Cassian was the one who said it first.
He said it the way he says things — quietly, like it was obvious, like the decision had already been made and he was just telling me the outcome.
"We should move in with your dad."
I looked at him.
"Our lease is up in two months," he said.
"I know."
"He's alone."
"I know."
"And I like his cooking better than yours."
"That is genuinely hurtful."
• • •
My dad flips something in the pan that smells incredible. He is wearing the apron my mom bought him fifteen years ago that says GRILL SERGEANT and he has never once grilled anything while wearing it.
"Is he up?" he asks.
"Probably not."
"He has the Moretti job today."
"He knows."
"The east wall framing —"
"Dad. He knows. He's been doing this for three years."
My dad looks at me over his shoulder with the specific expression of a man who has completely lost the ability to not worry about the people in his house and has accepted this about himself.
"I know he knows," he says. "I'm just saying."
• • •
Cassian didn't go back to school.
He thought about it. We talked about it. I told him I'd support whatever he wanted and I meant it, and then one afternoon about four months after we moved back he disappeared into the garage of one of our neighbors — a man named Hank who was trying to restore a 1972 Chevelle and failing badly — and didn't come out for six hours.
He came back with grease on his forearms and something different in his eyes.
Not fixed. Not healed. Just quieter. Like something had been turned down to a volume he could actually stand.
He didn't explain it. He didn't have to.
He's always worked things out through his hands. Always. He just needed time to figure that out about himself, and we needed time to figure out that therapy gives him a place to say the things out loud, and the work gives him a place to put the rest of it. The stuff that doesn't have words yet. Maybe never will.
So he fixes cars now. Restorations, mostly. And renovation work on the side — the Moretti job, a few others. He comes home every evening with grease under his nails or sawdust in his hair and a look on his face that is, I will go to my grave maintaining, deeply, profoundly attractive in a way I have chosen not to fully communicate to him because I don't want him to know that power.
He goes to therapy on Tuesdays.
He hates it.
