Page 49 of The Last Guy On Earth
“Your family didn’t want to move? Tell me about them.”
“Where to start?” Any shrink would have a field day with my family, so this is an easy little diversion. “I live with my father now, but he was purposely absent for most of my childhood. Ibecame a parent to my nephew when my sister went to jail for a DUI and drug possession. Toby hates hockey, loves video games, and never misses an opportunity to tell me how I’m ruining his life.”
“Shit.” He sits back in his seat. “That’s a lot to unpack.”
“Isn’t it just.”
He sips his coffee, thinking. “Toby probably has abandonment issues.”
“Well, sure.”
“And now you have a matching set, thanks to Detroit.”
I laugh because it’s probably true. “At least I know mine are about business. Toby doesn’t have that luxury.”
“Hmm,” he says, which is shrink talk for:I’m humoring you right now. “If you really believed it was only about business, you wouldn’t be all up in your head about it now, would you?”
That’s the thing about psychologists—they’re too damned perceptive. “I can understand that it’s just business tothem, but I still feel peeved about it. They have a whole team to run, but it’s my whole life they’re fucking with.”
“You understand it up here.” He points at his head. “But it still hurts here.” He points at his chest. “You’re feeling the same kind of loss as if you got dumped, right? Suddenly the love of your life doesn’t want you anymore. It shakes you.”
I flash back to everything Clay told me last night and sort of sag into my seat. “Yeah, okay. Getting dumped sucks.”
He grins. “So let’s talk through it, and maybe we can unfuck your game. Hmm?”
If only.
Doc Baker tries, though. He takes me through some basic coping strategies. He talks a lot about setting aside my “inner narrative” and taking each moment as a new opportunity. I nod along in all the right places until our time is up.
I go back to my seat and unlock my phone again. Something else Clay said last night is niggling at me. It takes me ten minutes to find my phone’s list of blocked numbers. Sure enough, Clay’s 415 phone number is on the list. After a moment’s hesitation, I unblock it and open up the text chain to read our final exchange.
And if I hadn’t been cringing at my own behavior already, reading this would seal the deal.
I shove the phone into the seatback pocket and let out a quiet groan.
TWENTY-THREE
Fifteen Years Ago
APRIL
It’s past midnight,and Jethro is on his couch with a full flask of whisky.
That’s right. His couch. Nottheircouch. He’s painfully aware of how alone he is without Clay tonight.
After a truly hideous playoff game, he’s bruised, both mentally and physically. He should be drinking a lot of water and going to bed. Except the bedroom isn’t his favorite place in the apartment anymore. And forget the kitchen. There’s nothing in the fridge except for stale pizza leftovers.
So here he is, marinating on the stupid sofa, emptying the contents of his flask way too fast and stretching out his legs because there’s nobody around to take up the other half of the space. He might sleep right here. It would be easier than standing up and going to bed.
His ancient laptop is open on his gut. His sloppy fingers somehow find their way to the AHL stat sheets, where he looks to see how Clay’s game went tonight.
The Blizzards won 4-1, advancing to the next round. He clicks on the score to get a breakdown, and a headline jumps out athim.ROOKIE CLAYTON POWERS SCORES HIS FIRST AHL GOAL.
Jethro isn’t surprised. Not even a little. This is exactly what was meant to happen. Clay’s the only one who couldn’t see it.
He raises his flask to the empty living room. “Great job, you preppy fucker,” he announces. “Told you, dumbass.”
He closes the laptop and sets it on the wobbly coffee table. Then he opens his phone and squints at the text thread he had with Clay. There’s almost nothing there. When you spend 24/7 with somebody, you don’t need a lot of texts. Their last exchange was Clay asking Jethro to pick up some mesclun, and Jethro asking what the hell that is.
