Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Milo

The back room was smaller than my bedroom on Larkin Street. There was a narrow cot against one wall with an army blanket folded square at the foot, a cast iron wood stove in the corner with a pot on top, a little table with two mismatched chairs, and stacks of cardboard boxes along the far wall. The boxes were labeled in black marker in a hand that wasn't Rhett's. Dad, office. Dad, books. Dad, kitchen.

"You live back here?" I asked.

"Since the spring." He went to the stove and stirred the pot. "I sold the house after the funeral. Couldn't stand being in it. This place has everything I need." He glanced over his shoulder. "You hungry? It's canned chili. I'm not much of a cook."

"I didn't eat lunch."

"I know you didn't. You had a granola bar because I made you." He took two bowls off a shelf and filled them. "Sit."

I sat. He put the bowl in front of me, then a spoon, then a sleeve of crackers, and he stood by the table until I took the first bite. Only then did he sit down across from me.

The chili was too salty and a little burnt on the bottom. It was the best thing I had eaten in two years. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I was halfway through the bowl, and when I looked up, he was watching me with his spoon resting in his own bowl, not eating.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing." He looked down. "You eat like somebody who's been hungry for a long time."

I didn't answer that. He didn't push.

When we finished, he cleared the bowls and set them in a plastic tub by the door. Then he took a cardboard box off the top of the stack, set it on the table, and pulled out the green notebook from the truck. He laid it in front of me, open to the last page.

"Go ahead," he said.

The handwriting was small and slanted, pressed hard into the paper, the kind of writing that comes from a man who thinks faster than his pen can move. At the top of the page was a list of six places. Some I knew and some I didn't. A mine shaft in Pennsylvania. A hydroelectric dam upstate. A military depot. Two towns in Vermont with hot springs under them. And at the very top, underlined, Northfield Agricultural Field Station, Westbrook University.

Under it, Frank Gallagher had written a few lines.

Geothermal, deep well, buried greenhouses. Harold's place. Could keep two or three hundred alive if they had food. The Bennett boy, Harold's student, the frost-hardy barley lines held at minus thirty in the chamber trials. Read his paper four times. If anyone can grow food up there, it's him. Someone has to get that kid to Northfield before winter.

I read it and then sat there holding the edge of the notebook.

I had written that paper in my second year at Westbrook, at the kitchen table on Larkin Street, at two in the morning, after a double shift at the lab. My mother had walked past me on her way to get water and told me to turn off the light because I was wasting electricity. Nobody in my family had ever read a single page of it.

A man I never met had read it four times.

"I didn't know who you were," Rhett said quietly. "When you came in yesterday and handed me that card, the name kept bothering me, and I couldn't figure out why. Then that professor said Northfield this morning, and you said barley, and it all came back." He sat down slowly across from me. "My dad wanted you up there. He wrote it like it was a job he couldn't finish."

"He never met me."

"He didn't need to. He read your work." Rhett looked at the page. "That was enough for him. It was always enough for him."

I turned back a few pages, mostly because I didn't trust my face. The entries got shorter near the end, the handwriting worse. Wind readings. Pressure maps sketched in pencil. A grocery list. Then, a few pages before the end, a short entry pressed so hard into the paper that it had torn through in one place.

Prescott came back today. Brought the son with him this time. Told him November, first or second week, I'm almost sure now. He didn't ask how to warn the state. He asked how many people the deep sites could hold, and what it would cost to build more. He doesn't want to save anyone. He wants to sell them seats. I told him I'm going to the governor's office Monday. He smiled at me.

"Rhett," I said.

He leaned over to see what I was reading. I watched his eyes move along the lines. I watched him get to the end, and then go back to the start and read it again, slower.

"I never saw this," he said.

"You said you read it a hundred times."

"I read the last page a hundred times. The list." His voice had gone rough. "The rest of it is just numbers. Wind and pressure. I didn't understand most of it, so I skipped." He put his finger on the torn paper. "He said he was going to the governor on Monday."

"Did he?"

"No." Rhett sat back. "He died that Friday. Heart attack in his car in the driveway. The doctor said it happens, even to healthy men." He was staring at the wood stove now. "He jogged five miles every morning. He never smoked a day in his life. His father lived to ninety-four."

Neither of us said the rest of it. We didn't need to.

I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I closed the notebook and slid it back across the table to him. He put his palm flat on the cover and left it there. In the light from the stove, his face looked older than it had in the truck, and very tired, and I thought about him living in this room for six months with his father's boxes stacked against the wall, reading the same page over and over and missing the one that mattered.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Not your fault." He breathed out slowly. Then he looked at me, and his eyes dropped to my chin. "You didn't clean that, did you?"

