Gerrard leaves and not a month later Lizzie calls him. It can't be good.
It’s not. He stares numbly at his phone for long enough after he hangs up that Dug nudges impatiently at his hand because they were supposed to be going for a walk. He walks her on autopilot, couldn’t have told you where they went, or if they saw anyone they knew. Hopes he was polite if they did.
Evan’s home from his shift by the time he gets back, he can hear the shower running. He lets Dug off her leash and gives her a treat, reaches up to pet Clementine's silky head from where she’s watching them from on top of the fridge. She purrs for him.
Goes into the bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed and waits. He should be booking a flight, or calling the station to arrange for leave, or packing, but he just sits there and listens to Evan’s off key singing as he finishes showering and brushes his teeth, because Evan always brushes his teeth when he showers, no matter what time of day it is. Habit.
Evan jumps when he emerges from the bathroom. “Hey. I didn’t hear you come in.” Bends down for a kiss, and then straightens with a frown. “Everything okay?”
There’s no good way to say this. “My father died.” Evan sits down on the bed next to him.
“I didn’t know—” stops himself and starts again, “Did you know he was sick?”
He shakes his head. “Lizzie said it was fast, by the time he made it to the hospital there wasn’t time to call.”
He looks down and Evan’s hand is threaded through his. “I’m so sorry.” He nods. He’s not sure if he’s sorry or not. Or, well, he’s sorry, his father is dead, but he hasn’t been home since his grandfather died for a reason. Evan’s hand tightens on his. “What do you need?”
That’s another question he doesn’t really know how to answer. But. “I’ll have to fly home. Put in for leave.” He gets some bereavement leave, but he’ll need longer. The yawning chasm of things that will need to be done opens up in front of him.
Evan nods. “I can do that. When is the funeral?”
He focuses long enough to look at the text Lizzie had sent him. “Thursday.”
He’s not sure how much time passes until Evan sits down next to him again. “Okay. I got us a flight. Let Bobby know, called your Captain. Do you want me to text your sister when we’re getting in, or is that weird?”
He blinks. Surfaces enough to process what Evan’s said. “We? You’re coming with me?”
Evan’s face goes abruptly blank. “Uh, unless you don’t want me to? Sorry, I didn’t even ask, I just kind of assumed. I can—”
Cuts him off, grips his wrist probably too hard. “Jesus Christ. Yes. I want you to come with me.” Wasn’t sure if that was a thing he could ask for until Evan had offered it up for free. Has to give him warning though. “My family, we’re not—” has no way to concisely quantify his family.
Evan smiles just slightly. “You’ve met mine. You got something worse?”
It makes him snort with unexpected laughter, and it feels wrong to laugh now, today. “What’s the Tolstoy quote? All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way? Yeah, that. Not worse, just different.”
Evan nods. “I can cope with different. Now, do you want me to text Lizzie, or do you want to do it?
Tommy texts his sister while Evan arranges for Dug to stay at Sarah’s and somehow convinces Eddie to take Clementine. “I’m not a cat person,” Eddie says, gingerly taking the small carrier.
“She’s not really a people cat,” Evan replies.
Evan gets them tickets on a non-stop flight from LAX to BWI, and bullies/asks Eddie to drop them off. LAX remains the fifth circle of hell, and he figures that’s a marker of friendship right there. Eddie gets out of the truck at the airport and pulls him into a hug, leans in to say something to Evan that Tommy can’t quite hear. Turns out Evan got them business class tickets, which isn’t a luxury he’d have sprung for, but, Evan says, “You need the sleep, nobody sleeps in economy,” and then waves away his question about how much he owes him. He doesn’t sleep exactly, but he does have room to stretch his legs out and he dozes while Evan reads next to him.
When they land he discovers Eddie has sent photos of Clementine perched on his fridge, asks, / Is this normal? / It makes him laugh.
Tommy rents a car because he doesn’t want to be beholden to Lizzie. When they arrive, she meets them out front. “You must be Evan,” she says, reaching out a hand to shake.
Evan nods, clasps her hand, “Call me Buck; it’s nice to meet you.”
She looks over at Tommy, brows raised, but he just shrugs. “Where’s Mom?”
She’s sitting on the edge of her bed. She looks as numb as he feels. He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she looks up. She blinks. “You’re here.” Like she hadn’t expected him to show up.
