“I know we decided not to be in touch,” Mia said, her voice light and nervous over the phone. “But, I don’t know, you seemed messed up when I saw you in the parking garage last week.”
Evan cleared his throat.
“And…” she said. “I know you were gone for a while. I saw your truck back in your spot tonight and figured … I guess I figured maybe you could use a home-cooked meal.”
In the background he could make out some Peter-related commotion. She muffled the receiver. “Put the lid back on that!” she shouted. Then she was back. “Anyway, it was just a thought.”
He heard himself say, “I’d like that.”
“Really?”
He was asking himself the same thing. He’d responded before thinking. What part of him had that answer teed up, ready to deploy?
“Yes,” he said.
“Okay. Well, come down in twenty?”
“Okay.” He was, he realized, pacing nervously. There was something else he was supposed to say here, something he’d heard people say on movies and TV shows. The words sounded clunky and robotic in his mouth, but he forced them out. “Can I bring anything?”
“Just yourself.”
That was how the script went. He’d watched it dozens of times but now he was inside it, saying the lines.
There was some other rule, too. Her job was to say no, but his job was to bring something anyway. Except what did he have to bring? Cocktail olives? An energy bar? A Strider folding knife with a tanto tip for punching through Kevlar vests?
Ordinary life was stressful.
He said, “Okay,” and hung up.
Jack had trained him for so many contingencies, had made him lethal and worldly and cultured.
But not domestic.
Checking the adjustment of his nose, he padded back to shower.
* * *
Mia yanked open the door, a blast of too-loud TV cartoons hitting Evan in the face along with the smell of cooking garlic and onion. “Hi, welcome. Wow—vodka.”
He stood nervously, holding a frost-clouded bottle of Nemiroff Lex, which was neither too expensive nor too cheap, not too showy nor too understated, not too spicy nor too citrusy.
There had been deliberations over the freezer drawer.
Feeling decidedly unmasculine, he’d also touched up his makeup on the bruises beneath his eyes. The discoloration was nearly gone; he hoped he could forgo the concealer come morning.
He hoisted the bottle. “It’s Ukrainian,” he said, sounding disconcertingly rehearsed. “Wheat-based and aged in wood for six—”
“Hi, Evan Smoak!” Peter blurred by, juggling oranges, which seemed mostly to involve dropping them.
Mia whipped around. “I am taking this house back! That’s what I’m doing! So help me—”
A crunch punctuated a sudden pause in Peter’s movement. He looked down at his feet. Remorse flickered across his face. “The remote got broken,” he announced in his raspy voice, and then he bolted over the back of the couch and resumed his not-juggling.
Mia seemed to register the afterimpression of her son. “‘Got broken,’” she said. “That’s what we call a strategically passive sentence construction.”
She turned and hurried back into the kitchen, Evan following. With a pasta ladle, she scooped out a piece of linguine and tossed it against the cabinet. It stuck beside various strands that had previously dried and adhered to the wood. She caught Evan’s expression and held up a hand, swollen by an oven mitt to inhuman proportions. “That means it’s ready,” she said, raising her voice over the blaring TV. As she dumped the pot’s contents into a colander, rising steam flushed her cheeks.
The smoke alarm began bleating, and Mia snatched up a dish towel and fanned the air beneath it. “It’s fine. It’ll just…”
The rest of her statement was lost beneath an orchestral change in the intensity of Bugs Bunny’s adventure.
In the midst of the chaos, Evan took a still moment. He set down the vodka bottle on the counter. Grabbing a steak knife from the block, he headed into the living room, sidestepping a toppled barstool. He found the remote on the carpet by the couch, the buttons jammed beneath the plastic casing, as he’d suspected.
He sat and worked the tiny screws with the tip of the steak knife. Three oranges tapped the couch cushion, light footsteps approached, and then Peter sat opposite Evan, cross-legged.
“What are you doing?” the boy asked.
Evan extracted the first screw, went to work on the second. “Unscrewing.”
Peter said, “Why are you using a steak knife?”
“Because that’s what I’ve got.”
“But knives are for eating.”
“Among other things.” The screw popped up, and the top casing of the remote lifted, the rubber buttons jostling back into place beneath it. Evan fastened the faceplate back on, then touched the POWER button.
