"It's not a crime. I'm not calling it a crime." Matty leans forward. "I'm saying he sees how the house runs and he slots right into it. He knows the system because he's already running one. His own version. For you."
The count ticks once in my right hand under the table. Once is nothing. Once is just the door opening.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Maybe." He picks up the sandwich again. "But you brought him to the house and he fit, and the reason he fit is because he already knew every step of the choreography before he walked in. That's not fitting in. That's running the same play."
The fry I'm holding has been in my hand for too long and I set it down because my fingers need to do something else and there's nothing else for them to do. The count ticks again. Twice is the door opening and someone standing in it.
"He is not running a play," I say, and my voice is flat when the precision is load-bearing, when the words have to arrive exactly right because the feeling behind them is not precise at all. "He is kind to me. There is a difference between being kind and running a play, and you don't get to sit in this booth and make them the same thing because it's easier for you to read it that way."
Matty is quiet. Matty is almost never quiet.
"I didn't say he wasn't kind."
"You said he runs a system."
"I said he sees the system and already knows the steps. I didn't say what that makes him. I'm asking what it makes you."
The diner is loud around us. Plates, voices, the kitchen bell. I hear all of it how I hear everything, which is completely, andthe count is at three now, which is the door open and someone standing in it and the draft coming through.
"It makes me someone who has a partner who pays attention," I say. "That is what it makes me."
"D'accord." He picks up a fry. "D'accord, Jules."
But the d'accord is the Matty d'accord, which means I hear you and I am not agreeing and I am not fighting and I am putting this down now because I said what I came to say. He eats the fry. He eats another one. The conversation is over, not with resolution but with one person setting the weight down and the other person knowing it has been set down and both of us deciding, separately, not to pick it up again.
He is wrong about Lundy. I know this the way I know anything that matters, which is all the way through, structurally, load-tested. Lundy is not managing me. Lundy is not running a system. Lundy dried the dishes because I handed him the towel and he took it and that is what kindness looks like when it is simple, which it almost never is, but sometimes, with him, it is.
Except Matty did not say the word I would need him to have said in order to dismiss it cleanly. He did not say controlling. He did not say managing. He said Lundy already knew the steps, and the reason that will not sit flat is not because it is true but because it is the exact shape of the thing I have been afraid to look at, and Matty, who has never once in his life articulated a feeling when he could throw it sideways instead, put his hand on the exact outline of it without knowing what he was touching.
The count is at four. I close my hand around it under the table and hold it there, not because I want to but because four isn't a number that lets go on its own. I breathe. The count stays. I'll walk it down later, in the hotel, in the order I walk things down. Not here.
"You want the rest of those," Matty says, pointing at my fries.
"Take them."
He takes them. He eats them how he eats everything, which is like someone who believes the food might leave if he doesn't get to it fast enough, and I sit across from him in the booth with the torn vinyl and the kitchen bell and the woman who has called me the quiet one for half my life, and the fear Matty put his finger on sits in the space between us like a glass nobody wants to pick up because picking it up means looking at what's in it.
He is wrong about Lundy.
He is wrong about Lundy, and the reason I will keep saying that to myself between here and the hotel is not because I need to convince myself but because Matty said it in the family's language, which is the language that gets past every wall I know how to build, and a thing said in that language takes longer to set back down than a thing said in any other.
We pay. We split it how we always split it, which is Matty puts down cash and I put down a card and the waitress takes whichever she gets to first and neither of us keeps track. On the sidewalk he puts his hand on the back of my neck the way he's done since we were kids, the grip that means I love you and I'll hit you and both of those are the same sentence in this family.
"Bonne nuit, le tranquille," he says.
"Bonne nuit."
He walks north. I walk south. The count lets go on the second block, and by the third I'm breathing right again, and by the time I reach the hotel the only thing left of the conversation is the shape of the thing Matty touched, sitting where he left it, waiting for me to decide whether to look.
Five Hole Fiction #2
Thompson
okay chapter four. the seven course dinner. go
Marchetti