Chapter 239 239

Chapter 239 239
Alejandro's POV:

Helen got up for the pot. Michael asked me whether the flights were bad this early in the season. Chen moved his water glass about an inch to the left for no reason I could see.

Connor drank his water.

Nobody had said what Elias was doing in that house and I had not asked, because you do not ask that at a table. Even I knew that.

"Connor." Elias put his fork down. "Is Saturday home or away?"

Nobody said anything.

It went on about a second longer than it should have, and then Helen said, "Home. They're home Saturday and then they go to Detroit," from over by the counter, without turning around, in the voice of a woman who has answered a lot of things. "Alejandro, do you want your pie warm or cold?"

"Warm."

"Kevin?"

"Warm, please," he said.

That was the only thing Elias asked Connor all night.

And Connor did not look at him once...

I was kinda confused. Connor was not cold, he passed him things. But Connor was a guy whose eyes went around a room like a hand going through a drawer, Connor had looked at me sideways in a locker room and known I was hungover before I did. For two and a half hours at that table his eyes went everywhere except one chair. I noticed it. I filed it under Connor.

Somewhere around the end Helen asked whether either of us had somebody, which was a question that got asked at that kind of table. Chen said no, flat, in the voice that closes a subject, and Helen made a small sound of regret and moved on to me.

"I'm seeing somebody," I said. "Kaylee. She's—"

And I stopped.

Not for long. Just half a second, the length of a word I could not find. I had seen her Tuesday and again the night before, and she was funny and she did a thing with one eyebrow and I liked her. Helen was waiting with her fork up, and the word that went in that gap was a word everybody kept in the same place.

"She's great," I said. "It's kind of new, you know."

It was not new, really. It had been since the end of August. But she was not formally my girlfriend or anything.

I took the last piece of bread off Chen's plate and he moved his water glass out from under my elbow without looking up, both of us doing it the way you do a thing you have done a thousand times.

When I sat back Connor was looking at us. Not at me: at the two of us, like we were one shape. Then he looked down at his own plate and asked his uncle about the roof.

After dinner he took me out back to look at the pool, which was covered, because it was November. Fucking Chen, he had been right.

It was cold enough that we both had our hands in our sleeves and there was nothing to see, a rectangle of blue vinyl with leaves on it and a light under the water making the whole thing glow. We stood there anyway, because that was how you got five minutes alone with Connor. He waited until there was a reason to be somewhere. He did not sit you down.

"So who was that guy?" I asked.

"Elias."

"Yeah, I got the name off your aunt, because he didn't give it to me. Who is he?"

Connor looked at the pool for about a second longer than that question needed.

"He's their son," he said. "My aunt and uncle's. They adopted him when he was eleven."

He said it the way you read a street name off a sign. Not warm and not cold either, just the words in the right order, and then he stopped, and I stood there waiting for the rest of it and there was no rest of it.

"Wait." I turned around. "Your aunt and uncle have a KID?"

"They have a son."

"Connor." I had to put my hands out. "You have been living in that house since August. Four months. I have heard about that pool maybe eleven times. I have heard about the guest wing. I have heard about your uncle's grill and what he puts on the chicken. Not one time has anybody said the words, hey, by the way, there is a whole other person in here. WHO DOESN'T SAY THAT."

"You never asked."

"Who ASKS that? What am I supposed to do, walk up to a guy and go, hey, Connor, any surprise cousins?"

"He's not my cousin," Connor said. "Is Chen sleeping?"

"What?"

"You said he goes to bed earlier now. Is he sleeping when he gets there?"

That was how Connor changed a subject. He did not tell you he was doing it. He handed you something you wanted more.

So I talked. That was what I did. I gave him all of it. The twelve days before the fire. The good week after it, when I had my friend back and he laughed on a kitchen floor covered in egg. And then Friday, when he sat in the wrong chair at our own table and it started again, and I went through that Thursday nine times looking for the thing I said and did not find one. I had tried loud and I had tried food and I had tried leaving him alone, and none of the three worked, which had never happened before.

"And Sunday he was fine," I said. "Sunday was normal. We played FIFA for like four hours, he beat me seven times, he did the thing where he pretends the offside rule is complicated." I laughed. "And he held my ankle the whole time. Which, whatever. That's Chen."

Connor didn't say anything.

"My legs were on him," I said. "I jumped when I scored and they slid and he grabbed my ankle so they wouldn't fall and then he just kept it. For hours. Guy runs about four degrees warm—"

"He held your ankle for hours?"

"That's what I said."

Connor was looking at the pool. He had gone still in the specific way Connor went still, which was not dramatic, he did not freeze or turn around, he just stopped giving you anything at all, and every ounce of him went somewhere behind his face.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"That's not nothing. You did the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have ONE face and you just did it. You did it at the table too."

He let that go past him. Then he said, "Do you like it when he does that?"

"Do I like—" I actually laughed. "What kind of question is that? It's Chen. He's my—" And then the sentence stopped, because I got to the end of it and there was nothing there to put down. He was my best friend. That was the answer, that had always been the answer, and I had said it about nine hundred times and it had never once cost me anything to say.

"Yeah," I said. "Obviously."

Connor nodded, and he did not look at me either.

"You should ask him what's wrong," he said.

"I ASKED him. I asked him on Sunday. He said he was Chen-fine, which is a thing he made up."

"You asked him what's wrong." Connor turned around and put his back against the rail and finally looked at me. His face was doing the thing it did when he was picking his words instead of finding them. "Ask him a different question."

"What question?"

"That's not mine to give you."

"Connor."

"Alejandro." He had used my first name maybe four times since freshman year and every one of them landed. "I'm not being cryptic to be cryptic. If I say it, it belongs to me, and it isn't mine."

I stood there in the cold not understanding a word of that and getting annoyed about it, and then Helen opened the back door and called us because it was cold outside. That was the whole conversation, and I carried it around in my chest for the rest of the night like something I had swallowed wrong.

At the door, going out, Connor said something to Chen. Two words, three at most, standing close with his hand on Chen's shoulder while Helen was putting a container of leftovers in my arms that I had not asked for but was not going to refuse.

Chen said one word back. One. I saw his mouth make it and I did not hear it.

Elias watched him do it from the end of the hall with a dish towel in his hands, and he did not come to the door to say goodbye, and nobody in that family seemed to think that was strange.

"What did he say to you?" I asked in the car.

"Nothing."

"That was not nothing, he had the hand on the shoulder, he does the hand when it's—"

"It was nothing, Martinez," he interrupted me.

So I put on the speaker and drove us home. I talked about the pool most of the way, and Chen looked out the window and said yeah in the right places.

Kaylee called somewhere around the halfway point. I put it on speaker because I was driving, and she said she had Thursday off and asked if she could come over. I said of course, come over, and she said something about the last time and I laughed and told her to bring nothing, which I thought was funny for about two seconds and then did not.

When I hung up, Chen had his headphones in.

He had not had them in when the phone rang. He had them in now, the Sony ones he kept in his coat pocket. He was looking out the window at a wall of trees in the dark, and I did not know at what point in that call he had put them there because I had been busy talking.

I thought about asking. But I did not ask. I turned the speaker back on and drove.

It had been a great night. And there was still something in me that would not lie flat, and it had been in there since the pool.

What was going on with Chen that everybody else seemed to notice except me?