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Not later. Not carefully. Now. I want to cross this kitchen and put my hands back in that ruined hair and find out what happens when I stop being the sensible one.
I take a step forward.
His phone rings.
He doesn’t reach for it. It goes off against the silence and he just stands there, eyes still on me, like if he ignores it the last thirty seconds might survive.
It rings again. And again.
Four times.
“Luke.” I nod at his pocket. “You should check that.”
Something in me already knows. He’s a firefighter and a single dad. Men like that don’t get to ignore a ringing phone. Not really. Not ever.
He pulls it out. Looks at the screen. His whole face changes.
“It’s Dottie.”
“Answer it.”
He does, on speaker without thinking, already moving. “Hey. What’s going on.”
And Bo is there. Instantly, loudly, mid-storm.
“Dad. Dad. DAD!” His voice is high and ragged, cracking at the edges, words tumbling too fast and looping back on themselves. “It’s too loud, everything is too loud, the Legos fell and the whole city fell and it’s ruined, ruined dad, and Grandma vacuumed and I told her not to and I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
“I know, buddy. I hear you.” Luke’s voice drops into something low and even and completely steady. A voice I haven’t heard from him before, built for exactly this. “You’re okay. The city’s okay. We’ll rebuild it, you and me, tonight. Where are you right now?”
“The kitchen.”
“Okay. Can you go to your corner for me? The tent. The blanket.”
“I don’t want the corner.”
I’m already moving. My hands find his toolbox and start putting the loose tools back in it because he has a kid coming apart on the other end of the phone, and the least I can do is make sure he doesn’t have to hunt for his tools.
Under Bo, I can hear Dottie. “That’s alright, baby, you don’t have to go to the corner. Let’s just come out of the kitchen. This way.”
Then a crash. Glass, or a plate, something hitting the floor and breaking, and Bo’s voice spikes into a wail that isn’t sad, it’s furious, and Dottie says, sharper now, “Okay. Bo. We are getting out of the kitchen, right now. Come with Grandma.”
Luke is already grabbing his things. “I have to go. Bo needs me.”
“Go,” I say.
“It’s not,” he starts, and stops, and I watch him decide how much to explain in the four seconds he has. “He gets overloaded and it turns into this. It passes. I just have to be there when it does.”
“I know.” And I do. I’ve read about it. I’ve sat with parents living it. I know the shape of it from the outside. But knowing the shape of a thing and hearing it come out of a ten-year-old you’ve started to love are two different things, and I feel the second one land somewhere the textbooks never reached.
I hand him the toolbox. He takes it, and for one second, in the middle of all of it, Bo still going on the other end of the line, he looks at me. Whatever we were thirty seconds ago is still there under the noise. I can see it. He’s just set it down, gently, because he has a son to get to.
“I’m sorry,” he says. And he gives me the crooked smile, worn thin around the edges now. An apology and a promise in the same look.
“Don’t be.” I open the door for him. “Go be his dad.”
He goes.
I stand in my doorway and watch him move down the hall, phone to his ear, voice already sliding back into that steady low register, then he’s through the door at the end and gone.
