Secret Vows

Chapter 5: The Family Rate

The Family Rate

It took a while for the room to come apart.

His mother went down the hall with his niece on her hip and came back with her hands empty and stood in the kitchen doorway. His father went out the front and left the porch light on and the door open an inch behind him, and the smoke came back in through it in a thin line that moved when the wind moved. Cody drank a bottle of water standing at the window and set the empty on the sill. Renee went down the hall and shut the door, and a minute later the light went off under it. Cody waited another minute and went after her.

Trey stayed on his feet in the middle of the rug with his hands in his pockets and the clock over the kitchen door reading 9:38. Ten minutes to get everybody back in here. Ten more to say it, if it went fast, which it would not. Then six miles on the bike, and he had to be at the back dock at eleven with a clipboard, and Rhonda did not care what had happened at his house.

He knocked twice on the door at the end of the hall.

"Renee."

He waited. A television was on somewhere in the house with the sound down, and under the door in front of him it was dark.

He knocked again. "Renee. Come out here a minute."

He looked at his own hand on the door while he waited — at the paint, which was the color of coffee with too much milk in it, at the little brass hook where a mirror used to hang. Somebody inside moved and stopped. He counted to sixty.

The door came open.

Renee had her hair down on one side and a clip behind her ear that had given up a while ago and was holding on by the hinge of it. She had been lying down in her clothes with the light off.

"Hey," he said.

"What."

"Come out here. Both of you. It's two minutes."

"Trey—"

"Two minutes." He stepped back from the door so she would have to come through it or close it on him, and she stood there a second and then came out. Cody came out behind her with his shirt hanging loose, and neither one of them asked him anything.

He got his father off the porch. He leaned out the front door and said, "Dad. Come in here," and there was a long pause with the crickets in it, and then footsteps, and Dale came in with the cigarette burned down to the filter and put it out under the kitchen tap.

"Over here." Trey got a hand on Cody's shoulder and sat him down on the couch. Cody let him. His mother took the chair by the lamp. Renee stayed at the edge of the dining room with her hand on the back of a chair, which was where she had been standing when he came through the door. His father stood at the end of the room like a man waiting for a bus he already knew wasn't coming.

The lamp was on and the room was put back together and the clock said 9:44.

"All right," Trey said.

Nobody answered him.

"Nobody's sick," he said. "Nobody's in trouble. This isn't about anything that happened tonight."

"Then what's it about," his mother said.

"It's about how there's never a good day for this, so I picked a bad one." He put his elbows on his knees and looked at his father, because it was for his father. "Cody's got a wife and a kid. I'm twenty-six. Two more years and I'm going to want the same thing, or I'm not, either way I'm going to want the room I sleep in to be mine and the money that comes out of it to be mine. Five adults in one house and there's nothing in it that isn't everybody's business. I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm not going to think about it for another year."

"So say it," his father said. "Go on and say the actual thing."

"I want to split the house."

His mother's hand came up to her mouth and stayed there. Cody's face did something and then nothing. Renee's jaw set — he saw the muscle stand up at the back of it, one line, and hold.

And his father came up out of that chair. The coffee table jumped under Trey's elbows and a magazine slid off the bottom shelf onto the rug.

"I'm not dead yet," Dale said. "You hear me? I'm not in the ground. You get up out of my house and go to work and I don't hear this again."

"Two sons split the property," Trey said. "That's not a new idea. Every family in the county—"

"Say it again."

"I want to split the—"

His father grabbed the first glass off the table and threw it.

Trey didn't get out of the way. It hit him on the shoulder and the tea went down the front of the suit jacket, cold, and a piece of ice caught in the collar and sat there a second and then went down his back, and the glass fell and broke on the rug into three big pieces and a spray of small ones.

He looked down at himself. Then he looked up.

"That was two inches off my head," he said. "And that's the suit I go to work in. Do you have any idea what it costs to get tea out of wool?"

"Go to work, then."

