Chapter 25: Why She Laughed, Only She Knew
They ended up at the same pizza place from the day before.
Charlie ate like a man who'd been shipwrecked. Half a pizza gone before he'd said ten words. He washed it down with a beer he'd somehow produced from his jacket, burped without apology, and finally leaned back in his chair like a man settling into a hot bath.
"So," he said. "Evan."
"Yeah," Andrew said.
"Good man. Terrible at most things, but a good man." Charlie picked up another slice. "We go back maybe fifteen years. Met on a job out in L.A. — I was doing some music licensing work, he was playing session guitar for whoever would have him. We drank together, chased the same women, made the same bad decisions. You know how it goes."
Andrew nodded. He knew exactly how it went. The smell alone — cigarettes, alcohol, someone else's perfume — had told him everything he needed to know about Charlie Harper in the first thirty seconds. His father had found his mirror image and made him a friend.
"He came to me about four years ago," Charlie continued. "We were having one of those late nights where you start talking about dying — not in a dark way, just the way you do when you've been drinking since noon. He said the one thing he actually worried about was you. Said he hadn't done right by you and he knew it." Charlie set down his slice. "So we drew up the will. Been sitting at my firm ever since."
Andrew was quiet for a moment. "He didn't reach out. Not once, the whole time."
"No," Charlie agreed, without defending it. "That was Evan. He'd do the right thing from a distance. Showing up was a different skill and he didn't have it." He drained his beer. "Anyway. That's what it is."
He looked at Andrew with the casual directness of a man who'd been around enough to not dress things up unnecessarily. "What are you planning to do? With the money, with all of it?"
Andrew had been asking himself the same question since he walked out of the courthouse. The monthly salary changed things — not dramatically, but meaningfully. Two thousand dollars a month, reliable, meant the food truck timeline compressed considerably. It meant the bar closing wasn't the crisis it had looked like yesterday morning.
The university condition was the complication. The full ownership of the fund was tied to a degree, which meant Evan, even from beyond, had managed to have an opinion about how Andrew lived his life.
"I'm figuring it out," Andrew said.
Charlie nodded like that was a complete answer. "Come back to Malibu with me," he said, almost as an afterthought. "I've got connections out there. Getting you into a school isn't hard, and New York is—" He made a gesture that encompassed the general oppressiveness of the city. "It's a lot."
Andrew didn't answer right away. He thought about it honestly, the way the offer deserved.
Malibu was Los Angeles. Los Angeles was three thousand miles from everything he'd built here, everything he was building. It was a clean break — new city, his father's friend watching over him, the fund, a university placement handed to him. An easy version of a life.
"No," he said. Quiet, but without any give in it. "New York is home. I'm not leaving."
Charlie looked at him for a moment, then shrugged with his entire body — the shrug of a man who'd made his offer and was perfectly comfortable with the answer. "Suit yourself." He reached into his shirt pocket and set two things on the table: a business card and a hundred-dollar bill. "My number. Call if you change your mind, or if you need anything. The money hits your account on the first of the month. When you've got your degree, come find me in Malibu and we'll do the paperwork."
He stood, finished the last of his beer standing up, and put his sunglasses back on.
At the door he paused and looked back.
"Good pizza, by the way. Evan would've liked this place."
Then he was gone — out the door and into the street with the easy gait of a man who was always leaving somewhere.
Andrew sat there for another few minutes after Charlie left. He paid the check with the hundred, pocketed the change and the business card, and gathered his courthouse paperwork.
Charlie Harper.
He turned the name over. What he felt wasn't quite what he'd expected. The anger he'd been carrying toward Evan — the quiet, background kind, the kind you stop noticing because it's always there — had shifted into something he didn't have an immediate word for. Not forgiveness exactly. More like the particular exhaustion that comes with finally seeing the whole picture.
Evan had been exactly what Andrew had always known him to be: absent, self-involved, constitutionally incapable of showing up in person for anything that required sustained presence. And at the same time, Evan had sat down with his friend four years ago and thought about what his son would need when he was gone, and he'd done something about it.
Both of those things were true. Andrew wasn't sure what to do with that.
The dead have it easy, he thought, standing up from the table. The living have to keep going.
He got home to find Bonnie and Christie on the couch watching cartoons. He dropped the paperwork on the cabinet by the door and walked to the couch and put his face directly into the cushion.
A long silence.
The cartoon kept going.
Eventually Bonnie tilted her head to look at him. She could read a mood. "How'd it go? If the apartment fell through, come with us. I can find you work."
She paused.
"Not in New York, though."
"The apartment's mine," Andrew said into the cushion.
"Then why do you look like that?"
He thought about trying to explain it and decided against it. "You wouldn't get it."
Bonnie considered this and accepted it with a shrug. She'd pushed into things that weren't her business before and it hadn't paid off. "Okay."
The cartoons kept going.
"Wake me up at noon," Andrew said, getting up from the couch. "I'll make lunch."
"It's already past noon," Bonnie said.
He looked at her. She nodded toward the window — the light had shifted. He'd lost track of the morning entirely.
He went to his room and was asleep within minutes.
The dreams came fast and without warning.
A living room. His father's voice. A woman he didn't know laughing at something. Brandy on the floor.
His father at a school event — shorts, no jacket, the other kids watching.
A mall. His father's arm around a woman, both of them disappearing into the crowd without looking back.
The apartment. Three days since he'd seen his father. The refrigerator empty. Little Andrew sitting on the kitchen floor.
He woke up gasping, sitting straight up, heart going hard in his chest. The clock said 3:30. The light through the curtains had gone flat and gray.
He sat there until his breathing evened out. Then he got up.
In the living room, Bonnie was stretched out on the couch with a book. She heard him and looked up. "Spaghetti's in the kitchen. I kept it warm."
He didn't ask when she'd made it. He went to the kitchen and ate two full portions standing at the counter, which wasn't something he'd planned but his body apparently required. The specific quality of the hunger — the edge in it, the urgency — was familiar in a way he didn't want to examine too closely.
He washed the dishes after. Stood at the sink with the water running and the afternoon quiet around him.
And then, unexpectedly, he laughed.
Not at anything in particular. Just at the whole shape of it — the cheap, distant father who'd arranged everything from three thousand miles away, the will sitting in a law firm for four years, the hungover friend who'd shown up to the courthouse reeking of last night and still managed to be the most straightforward person in the room. The way things came together in ways you couldn't plan for.
He'd been carrying that weight for a long time. It didn't disappear, but it was lighter now than it had been this morning. Some knots just took the right moment to loosen.
He dried his hands, got a change of clothes, and headed for the bathroom.
When he came out, Bonnie was in the bedroom, waiting, which was its own kind of language between them. Afterward, Andrew lay staring at the ceiling, and became aware for no particular reason that he wanted a cigarette — a feeling he hadn't had in years. He sat with it until it passed.
"What?" He looked over and found Bonnie watching him.
"Nothing." She looked away. "Just — you're not as hard to read as you think you are."
"That's not what you were thinking."
"No," she agreed. "It's not."
She didn't explain further. Andrew didn't push it.
She laughed a little then — quiet, to herself.
Why she laughed, only she knew.
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