He grits his teeth and doesn’t say anything. Just nods. “Got in just now.”
She smooths the fabric on her skirt. “Did you have a good flight?” Generic polite conversation he knows she can keep up on auto pilot indefinitely, like he’s a stranger and not her son.
He closes his eyes briefly. “Yes, it was fine.”
Lizzie leans into the room, says the funeral home called and they need to bring dad’s clothes over. His mother doesn’t move, so Tommy methodically pulls his dad’s old dress uniform from the back of the closet, shines his shoes, gathers his medals and ribbons from the box on the dresser. Goes downstairs to give them to Lizzie.
Evan’s in the kitchen, where it looks like he’s already taken over, prepping something on the counter when he comes down with the garment bag. He turns to look at Tommy when he walks in, scanning his face like he’s trying to get a read on how Tommy’s doing. He wishes Evan would tell him what he sees, because he’s not sure he knows.
He holds up the garment bag. “Lizzie?”
Evan points towards the back porch, and Tommy takes the clothes out to her. He comes back inside afterwards and finds his mother has drifted downstairs. She’s sitting at the table watching Evan move around her kitchen, glass of something in front of her that he’d bet his bank balance isn’t water. Evan is half apologizing for having taken over her kitchen without asking for permission. She’s watching him, fascinated, like she’s never seen a man cooking in her kitchen. Which, to be fair, she probably hasn’t.
He hovers awkwardly in the doorway. His mother finally says, “Thomas, were you going to introduce me to your friend?”
The look on Evan’s face says that he had in fact introduced himself already, and the quirk of his eyebrow asks whether they’re going the friend route with his mother. He sits down at the table. “Mom, this is Buck. My boyfriend.”
She hmms and takes a sip of whatever she’s drinking. Surprises him when she looks directly at Evan and says, “It’s nice of you to take the time to come with Thomas.” Then ruins it a little when she adds, “Particularly for people you’ve never met before.”
He wants to ask exactly whose fault she thinks that is, but her husband just died, and whatever he’d thought of his father, they’d been married for going on 40 years, and their marriage had always seemed, if not happy, at least not unhappy.
Out of the corner of his eye he can see that Lizzie is back and making a waving gesture at him. He goes out to join her on the porch, figures she wants to talk to him where Mom can’t hear them. He takes her a can of diet co*ke, because that’s all there is in the fridge. Knows if he looked that he’d find vodka in the freezer.
He leans against the porch railing. It needs fixing. Wonders how long his dad had been feeling bad without telling anyone, because he’d always been meticulous about keeping the house in good repair. “You doing okay?”
She shrugs. She looks tired. “Buck seems nice,” she offers. She glances into the kitchen. “He’s making dinner? Asked if there was anything we didn’t eat and then just took over.”
He smiles. “He is a very feed people, food is love, kind of guy.”
She takes a breath. “Well, I appreciate it. Mark and the kids will appreciate not eating pizza for the third day in a row. Well, Mark will appreciate it. The kids would probably eat pizza for a month straight.”
He smiles, because he’s supposed to. He hasn’t seen Lizzie’s kids since they were barely more than toddlers except on Facebook and Instagram. “How are they holding up?”
She shrugs. “Okay, I think. Mark’s mom died a couple of years ago, so I think that makes this a little easier. Or at least, not as much of a shock as that was.” She glances in through the kitchen window at where their mother is still watching Evan cook like he’s an anthropological exhibit. “I’m worried about Mom.” He nods. Lizzie looks up at the three story house they’d grown up in. “She can’t stay here on her own.”
He does the math in his head. “She’s only 66.”
Lizzie gives him a tight annoyed shake of her head. “She hasn’t suddenly started drinking less since the last time you came home. She can’t stay here on her own.”
Right. Got it. He rubs his forehead. “Okay. That’s gonna be a fight.”
Lizzie gives him a sour look. “You think?”
They have to get through the funeral first. Pick your battles, he thinks.
Mark and the kids get there a little later. After school he realizes, and thinks he should have worked that out earlier. They’re tall. Taller than had translated on Instagram. Sean looks like Mark, but Maggie looks exactly like Lizzie had at her age. They all stare at each other with that awkward sense of knowing that you’re family, but also being strangers.