"Mom was standing right there when I walked in and she's standing right there now." He shook the ice out of his collar and it traveled down the inside of his shirt. "It took two of you to have me. Seems like it ought to take two of you to get rid of me. You want to do this again, go get her and I'll take it seriously."

His father stood with his chest going up and down.

"You want to split this house," Dale said. "Fine. Say how. Say how you want to split it, in front of your brother and your mother and your sister-in-law, seeing as how you picked tonight."

And he swept the second glass off the table without looking at it. That one missed, and broke on the floor at Trey's feet, and the ice slid under the couch.

Trey got up.

He got up and looked at the table. Two glasses left on it, and the pitcher, two-thirds full, and his mother's hand on the handle. He walked around the coffee table, picked up the two glasses, one in each hand, carried them into the dining room and set them down past the salt, where no arm could reach them from a chair. Then he stood there and looked around the room for anything else glass and heavy and inside somebody's throwing range. There wasn't one. The lamp was the only other thing on the table and the lamp was plugged in.

"Okay," he said. "Sit down, Dad. Breathe."

"Say how."

He sat back down and pulled the envelope out of the inside pocket of the jacket and opened it, and laid the check on the table and pushed it across with two fingers.

"Fifty thousand dollars. Made out to both of you."

Nobody touched it. His father looked at it. He didn't pick it up.

"There's two houses in this family," Trey said. "I'll take the small one. It sits empty half the year and it's the only one of the two I could ever afford. The fifty goes to you and Mom against it, and you can call that the family rate. The other thirty I owe you. Whenever I've got it, you get it."

"Thirty," his father said.

"Thirty."

"You'll sign something."

"No." It came out faster than he'd meant it to, so he slowed the rest down. "No note. No paper. Nothing with my name on it in a drawer in this house. I'm not going to be thirty grand in the hole on paper before I've got a wife. So I'm a deadbeat for thirty grand. All right. I'll answer to that. But there's nothing on paper."

"You want to be a deadbeat with a house."

"I want to be a deadbeat with a roof."

His mother said his name, once, and nothing after it.

Cody had his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging and nothing on his face at all. He hadn't said a word since he came out of the bedroom. He had been on the road since before daylight and hadn't showered and still smelled like a cab — diesel, cold air, coffee — and in that lamplight he looked ten years past his own age. Nobody had asked him about the run. Nobody was going to.

Renee was looking at the check. Not at Trey, not at his father — at the check, the way you look at something on a shelf you've been told not to touch. Her jaw had been locked since the knock on the door. He watched it let go.

Nobody said anything for a while, and the check sat in the middle of the table with nobody's hand on it.

"Anyway." Trey stood up and hooked a thumb in his belt. "You and Mom live wherever you want. Here, or with me in the small one, or with Cody. That's yours to pick. I'm not putting that on the table tonight."

The clock over the kitchen door said 9:51.

"I have to go. Inventory tonight, and I'm on the bike."

He got his keys off the hook by the door and stopped at the edge of the dining room, where Renee was still standing with her hand on the chair.

"Hey. You two."

Cody didn't lift his head.

"You picked each other. Nobody made you do that. Whatever this thing is—" he moved his hand at the two of them, at the room, at the whole evening — "fighting's the expensive way to do it. Say it quieter." He looked down the hall. "She's five."

Nobody answered that either.

He let himself out the front and pulled the door to behind him. The porch light was on and the yard went dark about six feet past the steps. His bike was where he had left it, leaned against the siding, front wheel turned in.

He dug in the pockets. The cigarettes were in the jacket pocket that had caught the tea, and the pack was wet down one side and crushed flat the long way. He worked the lid up with his thumb. Half of it was still in there, and every cigarette in the pack was bent.

He got one out and straightened it as much as it was going to straighten, and found the lighter in the other pocket, and got it lit, and took it down until the smoke hit the bottom of his lungs. Then he stood there on the walk and breathed out and looked at the street.

He smoked it to the middle. Then he dropped it on the concrete and put his heel on it and turned it until it was nothing under his shoe.

He got on the bike and went. Six miles, eleven o'clock, and a*****e full of boxes to count.