"I forgot."

"Of course you forgot." He got up, pulled a first aid kit off a shelf by the door, and dragged his chair around the table until it was right in front of mine. "Lift your head."

"It's fine."

"Lift your head, Milo."

I did. He tore open an alcohol wipe and held my jaw still with his other hand, his fingers warm along the side of my face. The wipe stung, and I sucked in a breath without meaning to.

"Sorry," he said, softer. "Almost done."

He was close enough that I could see the faint gold in his gray eyes, and the little white scar that cut through his eyebrow, and a second, thinner scar under his jaw I hadn't noticed before. He smelled like wood smoke and soap. He was concentrating on the cut as if it were the most important thing in the room, his brows pulled together, and his thumb moved once along my jaw, slowly, without any reason I could see.

He dabbed on ointment and pressed a small bandage over it, smoothing the edges down with his fingertip.

Then he didn't move his hand away.

"There," he said, and his voice was very low. "Done."

"Thank you."

"You keep saying that."

"You keep doing things for me."

He looked at me then, not at the cut, at me. His thumb was still resting on my jaw. I could feel my heart beating in my throat, under his fingers, and I knew he could feel it too.

Nobody had touched me like this in my whole life. Not carefully. Not as if I were something that could be hurt.

"Milo," he said.

I don't know which of us moved first. I only know that his hand slid back into my hair, and I leaned forward, and then his mouth was on mine.

It was slow at first, almost careful, as if he were waiting for me to pull away. I didn't. I gripped the front of his flannel shirt with both hands, the same way I had held onto his jacket in the wind, and he made a low sound against my mouth and kissed me harder. His other hand found my waist and pulled me forward, off the edge of my chair and against him, and the room tipped sideways. I could taste salt from the chili and something warmer underneath it. My whole body felt like it had been cold for two years and was only now remembering what heat was.

When he finally drew back, he didn't go far. He rested his forehead against mine, breathing hard, his hand still in my hair.

"I've wanted to do that since you dripped on my floor," he said.

I laughed. It came out shaky and surprised, and he smiled, and I felt it more than saw it.

Then light swept across the window.

Headlights, bright and white, filled the little room and slid across the wall of boxes. Gravel crunched under tires in the lot. An engine idled, then cut off. A car door slammed.

Rhett was on his feet before I could blink. He moved to the side of the window and looked out through the gap in the curtain, and all the softness was gone from his face in a second.

"You expecting anybody?" he asked.

"No."

Someone pounded on the back door, three hard blows that rattled it on its hinges.

"Gallagher!" a voice shouted. "I know you're in there. I saw the light."

I knew that voice. I had heard it all my life. I had heard it on the shelter stairs telling my father to hurry up before it got dark.

"It's my brother," I said. "Trent."

Rhett looked at me, then at the door. He went over and opened it, but he kept his body in the doorway so nobody could step past him.

Trent stood on the step with his hood up and his face red from the wind. He held a thick white envelope in one hand. His eyes went past Rhett's shoulder and found me sitting at the table in the stove light, with my hair messed up and my mouth still wet, and his whole face twisted.

"Of course," he said. "Of course you're here."

"What do you want?" Rhett asked.

"My mother ordered six heaters and four sleeping bags from you on Monday." Trent held up the envelope. "The card didn't work, thanks to him. So I brought cash. Four thousand. Count it if you want."

I stared at the envelope. My father had less than two hundred dollars to his name outside my account. Trent spent everything he made on his truck and his bar tab. Nobody in my family had four thousand dollars in cash.

"Where did you get that?" I asked.

Trent ignored me. "So where's the stuff?"

"Not for sale," Rhett said.

"You took the order."

"And now I'm canceling it. Go home."

Trent took a step forward, and Rhett didn't move an inch, and Trent stopped. He looked up at Rhett, then over at me again, and his mouth pulled into the same small, mean smile he used to give me across the dinner table when my mother was crying about Owen.

"Fine," he said. "Keep your heaters. Owen said you'd probably say that." He shoved the envelope back into his pocket. "He also gave me a message for you, Milo. He made me say it exactly, so here it is."

I stood up. I don't remember deciding to.

"He said to ask Rhett Gallagher how many men he's killed," Trent said. "And to ask him what he did with their bodies. He said you should ask before you let him anywhere near your ring."

Rhett's hand was still on the edge of the door. I watched his knuckles go white around it, and I waited for him to laugh, or to call Trent a liar, or to say anything at all.