Evan breaks the silence with food. Wrangles Sean and Maggie into helping him find plates and cutlery and napkins, and then setting out bowls of sour cream and grated cheese and diced red onion and corn chips, and then he’s pulling cornbread out of the oven, and serving bowls of chili from the pot on the stove, and filling the silence with a determined monologue about how he’d never had chili without beans until he was working down South and got schooled that a real chili, Texas chili, never had beans, and how he’s always wanted to try Cincinnati chili sometime because they put cinnamon and cloves in it and serve it over spaghetti, which hey sounds weird to him, but 400,000 people can’t all be wrong. Tommy could kiss him. Settles for sitting next to him at the table and resting a hand on his thigh for a moment, murmuring, “Thank you,” when Evan leans over to grab the butter.
He gets through the next few days in a daze, the funeral and then the wake, talking to his dad’s old military buddies, who side-eye Evan when he tells them who he is. Then it’s just them and his mom in the house, him and Evan sleeping in his childhood bedroom that had been converted to a guest bedroom at some point —Tommy doesn’t ask when. It’s weird, falling asleep and waking up to the sound of the whippoorwills again, like nothing has changed when everything has. Cognitive dissonance when he looks at the ceiling and thinks for just a second that he’s 17 again, but then there’s Evan snoring lightly behind him, his arm wrapped around him.
He feels like there’s something clawing under his skin trying to get out. Thought that feeling was something he’d left behind a long time ago. Evan offers to find them a hotel room, but he can’t justify it. If he leaves then Lizzie has to come back, or they have to persuade their mother to go to Lizzie’s.
“It’s going to happen anyway,” he tells Evan. “Should give her as much time to transition as we can.”
Evan looks confused, “She’s going to move? She can’t stay—” and waves at the house.
Tommy shakes his head, “She can’t stay here on her own.”
“But she seems,” he stops. “She’s young? Younger than my mom.”
Tommy shrugs, “Lizzie is sure.” Evan’s quiet, tilts his head. “It’s not like I’ve been here, like I know.” Rubs his temples, trying to keep back the headache that’s been threatening all day. “I’m the one that left Lizzie alone with them, I have to back her play.”
“Sure,” Evan says, putting a hand on his back. “Okay.”
His mom sleeps on the couch, can’t seem to go back into the bedroom.
Tommy knows Evan has to get back, the department is only so flexible because “my boyfriend’s father died” doesn't actually qualify him for emergency bereavement. Tommy’s here for the long haul; Evan helped him put in for family leave. He needs to stay to help Lizzie, figure out what the next step is for their mom, and then figure out how to sell her on it.
“Bobby would let me stay longer,” Evan says as he’s packing.
He sits on the bed and watches. “No. I think this is a thing I need to do by myself. Or well, with Lizzie. But, thank you.”
Evan folds his last shirt into his bag and comes to stand between Tommy’s legs, hand curving around his neck. “If you need me, I can come back.”
He tips his head back to look up at Evan’s face, all aching sincerity and worried eyes. “I know.” He slides his hands around the back of Evan’s thighs. “Lizzie took Mom to the grocery store.”
Evan frowns. “Oh, I could have done that before I leave.”
He smiles, pulls until Evan’s knee buckles and he falls forward, catching himself on his hands, looming over Tommy. “Not the point I was trying to make.” Evan raises his eyebrows, but he’s also settling down on top of Tommy. “Lizzie said she was going to stop by the bank too, try and figure out what forms they need.” Looks at Evan meaningfully. “They won’t be home for at least two hours.”
Evan threads their hands together, pushing Tommy’s hands down into the mattress, and he feels something in him go liquid and content. “Have you ever made out in this bed?” He shakes his head, and Evan’s smile gets broader. “We should definitely fix that.”
They’re showered and downstairs by the time Lizzie and his mom get home. Lizzie gives him a wink when she catches that they both have wet hair and are wearing different shirts than they were earlier. His mom either doesn’t notice, or is choosing not to comment. He feels more settled in his skin, more like himself, or at least the person he’s made himself into.
Being back here, he finds himself slipping back into habits and skins he left behind a long time ago. During the funeral, the wake, he kept having to remind himself that he could touch Evan, could lean on him like he wanted, that it was okay. That Evan wanted him to.
