Chapter 59 HE LEAVES

Chapter 59 HE LEAVES

POV: Reese Calloway

Six in the morning and the street was still dark.

I'd been awake since five, not from anxiety but from the specific alertness of a body that had registered something significant was happening before the brain had finished deciding how to feel about it. I'd made coffee and drunk half of it standing at the kitchen counter and then put my jacket on and gone downstairs.

Cole was already at the car.

His bag was small enough that he didn't need to rearrange anything to fit it in. He lifted it into the back, closed the door, turned around. The street was quiet around us, the city in its early morning state before it committed to being the city, just the ambient hum of a place that never fully went to sleep but got close around five.

He crossed the pavement and pulled me in.

Not a production. Not a moment with a speech attached to it. Just his arms around me and his chin against my hair and the specific warmth of someone who had been in my kitchen every morning for ten days and was now about to be two hours away for the better part of three months.

"I'll text you when I get there," he said into my hair.

"Okay," I said.

He let go.

Got in the car.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched him pull out from the curb and move down the street and turn at the corner and the taillights disappeared and I stood there for another thirty seconds looking at the empty street where the car had been.

Then I went upstairs and opened my laptop and started working.

The magazine contract had three shoots in the first two weeks alone.

The Chicago artists portrait series first, the ceramicist in Pilsen followed by a muralist in Bridgeport and a furniture maker in Logan Square whose workshop had north light so good I stayed two hours longer than the scheduled session and the furniture maker made coffee and didn't seem to mind. Then a standalone assignment, a feature on a community garden in Woodlawn that had been running for twenty years and had more documented history than most institutions three times its size.

The work was real and it was mine and it filled the apartment in the specific way that real work filled spaces, not just the hours but the air itself, the apartment feeling occupied and purposeful in a way it hadn't in three years of real estate listings and corporate headshots and a camera carried everywhere and pointed at nothing that mattered.

Cole texted when he arrived. A short one, factual, the two-hour drive had been fine, camp started tomorrow.

The next morning another text. Early, before six, which meant he'd been up before the rest of the camp and had reached for his phone in the first quiet minutes of the day.

The morning after that, another one.

They came in the morning mostly, short and factual, updates from a world I didn't know the specific geography of, the names of the other players arriving at camp, the condition of the ice in the facility's rink, the interim coach's approach to the first week. Occasionally something else, a sentence that arrived without context and sat in the thread and made me laugh unexpectedly at my own kitchen table with my coffee going warm in my hand.

I texted back. Short, factual, the same register. The muralist shoot had gone well. The community garden had a ninety-year-old founding member who'd been tending the same plot since 1974 and had opinions about soil composition that I now also had opinions about.

He sent back one word. Naturally.

I laughed again at the kitchen table.

Dana came on Saturday.

She came in and took her coat off and looked at the wall the way she looked at things she was assessing before she said anything about them. The documentary prints were still up but moved to the left side, the two-hundred-photograph arc from the shoot condensed into the best twelve, and the right side of the wall had the new work on it. The ceramicist's hands shaping clay in the north window light. The muralist twenty feet up a scaffold with the city spread out below her. The trumpet player from the L platform that I'd shot on the walk back from the magazine meeting.

Dana stood in front of the wall for a moment.

"You're building something," she said.

"Yeah," I said.

She turned and looked at me with the Dana expression, the one that meant she was going to say the true thing and had decided not to soften it first.

"About time," she said.

She made tea and we sat on the floor with our backs against the couch the way we'd been sitting since we were children and she told me about her week and I told her about the garden shoot and the ninety-year-old with the soil opinions and Dana laughed the real laugh and said she wanted to photograph her too and I said get your own subjects.

It was the kind of afternoon that didn't require anything from either of us except to be in it.

After Dana left I stood in front of the wall for a minute.

The documentary work and the magazine work side by side. Six weeks of Cole and Tommy and Mercy Row on the left and the first two weeks of something new on the right, the work that was mine in the straightforward sense of having been assigned to nobody's project except the one I was building.

I took a photograph of the wall.

Sent it to nobody. Just kept it in the folder where I kept things that were only mine.

Three weeks into training camp my phone rang.

Not a text. A call, Cole's name on the screen at seven in the evening, which was unusual enough that I picked up on the first ring.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey." A pause. The specific quality of a pause from someone who has organized what they're going to say and is deciding where to start. "There's something I need to tell you. About a conversation that happened in the locker room today."

I sat down at the kitchen table.

His voice had the careful register it had when he was delivering information he'd already decided I needed to have, not managing how it landed but making sure the landing was accurate.

"It involves Marcus Deane," he said.