The Kid nods tightly.
Dom lingers for a moment longer before heading toward the kitchen, where conversation has resumed. They were speaking loudly, like they were trying to give us as much privacy as possible. I appreciated it, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Otter’s watching me, waiting for me to start. I know he’s going to follow my lead, and I appreciate the hell out of him for that. I’m angry, and rightly so, but I don’t want to open my mouth until I can be sure I won’t say anything I can’t take back. I may still talk too much, and ninety-five percent of what comes out of my mouth is still bullshit, but I’m not that same person I was the days when we lived in that shitty apartment with the splintered steps. When I’d worked at the grocery store, worrying about how we were going to pay rent or if the piece of crap car I’d had would start or if I would open the door one day and she’d be standing there, saying that she was sorry and she was ready to come back and could I get her a couple of fingers of Jack? Two ice cubes, because that’s how she liked it. And were there any smokes left? They’d probably be stale, but she’d still smoke them. It’d be fine.
And you worried, it whispers. Didn’t you? You worried that you’d fuck him up more than he already was. Because even back then, even before she left, you knew he wasn’t normal. And what were you going to do about it? Oh, that’s right! You were going to leave him with her. Do you remember that, Bear? You had plans. You were going to go off to college with your bright eyes and your big dreams, and you were going to leave him behind. Would you have felt bad about it? Maybe. But that relief you would have felt would have eclipsed it. Right? And when you’d come back to visit, you’d feel bad, you really, really would, but then you’d remember that you got to leave again, and you’d feel better. How different things could have been!
I couldn’t do this here. The room felt too warm, the murmur of the voices in the kitchen too loud.
“Bear?” Otter asks, and he sounds a little worried.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Let’s go out back.”
He nods and reaches out to take my hand. I squeeze it gratefully, letting it ground me. It’s familiar, this, and I take it for all that it is.
There’s a sliding door out the living room that leads to a side yard that wraps around to the back. There used to be a chain-link fence that surrounded the house, a cheap thing that shook and rattled when it was windy. Otter had gotten rid of it a long time ago, replacing it with a six-foot-tall wooden fence. Our neighbors had tried to give us shit, but Otter had glared at them, crossing his arms over his chest. They hadn’t said much after that.
There’s a deck in the back that Otter, Ty, Dom, and I built one long, hot summer when the Kid was thirteen years old. We hadn’t known exactly what we were doing, and it was determined rather early on that I should never hold a hammer for any reason, but it’d turned out better than we had hoped. There were even steps that led down to stepping stones in the grass. One night, not so very long ago, Otter and I were in bed on our sides, facing each other, heads on the same pillow. We’d been whispering back and forth, and I’d been trying to get him to tell me what was on his mind because there was something, when he finally admitted that he couldn’t wait until our kid was big enough so he could build a playground in the backyard for him. Maybe a tree house. And a tire swing hanging underneath. “You think that’d be okay?” he’d asked me almost shyly. “You think they’d like that?”
“Yeah,” I’d whispered hoarsely, wondering again how I’d gotten so fucking lucky. “Yeah, Otter. That sounds fine. They’ll love it.”
But that’s for later.
Now there are balloons tied along the railings to the deck and streamers fluttering in the breeze that tastes of salt. Seagulls are calling from somewhere, the sky above covered in thin clouds, pale blue poking through in bits and pieces.
There’s a large table set up on the deck and another one on the grass below. The ends of the tablecloths sway back and forth, and another banner for Tyson is hung on the back of the Green Monstrosity.
“Welcome home,” I say, unable to keep from sounding bitter.
The guilty look on the Kid’s face should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. “You did this all for me?” he asks, hands trailing along the deck railing, and it’s like he’s a kid again, a vegetarian ecoterrorist-in-training Kid again, staring in awe at a jumping castle, tugging on my fingers and asking if this was all for him, if everyone was here for him.
“We did,” Otter says, and I can see everyone moving around the kitchen through the glass doors off the deck. They’re pointedly ignoring us, though I see them all taking turns sneaking a peek out at us. Izzie’s sitting on the counter, feet dangling, tongue pressed between her teeth in concentration as her fingers fly over the tablet. “You were coming home. Of course we’d do this for you.”
His shoulders slump, just a little. “I—I just….”
And maybe I’m angrier than I think I am, because I say, “I’ve done everything for you,” and it comes out flat and cool.
He winces a little, picking at one of the streamers. “I know.”
“Do you? Because sometimes I don’t know that you do. Every decision I’ve made, every choice that has been put before me, I’ve always thought about you, even if it had nothing to do with you. You were always there. And that was okay for a long, long time. Because we made a promise to each other that it was always going to be you and me.”
He shakes his head. “Maybe not the best promise to make.”
“Maybe. Because it can’t always be just you and me. We would have never survived that way. And it wouldn’t have been fair to you. Or to me.”
“I get that,” he says, and his voice has an edge to that. “I know you think I’m just a kid, but I get that, Bear.”
“Do you? Because here we are, and for one of the first times in my life, I’ve made a major decision for myself and for Otter, and yet within seconds, you started giving me shit for it.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t kept it from me,” he says, and yeah, maybe he’s got a point, but that’s not what this is about. I know him too well to take his bullshit.
“So what if we did?” Otter says.
The Kid jerks his head up sharply, looking incredulous. “So what? Are you being serious right now?”
“It doesn’t involve you,?
? Otter says. “Or rather, it’s not about you. You knew we were going to do this. We made that clear to you last year. And you told us that you were happy for us. That you were okay with it. So what changed?”