He drives Evan to the airport. Evan fills the car with words, making up for Tommy’s silence, unable to voice everything he wants to. Worries if he opens his mouth, he’ll just ask Evan to stay and that’s not fair.
He parks in front of Departures, pulls Evan’s bag out of the back and he slings it over his shoulder. They stand in front of the car for a minute, before Evan says, “I should go or I’m gonna be late.”
Tommy leans forward to kiss him softly, hand on his neck. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Sure,” Evan says. “Soon.”
He watches Evan disappear into the airport, a creeping feeling that all that’s keeping him tethered down to reality is about to fly away.
When he gets home, a group of women from church have stopped by with dinner and to keep his mother company, and he figures that’s his cue to leave. Takes the opportunity to go over to Lizzie’s to start the conversation they need to have about what happens next. They’re going to need to be a united front on this.
He has dinner with Lizzie and Mark and the kids, listens to them talk about school, and classes, listens to Mark talk about work. He doesn’t know Mark well. All he remembers from Lizzie’s wedding is that she was beautiful, and looked so happy. Mark’s voice had cracked when he gave his vows.
He doesn’t, if he’s honest, really know Lizzie all that well anymore either. It’s been too many years to claim that. But he loves her, hard wired into him. He’s never had the relationship with Lizzie that Evan has with Maddie, wouldn’t want it, but maybe something in between would be nice.
Lizzie lets the kids escape without doing the dishes, and he and Mark divide them up between them while Lizzie makes tea, and then they’ve put off the inevitable as long as they can.
He starts. “I know I haven’t been here.”
Lizzie’s lips tighten, but she just nods. “You moved. It’s not a cardinal sin.”
He’s got his doubts that that’s how his mother sees it, but— “Okay, so what are our options?”
“She can’t stay in the house on her own.”
“Okay,” he agrees. He’s not as sure as Lizzie is, but she’s here and he’s not, so her word carries more weight right now. “So, what? Assisted living community?” She’ll hate that. Also, he’s not sure they can afford it. The house is nice, and his dad had paid off the mortgage years ago, but it’s not the next 20-30 years in assisted living nice. Not a good one anyway. “Does she have any friends she could live with?”
Lizzie snorts, “Dad. She had Dad and the church.” Lizzie glances at Mark. “We’ve talked about it. She can come here.”
He recoils before he can stop himself.
“Not all of us fought with Mom and Dad and hate it here quite as much as you do.” She says flatly. He flinches at the accusation.
“She’s an alcoholic,” he tries. “You want that around your kids?” It’s not what he really wants to ask, but doesn’t think Lizzie will take — ‘are you sure?’ any better than Evan had. He can learn from his mistakes. Really.
“Of course I know that,” she snaps. “I’m the one who’s here, remember? Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays, and Wednesday nights just because.” She slumps. “We have rules.”
“You can’t stop her drinking,” he points out, “not if she doesn’t think she has a problem, not if she’s not interested in stopping.”
She rolls her eyes at him. “We have rules,” she repeats. “She can’t drive if she’s been drinking, not before noon, no bottles where the kids can see them.” He hadn’t known that. “I’m not putting her in a home.”
Way to make him sound like a Dickensian villain, thanks for that Lizzie.
He rubs his forehead. “Does she want to move in here?”
Lizzie rolls her eyes again. He has vivid flashbacks to the year she turned 13 and she and their mom fought like cats and dogs. “Of course not. But staying where she is isn’t an option, so you’re going to have to be the man of the house and just tell her. She won’t listen to me.”
“And you think she’ll listen to me?”
“Of course she will, you’re the son. Dad died and now you’re the head of the family.”
“Jesus f*ck, Lizzie.”
She waves a hand. “What do you want from me? She grew up in the 60s. She married Dad when she was 21. The sexual revolution kind of missed her.”
“Please never say that again.” She snorts, and it breaks the tension. “I’m serious, Lizzie. I’m not leaving and making her all your responsibility.”
She raises her eyebrows. “So, you’re going to move back here?”
He cannot stop the instinctive, “—No.”
“Yeah, didn’t think so.” He starts to argue, but she beats him to it. “Look, I’m offering.” Looks at Mark who nods. “We’re offering.”
