my arms tightly around his body. My cheek rests against the back of his shoulder as his body tenses, and I wait.
I wait for the sharp intake of air as he surrenders to the fear of losing the father who turned his back on him. I wait for the shake in his body and the unsteady breath that comes with it.
I wait until he doesn’t need me to hold him, anymore.
As he gathers himself and his breathing comes back to him, my hands massage into his chest.
“Julia’s making you something to eat,” I tell him.
“Julia can’t cook,” he says through a tired laugh, scrubbing a hand down the length of his face. “She made spaghetti once,and she almost burned the house down. Have you ever seen someoneburnwater?”
“Then let’s get in there and save her.” Wrapping my arms around his shoulders, I squeeze him tightly before pulling his face toward mine to meet him in a soft kiss. “We love you, alright? We’re here for all of it.”
“Yeah,” he shrugs.
For hours, he’s quiet. As the three of us work together to cook the messiest skillet of fajitas I’ve ever seen, he doesn’t say more than a few words to either of us. A laugh here or there, but not much more than that. When it finally comes time to eat, he spends more time pushing the food around his plate than he does actually eating it.
It’s hard for Julia and I to hide our worry, each of us keeping a watchful eye on him with the occasional glance to one another to check in.
As his phone finally vibrates against the table with his brother’s name illuminated across the screen, he snatches it up and hurries out to the back yard to answer the call.
It’s a powerless feeling to watch someone you care about take a phone call that will either relieve stress they didn’t know that they carried; or one that will upend everything that they thought they once knew.
It’s wanting to crawl through time and space to reach whatever mechanism it is that makes the universe run. To take it by the throat and tell it to make the right decision. Put something good in the world for that person – for those people.
Julia’s hand reaches for mine across the table, and I take it, offering a kiss to the back of it before I tuck it tightly between mine. It isn’t lost on me that she’s likely feeling just as conflicted as Tripp is. If she wasn’t, she never would have mentioned her brief but positive memories of his father.
Standing, I move behind her to wrap my arms tightly around her shoulders with a hard kiss to her cheek, and we watch together as Tripp finally kicks at the ground before stepping back inside to be immediately jumped on by an excited Koda.
Jules’s body tenses in my grip, her fingertips digging into the skin of my forearms.
“He didn’t die,” Tripp tells us. I can’t decide whether he sounds indifferent or angry.
Moving past us, he trudges quietly up the stairs, followed closely by Drumstick, who I think may be the only one of us that he wants to see right now.
Koda whines from the base of the stairs as his friends disappear, and I click my tongue to call him in our direction. Reluctantly, he trots toward us, dropping to lay down at thelanding of the stairs. I’m stopped by a hand wrapping around my wrist when I move to step toward them.
“He can’t yet,” Julia tells me with a shake of her head, her lips pulled into a tight line.
Her thumb strokes against my skin as I turn my gaze to the stairs, following each of them up to the hallway which leads to our bedroom. I shake my head before dropping back into my seat.
