CALEB
I had no right to feel possessive of Millie.
She had every right to smile and laugh with Warren. I knew they would get along. With Millie being gone from the city for so long, I figured she might like a new connection, but after that dinner, paranoia whispered in my ear. It followed me into the weekend and pestered me like a demon I couldn’t shake.
Was I going to lose her to Warren?
I’d drawn a hard line between us, knowing I needed to respect Millie as a professional first, but I also saw how Warren looked at her. I heard the connotation in his comments when she was in the bathroom.
“You should consider yourself a lucky man.”
I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I didn’t make a move, Warren would happily try his hand with her. They had similar interests, and they were both confident, enigmatic individuals. Millie could stroke Warren’s not-that-subtle ego without losing any of her own sparkling allure. Though I didn’t want to admit it, they would make a good pair.
“Stop torturing yourself,” I muttered under my breath.
Pouring my coffee grounds in to the Chemex coffee maker, I sprinkled two pinches of salt in before adding the hot water. The smell of dark roast filled in my deep inhale. I scratched my bare chest and detected the familiar notes of chocolate and molasses. I was going to need this coffee.
It was about to be very a long day.
Showered, caffeinated, and dressed, I took the ninety-minute trip out to Albany Park, just north of the city. It took two buses and one long ride on the Red line train, but I found myself walking the quieter residential street. Trees grew in front of the modest brick homes. Kids played in the street. It wasn’t a bad place to be, but it didn’t change how heavy my shoulders felt.
I wasn’t heading to any of the family homes. I was going to the halfway house, quite ironically, halfway down the avenue. The iron gate squeaked as I opened it and headed inside.
“I’m here to see Jamie Harrow,” I told the stony-faced woman at the front desk.
Knowing the routine, I signed the guest clipboard and took my temporary visitor’s badge. This wasn’t supposed to be a prison. The twenty-some residents could come and go as they pleased, but it was easier to ensure no dealers or enablers were coming into the place if they kept a running log of visitors.
This was a sobriety shelter, and my younger brother had been living there for five years. After his last intervention, it was decided that I could do a better job of supporting Jamie than our aging parents, so I moved him up here. Mom and Dad supplement the cost of his room rental, but it was my job to check on him every couple of weeks. I made sure he was visiting his sobriety meetings at the Lutheran church down the road. I was the one who checked to see if he was still seeing his therapist.
We only wanted the best for him, even if the best didn’t look like much.
Finding him in the common room, Jamie was sitting in his usual bargain-bin T-shirt and jeans, working on some volunteer project. There were a lot of those around here. They would pack food for a nearby food pantry or make blankets to be distributed to the homeless. It was a way to make the residents feel worthwhile again, like they had purposes beyond getting high or drunk.
“Hey, Caleb,” Jamie greeted me with a smile. “How’s it goin’?”
He was a few years younger than me, but the years of drinking made him look so much older. His bright blue eyes couldn’t change that. The graying scruff on his chin didn’t help either.
“All right,” I replied. “What are you working on?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
That was a lie. There were all kinds of papers spread out before him.
“Let me see it.”
“No.”
“Why? Will you have to kill me if I read it?”
He blinked twice. “Uh, no.”
“Then, just tell me what you’re doing right now.”
Jamie was entitled to his privacy, and the staff would let me know if they found anything alarming in his room. However, this was only papers sprawled across the round tabletop. My brother was writing letters from Santa. Even though summer had just ended, the program covered all the public kindergarten classes in the school district. With thousands of kids to cover, they had volunteers writing out form phrases to fill in later. I glanced over the paper bordered with candy cane stripes and smiled.
“How’s school?” Jamie asked as I set down one of his letters.
“Good,” I said, sitting down on the grass. “The university hired a research assistant to work with me.”