He tries to think about it dispassionately, and then reluctantly nods agreement. Offers what he can, "I'll help, however you need.” Wants her to know he won't leave her alone in this again. "You don't have to do this without my support." Looks over at Mark, and he nods, too.
The discussion with his mother goes somehow even worse than he’d envisioned.
He knows he and Lizzie aren’t wrong, but he keeps hearing the things his mother said on repeat long after she’s gone to bed. She’s not wrong either.
“Your father is barely in the ground and you’re trying to get rid of me.”
“I raised you in this house.”
“You left a long time ago, what gives you the right to make decisions for me now?”
He wished he had Evan, to talk to, to hold, to just — wipe away the sheer sh*ttiness of the whole situation. Instead, he goes for a run, doesn’t stop until he can’t breathe and can’t think about anything at all.
It takes another two days but his mother finally agrees, the lure of grandkids is too strong, and, Tommy thinks, she doesn’t really want to be alone in the house any more than he does.
He’s still feeling a little raw, all his flaws right on the surface, when he gets a text from Eddie, just / we need to talk /And his blood runs cold; that could mean so many things. Almost none of them are good.
He calls back and gets voicemail, belatedly thinks to look at Evan’s shift schedule and realizes they’re on shift.
It’s hours later by the time Eddie calls him back, and he’s had time to run every possible scenario in his mind. The only thing he’s sure about is that it isn’t a hospital visit, because someone would definitely have called him back about that.
"That was not ominous at all," he opens when he sees Eddie’s name on his call screen.
Eddie responds in kind, no small talk. "Did he tell you about Abby?"
Tommy thinks. "The 911 operator, the first date tracheotomy?"
Eddie hmms, asks, "Did he tell you how it ended?"
Tommy shakes his head, though Eddie can't see him. "I mean, she's married, right? Evan saved her fiancé during that train derailment?"
A deep sigh on the other end. "That's what I thought, so." A pause. "I know it's not. My place. But." Another break. "She... went on walk about, all eat pray love, find yourself, after her mom died. She left Buck at the airport and he lived in her apartment for three months, waiting, thinking she was coming back."
"She never did," Tommy guesses. "And I haven't called him."
He can almost hear the nod, "She never did,” Eddie confirms. “And you haven't called him."
He hangs up with Eddie and calls Evan. If he hadn’t had Eddie’s warning he wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong. He doesn’t try and apologize or explain, because Evan’ll just say there was no need. He glances around the room for anything to talk about. His gaze snags on his grandmother’s collection of creepy Hummel figurines that his mom had faithfully dusted for thirty years. Launches into the middle of a conversation like no time had passed. “So, what do you know about the value of Hummel figurines?”
It gets Evan to stop cold in the middle of whatever painfully polite question he’d been asking, and then more cautiously, “Hummel figurines?”
Four hours later he gets ten minute voice text from Evan about the history of the Hummel figurines, and Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel who had drawn the original sketches most of the figurines were based on. He can’t help his grin while he listens to it. LIzzie finally nudges him. “What are you so happy about?”
He saves the voicemail to listen to again later, and refuses to feel like a sap for it. “Did you know that there are not one, but two museums to the Hummel figurine? One of them is in Illinois. We could take a road trip.” She stares at him like he’s lost his mind.
He waits to call Evan back until after Lizzie goes home, after he has dinner with his mother and she retires to the living room to watch TV and not sleep. The time difference in his favor, 10 o’clock on the East Coast means Evan will be just getting back from walking Dug in LA.
"Lizzie and I talked," he starts, "and Mom finally agreed. Mom‘s gonna stay here, move in with her. We’re going to sell the house. I have to stay, help clean it out, put it on the market, get Mom moved over."
There’s a silence as Evan assimilates that. "You ok with that?"
He shrugs. "Lizzie doesn’t want to put her in an assisted living facility, she and Mark had already talked about it. She offered. Insisted. But, I feel — guilty. Like I’m getting off easy and letting her take all the hard stuff. Like I should do more.”
"Okay," Evan says reasonably, "What would that look like? Would you want to have her come here?"
"Oh f*ck no." Evan gives a choked laugh at his vehemence. He adds more quietly, "She wouldn’t go, and I wouldn’t ask that of you."
"It’s not asking if someone offers," Evan says, and Tommy doesn’t think he’s talking about himself.
