Chapter 249 249

Chapter 249 249
Kevin's POV:

He had been watching me since Monday, and from outside it was nothing.

My entire life ran on one assumption, which was that nobody was looking. That was not self-pity, it was engineering: I had no scent, I had a face that did what I told it, and I was the least interesting-looking man in any room I had ever walked into.

Four years of standing inside the radius of Alejandro Martinez and not once had anybody had to work to look past me, because there had never been anything there to look at. That was the whole reason it had been survivable. The secret was not hidden. The secret was invisible, which was better, because hidden things could be found.

And on Monday he started looking at me.

He was not subtle. He was incapable of subtle. He timed me taping my stick on Tuesday, and I watched him do it in the reflection of the glass, and his lips moved. He turned around so fast in the lounge on Wednesday that he took a full Gatorade off the counter with his elbow, and Parsons made a noise like a man watching a car crash. On Thursday I came out of the shower and felt his eyes on my back the whole way to my stall, and then he sat down and looked at his own skates with his ears going red.

I could not work out what he was looking for. He had not needed to look at me in four years, and then it was the back half of November and he was looking. Whatever had gotten into him had gotten in on Friday in Detroit, when my body sold me out for one second in a hotel room and I was half a beat too slow shutting it down.

So by Thursday night I was not okay, and that was the ground everything after it happened on.

He had the apartment full when I got home from the nearby market. Speaker on the counter, something with a beat that was moving the cabinet doors, an onion in a pan about four minutes past where it should have come off, and him in the middle of it with a wooden spoon he was not using for anything. Or actually, yes, he was using it as a mic to sing loudly.

I had never said this to anybody about him. Martinez told everyone he only spoke Spanish with his mother, and he believed it, and it was not true. Because he also sang in it constantly. In the car, in the shower behind a door that did not lock, on a bus with thirty guys asleep around him, at a stove with a spoon in his hand. The one part of himself he thought he kept private was the part he broadcast at ninety decibels in every room he walked into, and nobody had ever told him. I had spent four years listening to a man be completely open in a language I did not have.

I put the bag on the counter.

"You're burning it," I said.

"It's supposed to look like that."

"It's black."

"It's CARAMELIZED, Chen, this is a technique." He turned the burner down about ten percent, which was not what turning a burner down meant, and went back to the song while cooking rice. He had a whole verse in him. He was doing it with his eyes shut and one hand out like a man in a church.

I got a beer out of the fridge and sat on the counter, which put me five feet from him and level with his shoulder.

"What is that song about?" I asked.

I did that maybe once a month. It was one of my ways of getting him to talk about something that was his. It worked every time, because Martinez had never in his life been asked a question he did not want to answer at length. It also handed him the rest of the argument, which I knew when I did it, and which was the closest thing to an excuse I had.

He lit up. He put the spoon down.

"You want to know what it says?"

"That's what I asked."

"Okay. Okay, so." He held both hands up, and then he stopped and actually thought about it, which he never did, and I understood about two seconds too late that he was working out how to put it into English in front of me.

"So it's about, uh... Wanting somebody."

"That's it?"

"No. No, hold on, that's not right, I'm doing him a disservice." He turned around with the spoon. He was completely serious about this, he wanted to get it accurate. "Okay. It's about having somebody up against a wall with her legs around him and going at it until she can't remember her own name. That's the chorus. That's the part with the whistle in it."

I did not do anything with my face. I did not think I did. What I had afterward was a very clear memory of holding a beer about four inches off my knee for a length of time that was not natural.

"That's the song?"

"That's the chorus. The second verse is worse."

"You don't have to—"

"He says he's going to keep her there until the neighbors complain." He said it the way another man would read out a train time. Then he frowned at the pan. "Although that line doesn't really work in English, because there's a word in it that isn't a word over here. It's when you—" and he did something with the spoon that did not need translating. "You know?"

"No."

"Yeah... There's no word." He shrugged and went back to the rice. "English is a very polite language."

That was the thing. He was making rice. He said all of it with his back mostly turned, checking a lid, moving a pan off a burner, in the voice he used for zone coverage.

Then he looked over at me.

"Nothing," he said. "Look at you. Nothing. Four years and I have never gotten a face out of you once."

"You have."

"Name one."

I did not name one.

He laughed at me and forgot about it, the way he forgot about everything. Two songs went by. Maybe three. He told me a long story about the Coyotes' backup goalie, whose brother apparently sold above-ground pools, and I drank my beer and got called an idiot twice for asking follow-up questions. It was so normal that I felt my shoulders come down off my ears for the first time since Friday.

Then something else came on. Faster and brighter, one of those songs that was about a summer and a car and nothing else at all.

And he pointed the spoon at the speaker without turning around and said, "Oh, Chen. Chen. This one's for you!"

What happened in the next second was the only second in four years I ever got wrong.

It was a joke. That was all it was. He did it constantly. He had dedicated songs to me, to Connor, to his mother, and to a golden retriever he saw once outside a CVS. It meant nothing and it required nothing, and the correct response was to say okay and keep drinking.

But he had been looking at me for four days, and I had spent those four days sitting inside a system that had held for four years and was now audibly making a noise. I was tired in the specific way where the thing that stops you had gone home early.

I felt the sentence arrive. I had about a quarter of a second with it, and I let it go anyway.

"Is that one about having me up against a wall until I can't remember my own name too?" I asked it flat, in the same voice I used for the offside rule. I did not blink and I did not look away and I did not put anything in my face, because I had nothing in my face to put.

He laughed.

And it came out wrong.

I had known that man's laugh since I was eighteen years old and I could pick it out of a stadium. There was the real one, which started in his stomach and took his whole face with it. There was the polite one he did for coaches and for his father's friends. There was the one he did when he was about to say something that would get him hit. But this was none of them. It came out high, and it stopped a syllable and a half early, and then he was standing over a pan of rice with a wooden spoon in his hand and he was not turning around.

"Why would I... I mean, why would I want to do that?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

It was not an answer. It did not fit. That was exactly why I said it, because a real answer would have been a door and yes was a wall with a hole in it, and either he would take it for a joke or he would not, and I had already jumped by then anyway.

He laughed again, better, closer to the real one, and said, "You're so WEIRD," and reached over and put the music up two notches, and turned the burner off.

The onion had been gone for twenty minutes. He had not looked at it once.

It was a joke. Obviously it was a joke.

The song had about two minutes left on it. He plated the rice and I got the forks and we moved around each other in a kitchen we had been moving around each other in since August, and neither of us looked at the other one for the rest of that song.

Not once.

I knew because I was counting, and because somewhere in there I worked out that he was doing it too, and I could not make that mean anything I liked, and I lay awake later trying.

He put a plate in front of me. The onion was burned, but I ate all of it anyway.