The TV mercifully silenced just as the smoke alarm stopped bleating. A moment of perfect, blissful quiet.
Mia said, “We are ready to plate.”
* * *
While Peter disappeared to brush his teeth, Mia and Evan sat at the table, empty dishes between them. In the background, singing softly from an iPod speaker dock, Linda Ronstadt was wondering when she’d be loved.
Mia took a sip of vodka. “This is good. It tastes … aged in wood.”
Evan said, “You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m making fun of you.”
She held up her glass, and they clinked.
From the depths of his bathroom, Peter yelled, “Done!” and Mia shouted, “That wasn’t two minutes!”
It was cold, and she had her sweater sleeves pulled over her hands. Her hair was a rich mess of waves and curls. The glow of the overhead light spilled through it, showing off all the colors, chestnut and gold and auburn.
Evan remembered that he was supposed to comment on the food. “That was delicious.”
“Thank you.” She leaned forward, cupped a hand by her mouth, gave a stage whisper. “I blend spinach in the marinara sauce. It’s how I get him to eat vegetables.”
Unexpectedly, Evan found himself thinking of Joey dining alone in the safe house, Twizzlers and ramen in the dead blue light of the laptop. A sensation worked in his chest, and he gave it some space, observed it, identified it.
Guilt.
That was interesting.
He looked across at the kitchen, where a new Post-it was stuck above the pass-through.
Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.—Jordan Peterson
Mia left quotations around for Peter, rules to live by. As she’d once remarked to Evan, it took a lot of work to raise a human.
“Peter’s lucky to have you,” Evan said.
“Thanks.” She smiled and peered into her vodka, her fingers peeking out of the sweater cuff to grip the glass. “I’m lucky to have him, too. It’s the predictable response, but it’s true.”
“Really done now!” Peter yelled. “Can I read?”
“Ten minutes!”
“Tell me when time’s up!”
“Okay! I’ll be in to tuck you in!”
Evan looked at the freshly folded laundry, still in the basket on the floor. The homework chart above the kitchen table, bedazzled with puffy stickers. “It’s so much work,” he said.
“Yes. And that’s on a good week. Then there’s the strep-throat week, the getting-bullied week, the cheating-on-the-simplifying-fractions-test week.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Fractions.”
She laughed. “Kids turn your life upside down. But maybe that’s where anything matters. In the big fat mess of it all. Of course, I’d like to do more. Travel. Relax.” She hoisted the glass. “Drink.” Her grin faded. “Sometimes parenting, it feels like … an anchor.” Her expression lightened. “But that’s the good part, too. You have this anchor. And it holds you in the world.”
Evan thought, Like having Jack.
“God,” she said. “Sometimes I miss Roger so much. It’s never the big stuff like you’d think. Candlelight dinners. The sex. Wedding veils and vacations. No. It’s coming home when you’re at the end of a brutal day and there’s someone there. Consistency. You know?”
Evan said, “No.”
She laughed. “Your bluntness, it’s refreshing. It’s always yes and no with you. Never ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I get it.’”
He thought, That’s because I don’t get it.
“This personal thing you’re dealing with,” she said. “What is it?”
He took another sip, let the vodka heat his throat. “It is,” he said, “the job to end all jobs.”
“Truly?”
“I think so.”
“If that’s the case,” she said. “Maybe a DA and a … whatever you are can be friends.”
“Friends.”
She rose from the table, and he followed her cue.
“Maybe we could do this,” she said. “Just this. Maybe again Friday? Peter enjoys it. I enjoy it.”
Evan thought of Jack, stepping silently into space, giving his life to protect Evan’s. Joey, working furiously to get him back on Van Sciver’s trail. Benito Orellana, besieged by debt, his wife dead, his son in danger. Please help me. You’re all I have left.
Evan didn’t deserve to have something this nice on a regular basis.
Mia was staring at him.
He said, “What?”
“This is where you say you enjoy it, too.”
Evan said, “I enjoy it, too.”
They were at the door. Mia was looking at his mouth, and he was looking at hers.
“Can I kiss you?” she asked.
He drew her in.
Her mouth was so, so soft.
They parted. She was breathless. He was, too. An odd sensation—odder even than guilt.
He said, “Thank you for dinner.”
She laughed as she closed the door after him.
He had no idea why.