“I see what you did there," he says dryly.
Evan huffs a laugh. "I wasn’t really trying to be subtle."
They sit quietly for a minute before he asks, "What about your parents?" It's not quite idle curiosity.
Evan makes an eh noise. "They've talked about maybe moving to California, maybe somewhere like Monterey, maybe LA — somewhere closer to Maddie, to Jee-yun,” Tommy clocks how he doesn’t say himself, but keeps quiet. “But they've been talking about it for a while, so I don't know if they're serious."
He wonders, not for the first time, exactly what kind of money Evan and Maddie came from. It’s hard to tell because the usual markers for growing up with money don’t show up — no stories about ski trips, or beach houses, or vacations in Europe. But, he remembers where Evan used to live, and he's seen the way Evan doesn’t do the mental math for things like last-minute business class tickets. It's a discussion for another time though. He's more curious about this. "Yeah? How do you feel about that?"
He hears Evan shrug. "Not really gonna be my decision. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do." He pauses. "Maddie said she’s okay with it."
Eddie had told him once that Buck doesn’t hold a grudge about things that happened to him, he only holds grudges for other people, and Tommy wonders what their parents had done to Maddie that Evan can’t forgive them for.
He texts Evan every morning, knows he usually won’t be awake, unless he’s on a long shift, but wants something there for him when he does wake up. Can see it in his mind, Evan stretched on their bed, looking at his phone, sleep creases across his face, sheets pushed down around his hips because he sleeps hot. Tommy figures that now that he’s gone, Dug probably won the battle over whether she gets to sleep in the bed — probably going to have to fight her to recover his side of the bed again when he gets home.
He calls Evan every night, leaves voicemails when he doesn’t reach him — it doesn’t take long for Evan to realize what he’s doing, stops picking up the phone in a panic wherever he is. He does catch a drunk Evan out with Chimney and Hen once, and that’s an amusing twenty minutes.
Evan reciprocates, likes to call while he’s driving home. Shift schedules means that sometimes that happens when Tommy’s fast asleep and he wakes up to rambling commentary on the history of the now vanished LA subway system in his voicemail.
“Did you know that Los Angeles once had one of the most robust subway systems in the country — this road, sorry, I just turned on to Santa Monica, forgot you couldn’t see that, anyway, it used to have a streetcar on it, that’s why it’s so wide, but Huntington, who owned the system, lost interest, or rather, it stopped making him money and he stopped funding it, so it went into disrepair and so people stopped riding it, hated it and then when the car lobby came, everyone jumped to support highway construction,” He takes a breath, and Tommy can hear the click click of his blinker in the background, can picture the light he’s waiting at, and then he continues, “Huntington’s money built a nice library, though — did you know they have a living plant archive, with over 80,000 varieties—?” And he was off again and Tommy gets to lie in bed listening to it before he has to get up to start his day.
Other times he’s awake, and he leaves Evan on speaker as he and Lizzie sort through the accumulated detritus of forty years of a marriage, of kids, and grandkids while their mom grudgingly supervises from the back porch.
She eyes every box they stack up for donation, every bag they load into the car for a trip to the dump with vague suspicion. Takes a sip of her ice tea, and looks at the lamp sticking out of the top of the box Tommy had just brought out. “I guess you really don’t want to keep anything from your home.”
He loses his patience. “You obviously didn’t want it either, since it was in the attic, and we all know that you never go up there.”
She sniffs. “Your grand-aunt gave that to us as a wedding present.”
He bites back a thousand comments and picks it up out of the box. “Do you want us to keep it?”
She waves a hand and goes back to her drink. “No, it’s fine. Not like I get a say here anyway.” He rolls his eyes and goes back inside.
He likes listening to Evan as he sorts through endless boxes, coughing at the dust he’s kicking up, even if neither one of them is saying anything. He can hear Evan going through the routine of his day on the other end, the jingle of Dug’s tags, the way Evan absently talks to her as he moves around, the tiny grumbling mew of Clementine deigning to allow Evan to scritch her ears. He misses all of it more than he thought possible. He’s moved back and forth across the US, and deployed halfway across the world and never been homesick before. It’s just starting to occur to him that maybe that’s because he’s never had anyone he wanted to go home to before.
