“What?”
“You made a noise.”
“I didn’t.” Probably a lie. Anyway, if his mother said he made a noise, he’d made a noise. She missed nothing, not now. A monstrous curse he’d put on her without ever meaning to.
Right now, she was probably trying not to ask him a familiar question, the same one he got asked for months and months by doctors and nurses and therapists. She still had to try, even though it’d been years since he’d yelled at her in a fit of frustrated exhaustion.Please, stop. It’s never what you want to hear. It’s never going to be what you want to hear, not ever again.
Still, he gave the answer silently, automatically.Six out of ten today.Not too bad.
“How’s Leonard?” he asked, to distract her. And himself.
“A stubborn ass,” she said, chuckling, because Leonard was, literally, a stubborn ass, the lone donkey on the property that had no purpose other than to eat every other animal’s feed and show his weird, too-big teeth to everyone who walked by his enclosure. When Griffin left, Leonard had a sarcoid over his left eye that his mother had been fretting over. “But getting better.”
“Good.”
“And?” she said.
“And what?” He braced himself for her losing the battle against herself.What’s your pain level today?
“And how’syourstubborn ass?” she said instead, and his mouth curved up. “I hope you notice I haven’t been calling you. Like you asked.”
“I noticed. I’m doing all right, all things considered.”
The travel, he meant. The plane, the time change, the hotel, the people. That’s what she meant, when she asked—how he was managing all these things that he so determinedly avoided for the lastten years, that he’d had to train for like the most pathetic boxer before he’d left.
“I went on a boat,” he said, surprising himself. And then worse, he keptgoing. “Shopped at this famous store. Saw the building where they…have the opera. Looking at Notre-Dame right now.”
This was, he knew, a stunning enough recap on its own that his mom would not press for details on any of it, which meant that he would not explain that not a single thing he listed was some kind of sightseeing lark that he’d done of his own accord. Even this morning felt like a strange necessity, a required ritual he needed to perform before doing this new day.
She didn’t speak for a long time. Or at least, what felt like a long time, when you were on the phone, thousands of miles away. Griffin could picture her, in the small kitchen of the ranch house where he never really spent much time, stirring her tea until the urge to cry passed.
“That’s good,” she finally said, her voice perfectly normal.
The light was changing now—pink sky behind streaks of wispy slate-gray clouds, the church changing color along with it, like it was getting dressed for the day.
Probably he should go back. Shower, eat something. Get ready for getting looked at.
“And Michael?” his mother asked, a chippy, nearly undetectable note in her voice.
But the truth was, he didn’t miss much about her, either.
He paused, scuffed his shoe across the pavers beneath his feet. “He’s good,” he lied.
Man, what the fuck, Michael had texted him last night, ten minutes after he’d taken Layla off the boat. Griff had been in the car with her by then, watching her faintly trembling fingersholding her dress away from her body, finally starting to reckon with what he’d done.
Handling it, he’d texted back, as though he had some grand best man plan. As though he was the crisis manager, and not half the crisis himself.
“Fitz and Paula?” his mother added, which was really what that chippy tone was about. Michael, his mother loved—complicatedly loved, Griff supposed, but still. Loved.
Michael’s parents were another story.
“They get here later. This afternoon, I think.”
“You won’t take any shit from them,” she said, but he didn’t want to get into this. They wouldn’t ever agree on what shit he’d taken—would always take—from them.
So he changed the subject.
“It’s the other family that’s messy,” he said, and as soon as it came out of his mouth, he knew it was the wrong can of worms to open. Knew exactly who it would lead to.
