Chapter 15
Grady
“You’re leaving first.”
I’ve been in rooms where the air changes. Every fireman has. The room tells you before the fire does, something in the pressure, the sound going wrong at the edges, and your body starts leaving before your brain has signed off on the paperwork.
Her clinic is doing it now. The boxes. The files squared in their labeled stacks. The suitcase with fresh dog fur on it. The air in here changed days ago, and I walked through it twice with a bag of dog food and a hinge repair, being charming.
“When,” I say. It comes out with no question mark on it.
“Saturday.” She doesn’t look at the boxes. She looks straight at me, which is worse. “Durango. Six months. Small-animal practice, two vets, one tech.” She hands it over like a transfer report. Complete. Clean. So nobody can say she withheld information.
“You knew about the rotation.”
“Since the Watershed. Cal told me.” A pause with a whole verdict folded inside it. “You’ve had it since dawn that morning. I did the math on which of us was going to say it first, and then I stopped waiting for the math to change.”
Everything I could offer lines up in my head and none of it survives inspection. I was going to tell you. When. I didn’t want to wreck what was left. For whose sake. It’s not me leaving, it’s the season. Except the season doesn’t sign anything. The season doesn’t pack my bag. The season has never once done the leaving for me. It just lets me file the leaving under weather.
“Sloane.”
“Don’t.” Even. Level. The voice she’d use walking a family through the worst appointment of their year, and recognizing the register doesn’t protect me from it. “You don’t owe me anything. Temporary was the deal. I wrote the deal.” She picks up a folder, squares it against the counter, sets it on the stack. “I’m just holding up my end faster.”
There’s a version of me that crosses the room right now. I can see him from here. He says the thing with no charm on it. He stands in front of her and says stay, or better, says I’ll stay, and means it, and the whole summer turns on one minute of him being braver than me.
I don’t cross the room.
Thirteen seasons, and what they’ve trained into me is this: when the air changes, you go. You don’t stand around negotiating with a room that’s told you what it’s about to do. So I stand there with my hands empty and everything true stuck somewhere between my chest and my teeth, and I hear my own voice, and what it says is:
“Okay.”
Okay. Three years from now I’ll be flat on my back under some motel ceiling replaying this exact minute, and that’s the word I’ll have to work with. Okay.
She nods once, like I’ve confirmed something she’d already written in the chart, and turns back to the files, and her shoulders are one straight line, and the line is the last thing I see because I’m already through the door.
The dog comes with me.
I don’t ask him to. He slides through the gap before the door swings shut, crosses the gravel like the two of us scheduled this, and when I open the truck door he’s in it. Up and over, driver’s seat to passenger seat, sitting at attention and facing the windshield like a man waiting on a valet.
“No,” I tell him. “Buddy. No.You live here.”
I lift him out. Forty-five pounds, zero resistance, loose and agreeable. The second his paws touch gravel, he turns around and jumps back in.
I lift him out again. He jumps back in again. The third time, he deploys the boneless maneuver, all his weight surrendering at once, a protest technique I have to assume he studied under Louie, and the apartment window upstairs has a light in it and a shape at the edge of the curtain. She’s watching a grown man lose custody negotiations to a dog in her parking lot. I lift my hand halfway. The shape doesn’t move.
I get in the truck.
Half a block down Main I look over. He’s sitting up straight, ears at their two separate angles, watching the road like it’s his shift.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I tell him.
He doesn’t dignify it.
Demob has a sound. Tailgates and tape guns and the specific ring of tool steel going into a box that fits it, and under all of it Diaz’s voice running the manifest in the tone of a man reading scripture he wrote himself. By eight the next morning the bay looks like the end of every season I’ve ever worked: the buggiesbacked up to the doors, the saw kits staged in rows, thirteen years of muscle memory breaking a summer down into freight.
I’m good at this part. I can strike my whole life in eleven minutes. It’s the one packing job that requires no thought, because I’ve never once put anything into that red bag that couldn’t leave a town without noticing.
Today the bag isn’t cooperating.
