“My God,” he says and pushes one of the containers toward me.“You get chicken for being a nerd.”
We eat for a while.It’s pretty good—and it seems pretty healthy.Gray keeps looking around the house, and I’m sure he’s seeing what I’d see if I walked in here for the first time: the scalloped curtains and the pastel walls and all the little old lady trinkets everywhere.It’s the kind of stuff you don’t see once you’ve been around it long enough, but I’m seeing it now.Like Gran’s needlepoint pillow that says GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND GET TO WORK.
A few years ago, I would have made a crack about it.I guess I thought I was trying to beat everybody else to the punch, like if I made fun of it first, it would show I knew it wasn’t cool—and that meant I was cool.But I’d been working on that, and so I sit and eat and try to think of something else to say.It takes me about five minutes before I finally say, “Gran pretty much raised me.”
Gray looks at me.
“With my dad, I mean,” I say.“My mom left before I turned one.”
Gray forks some of the burrito bowl around.People always feel awkward when they hear about Mom; they don’t know what to say.
“Dad says she wasn’t ready for the responsibility of having a kid,” I say.“But it could have been anything.You learn that when you’re police, you know?Sometimes, bad things happen, and you never find out.”
Gray puts his fork down now.“Your grandma seems sweet.And like a lot of fun.”
In spite of myself, I smile.“Oh yeah.Unless you’re a sophomore in high school, and everybody finds out she’s canoodling with the principal.”
Gray bursts out laughing, but what he says is “Canoodling?”
“That’s what she called it.”And even though my face is turning red, I start laughing too.
“God,” Gray says, and I can’t tell if he’s impressed or if he’s trying to stop laughing.“Is she actually going to get married?It sounded like she just met this guy.”
“Probably.And yeah, she did.That’s Gran.She falls in and out of love about ten times a week.If she does marry this guy, it’ll be the fifth one.”
This time, Gray’s laugh sounds funny.“Better her than me, I guess.”
“I guess it probably seems strange if you don’t know her, but she really does fall in love.”
Neither of us says anything after that.We eat.I wonder if I should turn the TV on; that’s what Gran and I usually do if it’s the two of us.But I don’t think Gray wants to watchMurder, She Wroteor one of the old VHS tapes ofRemington Steele.He probably wants to watch Bravo.Or does he want to watch ESPN?I guess I don’t hear him talk about TV much, not that we’d ever had a conversation before yesterday.
I’m still thinking about TV—maybe I could put it on the news—when Gray says, “I think it’s nice.”At first, I don’t know what he’s talking about, and he must see it on my face because he says, “Your gran.How close you are.”He stops, but then he looks down at his bowl, scraping rice from the side.“I’m not close with my family.”And then he does that weird laugh again.“That’s putting it lightly.”
I don’t know what to say to that, and Gran says if you don’t know what to say, keep your mouth shut.
“I started WISP for a reason,” Gray says dryly, as though I’d asked something anyhow.“Let’s leave it at that.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He shakes his head.And then something changes in his face, and he looks like Detective Dulac again, and this other person—Gray, I think—is gone.“Finish your lunch, Sammy.We’ve got work to do.”
9
Gray
Five days later, Palomo and I catch a domestic.
It’s been a weird five days.Everything has been off since I came up with this plan.Everything has been different since Sam.
Part of it is the obvious shift in things at WISP.Over the last five days, Sam has made a few calculated appearances, and I’ve introduced him to people—Robin got a proper introduction, for example.He bared his teeth the whole time, and I’m honestly surprised he didn’t bite Sam at least once.And I made sure Kayla met Sam so that she could start spreading the word behind the scenes to donors about this new Norman Rockwell bullshit I had going on—basically a 1950s nuclear family if I could put Sam in a skirt and heels and Gran lived in an apartment over our garage.Actually, that sounded like a super gay sitcom, and I would totally watch it.The thing with Kayla couldn’t have gone any better as a matter of fact.She’d dropped by unexpectedly, and I’d texted him and told him it was an emergency.He’d shown up in Carhartt pants and an old white T-shirt.He’d had grease on one arm.More grease on his nose.He’d been doing something on his gran’s car, he said, and he apologized a million times as he shook Kayla’s hand and said I should have told him so he could wash up.If I’d planned the whole thing, it couldn’t have been more perfect—it was like taking a piece of Americana out of the museum, the grease monkey next door, and finding out it was a classic for a reason.I think Kayla and I both splooged, and when she got me alone, she said Ben Fields, megadonor family man, was going to wet himself.
But it’s not only the changes at WISP.I haven’t been sleeping well.That’s been true on and off since I got hurt.For the last year, things have been getting steadily better, but now I’m back to not sleeping—lying awake in bed, and, when I do fall asleep, waking up at odd hours.It’s the stress.Everything at WISP.The fact that I’ve worked so hard, and they still might take it away from me.
So, when we catch this domestic, my head is hurting, and my eyes feel grainy, and I swear I can smell the cheap-ass coffee oozing out of my skin.
Palomo drives, which is fine by me.
Palomo’s been my partner since before I got hurt.She and I didn’t get off to a good start, but in the time since, we’ve hit our stride.She’s good at what she does, and even though I still think there’s a lot of ambition hiding under the professional façade, she’s a good partner too.And she’s good to have on a domestic because she’s a woman.
