Page 9 of Rhodes

We drop into the two chairs that were on this porch before either of us could walk. Coop puts his boots up on the rail and kills half his beer in one long pull.

Cooper Maybank does not drink fast unless he's working up to a hard thing. So I don't help him get there. You learn that with the quiet ones, the ones built like my old man and Coop's. You leave the silence sitting open and let them walk into it in their own time.

I put my boots on the rail next to his and turn my bottle up, looking around at the empty property.

"Ran into Tallulah last night," I say after a while, when he doesn't respond. "At the Boot. I was surprised to see her there. It was weird running into her there, for some reason. I almost forget she lives here now."

Green dress turning around, my own voice in my own mouth saying the thing I'd give a year of my life to reach back and grab before it got out. I keep my face doing nothing and drink my beer.

"How'd she seem?" he asks.

“Fine,” I answer a little too quickly.

Fine. That's the word loaded and ready. She was fine. What I saw was a girl who still stands like she plays, weight up on the front of her feet the way she's stood since she was twelve years old, in a green dress, in a bar full of people who don't know one thing about her.

“That’s it? Fine.”

“She was good, Coop. What do you want me to say? She’s sharp as ever. Gave me hell the entire time." I leave out the part that she knew immediately I was suspect of what she was drinking.

Coop nods at the bikes parked in front of us, and something moves across his face that I don't much like. "She's real good at seeming good."

"She wasn't seeming, Coop. She ran laps around two frat guys hitting on her and me inside of five minutes."

"That's exactly what I'm saying." He rolls the bottle between his palms, back and forth. "She had it handled the whole month before Virginia, too. Straight A's, never missed a class. Nobody knew one damn thing until Mama found the—" He stops and puts his boots down off the rail before picking the sentence back up somewhere safer. "She's got a version of herself where everything's fine and running smooth, and that's the one she puts out. I've watched her run it my whole life. She could be drowning, and you'd get straight A's and a smart mouth right up until she went under."

I don't answer that. There's a stubborn thing sitting in me that wants to defend her, but the truth is, I had the same worry when I saw her last night at The Boot.

"I'm thinking about not going," he says.

"To Spain?"

"Yeah. I just think with Tilly being here for her Freshman year, Mom,” he pauses. “Since Mom just died, it's just too raw, too soon. She's supposed to move into my apartment, and I just don't think she should live there alone in the middle of all this chaos."

I turn the bottle on my knee. It leaves a cold, wet ring on the denim. "You've been building Galicia since sophomore year. You took three semesters of aquaculture credits just to qualify. You sat in a language lab and actually learned Spanish, which I personally watched nearly kill you."

"I know what I did. But making sure she's safe is more important. The timing is shitty."

"Your mama made you promise you'd go."

His throat works. I know that promise got made even though I wasn't in the room for it, because I know exactly how Lizzy Maybank spent her dying, propped up in that four-poster with the window over the creek, wringing promises out of her kids one at a time like she was rationing them out for a war she knew was coming.

Hell, she did it to me. I can still hear her. "Keep living. Do the things. Mind the beds."

Out past the treeline, a woodpecker starts hammering and then quits. The quiet after it is louder than it was.

"She did," Coop says. "She specifically made me promise I'd go. She told me—" He doesn't finish that one. He's not going to, and I'm not going to reach in there after it. So I look at the toe of my boot and give him the room to leave it unsaid.

"She made me promise to go to Spain and make sure Tilly is okay. That's the whole problem right there. I can't keep go-to-Spain and look-after-Tilly, not with an ocean in between. And I can't exactly call her up and ask which one she meant the most."

"So go," I tell him. "I'll make sure Tallulah is okay."

It comes out of me the way the ditch turn comes, no gap at all between seeing the line and taking it. My mouth was already through the corner before the careful part of me catches up to check the math. He set the thing that's weighing on him down on this porch, and I want to be the one who reaches over and picks it up for him.

He looks at me. "Rhodes."

"I mean it. What's the actual job? Somebody close by, somebody who clocks it fast if she's off, somebody who's just around. I'm fifteen minutes from Tulane. She can take the second bedroom at my place. It's sitting there empty. Then you're not floating two rents, she's not living alone, and you're not lying awake in Spain at three in the morning wondering whether your sister's by herself."

"I don't want to ask you to do that."