He’s cleaning out the linen closet when his phone buzzes in his pocket — there's an involuntary shiver of dread that runs through him when he sees Bobby's name on his call screen. He can't think of any good reasons for Bobby to be calling him. Braces himself and picks up with a wary, "Bobby?"
Except Bobby's voice has no tension in it, just warm mid-western concern. "Hey, Tommy, is this a good time? I just wanted to call to see how you were doing."
The 118 had sent flowers for the funeral. So had Harbor. His mother had gone through the cards afterwards and paused on both of them. "People you work with?"
He'd picked up the card from Harbor. "Yes." Picked up the card from the 118 next. "This is Evan's house," and then pushed a little. "His family."
If he was waiting for a reaction he hadn't gotten one, just a nod, and a, "That was kind of them."
He hadn't expected Bobby to call to check up on him. Of all of the 118, he probably knows Bobby the least, doesn't even know him half as well as Athena, because at least she is on the 118 Wives group text.
He fumbles his answer to Bobby now. "I'm okay?" Doesn't mean it to come out as a question, but it does anyway, a little.
"Fathers and sons can be complicated," Bobby says easily, huffs a small laugh. "I know that in both directions now." Tommy knows Bobby had a family before he came to LA, doesn't know the details, but knows it ended in tragedy. He doesn't think Bobby's talking about them.
"How is Evan doing?" he asks.
Bobby's voice is fond. "He's fine. Worried about you. I didn't call to talk about Buck, though. I called to see how you were doing."
Evan sees Bobby as somewhere between a boss and a replacement father figure — and having met Phillip Buckley, Tommy thinks Evan’s made a solid choice there — he's never considered that Bobby would extend that kind of paternal/parental concern to him. Hadn't realized he'd made the leap from boyfriend to family.
It feels disloyal to sit here in his father's house and be comforted by someone who could, maybe one day, be considered a surrogate father (father-in-law, a small ungovernable part of his brain suggests quietly). His dad will never be here again, he'll never be able to mend those fences and — he’d made peace with that, he thought.
Gerrard had kicked up some residual bullsh*t though, he’d had to remind himself for months that he didn't have to hide, that he didn't have to try to be someone, anyone but exactly who he was.
And now, he buried his father. He's in the ground, and he can never look at Tommy again and see — well, anything. It’s not even that he thought he’d ever really have a conversation with his father that brought resolution or reconciliation, but even the possibility is gone now, and that’s harder to live with than he’d anticipated. The last thing he said to his father is just…the last thing he said to his father.
But, for all of the bullsh*t, for all of the reminders he’s had this last year, these last few weeks, of who he was, he’s also got people like Bobby reminding him of who he’s become, that he came out the other side of all of it a better person, one he likes.
And that person he likes, is better at letting people in than Tommy was when he lived in this house. Bobby’s a good reminder that he needs to try as hard with Lizzie, with his mom, as he does with Jerry and Brian, with the 118.
He and Lizzie started in the attic, work their way through the house. They talk. Hold things up that spark memories. Hold things up to wonder out loud what they are, why anyone would have kept them.
It's more time than he's spent with his sister since they both lived under this roof.
"So what's he like?" Lizzie asks one day, after he’s just hung up with an Evan who was hyped up after a rope rescue that day — two hikers who got themselves down a canyon, but apparently didn't consider they'd need to get back up, too. It was the best kind of rescue; nobody really hurt and he got to strap on a harness, dangle off the side of a cliff, and get paid for it. Tommy had listened, half amused, half a little turned on, snorted at the faint sound of Chim's commentary in the background.
He eyes her over a stack of boxes. "Evan?"
She nods. "Evan,” finger quotes at him, “call me Buck.” She grins, “Give me the dirt."
"He's a firefighter?"
She groans. "Oh my god, how are you so bad at this? Does he have family?"
"One sister, a niece." Fraught relationship with his parents. "Our second date was her wedding."
She laughs. "Your boy moves fast." She puts down the embroidered tea towel she's holding — one of a set of seven, one for each day of the week — and just, why? "You seem happy."
"I am."
She holds up the towel. "Thrift store? Church sale?" Puts them in the church box. "I'm glad. You deserve that. I'm glad we got to meet him. Maybe next time there doesn't have to be a funeral." It’s an olive branch, and he takes it, even if he’s not quite sure what to do with it next.
