A pause.
Pratt:Yes.
I laughed into the couch cushion.
Sully:Goodnight, Pratt.
Pratt:Goodnight.
***
The next morning, I wasn't sure I wanted to wake up. I knew what day it was, and I'd pushed it out of my mind all Wednesday.
It was there, already in the room.
It had been three years.
My mother picked up on the third ring.
"Hi, honey."
"Hey."
"You okay?"
"Yeah. I'm good."
"Good." She let it settle. "That's good."
I didn't call often. Usually, it was Mom checking in, but I called on the anniversary each year.
She'd known Bryan since I brought him home after school when I was nine years old. She'd fed him dinner approximately four hundred times, and she stood at my side at the funeral, saying nothing because there was nothing to say.
She didn't bring him up on the phone. She always waited on me.
"Tell his mom hi for me." That was all I could get out before I needed to hang up the phone.
I grabbed my coat and keys and left the condo.
The Harold Washington Library reading room had ceilings tall enough that the light arriving at the tables lost something on the way down. I sat near a window with a book I'd grabbed off a display on the way in.
It wasThe Undertaking.The name sounded appropriate. I opened it somewhere past the middle.
I didn't read it. That was fine. All I needed was the exercise of sitting somewhere with living people around. Somewhere that didn't require me to do anything.
Bryan would have found it funny.
He'd have come in, clocked the whole setup—me at a library table on a Thursday afternoon with a book I wasn't reading—and pulled out the chair across from me. He'd look at the book and then look at me.
The Undertaking,he'd have said.Interesting choice for a guy who's fine.
I am fine.
You're in a library, Sul.
Libraries are for everyone.
You haven't been in a library since—He'd give it some thought.Since Miss Grand forced us to check out books in sixth grade. You have never voluntarily been in a library.