Sean and Maggie come over after school a couple of times to help sort through the house. They're brutally efficient, or maybe just brutal — Tommy says something once, and Sean's like, "Do you want any of this? No, right? I certainly don't." And Tommy can't disagree with the assessment.
Spending time with them reminds him a little bit of Jenny and Max, makes him miss them. Knows that Evan's lonely on his own, although he’d never say it. He babysits Jee as much as Maddie feels like she can get away with it without taking advantage. And, Tommy knows that Evan talks to Chris regularly, but he’s pretty clear that the phone calls just aren't the same as how things used to be. Evan never explicitly says anything but Tommy’s getting pretty good at reading between the lines, at least about some things. And, Evan wears his heart on his sleeves with the kids.
He can't bring Chris home, but he knows some other kids who would probably enjoy being the focus of Evan's attention. Calls Jerry and asks if Evan can take the kids to the zoo, give him and Brian a day off. He's never heard someone say yes so fast.
It's like a game of telephone to get the story out of them afterwards — Jenny tells Jerry, who calls him, talks about how Evan apparently has a backstage pass to the zoo, and Tommy realizes that Eddie was actually maybe underselling it when he said that Evan and Chris went all the time, knew everyone.
Jerry passes the phone to Jenny and Max who talk over each other to tell him about how Evan greeted staff by name, how everyone asked him about Chris (“Who’s Chris, Uncle Tommy?” Jenny asks/ “And why is he in Texas if Evan’s here and misses him?”). He knows the animals, too, their feeding schedules, little details about their enclosures. (“We got to meet Jim. He’s a boa constrictor.” Max breaks in to tell him. “He’s the coolest.” Tommy is not clear if Max is talking about Evan or the snake. Could be both.)
Evan sent pictures throughout the day so he can follow along through Jenny and Max’s tumbled recitation — Jenny standing in front of the meerkat exhibit, holding one of the sloths, an expression of ecstatic delight. He texts Evan the video of Kristen Bell meeting a sloth in response.
“I’m sorry.”
He looks up, realizes his sister is looking over his shoulder and fights the urge to cover his phone like he’s looking at something he shouldn’t be.
She continues, “But when I asked about him, did you somehow think the fact that he has kids wasn’t relevant?”
His mom appears around the corner. “He has kids?”
Oh dear lord. Tommy looks down at his phone and back to them and has to laugh, “No, no, those are my friends Jerry and Brian’s kids. Evan took them to the zoo.” He doesn’t quite hold his breath to see if his mother makes a comment about two fathers. She doesn’t, but maybe she thought Jerry was a woman’s name. He’s tempted to force the issue, and bites his tongue instead and reminds himself to be charitable.
“Oh,” his mom looks crestfallen, “he doesn’t have kids?”
Tommy doesn’t really want to try to explain about Chris, that would just completely confuse the issue. Just says, “No kids,” shaking his head. She looks unexpectedly upset about that, and he doesn’t know how to take that.
There’s a break in the stream of pictures — he tries to calculate the time difference, for lunch maybe? And then a video of Max, sitting down, a giant boa constrictor shifting and coiling around him. Max looks transported. In the background he can hear Evan saying, “I told you Jim was a sweetheart.” / you should send that to Jerry / he tells Evan, genuinely regrets that he’s not there to see Jerry’s expression at the sight of Max with a boa constrictor’s head resting on his shoulder.
Later that night he gets a text from Evan / You set me up / … / Jerry’s never gonna let me babysit again /
It looks like Jerry’s kids treated Evan like their own personal Pied Piper, so he gives that low odds of happening. Besides, he needs all the leverage he can get to keep his favorite uncle status.
There are pictures of Evan in there too, clearly taken by the kids, or by the zoo personnel, and his smile looks incandescent. He hadn’t realized quite how large a hole Chris had left in Evan’s life, too.
At first Eddie had talked about Chris being gone like it was only going to be a couple of days, a week max, but incrementally the time frame kept shifting, before the 4th of July, by early August, before summer break ended. And then Chris was starting school in El Paso, and that means he’s there at least through Christmas. Tommy’s heard Evan and Eddie talking about how if he’s enrolled then he should stay for the full year, instead of shifting back halfway through the year, that he’s less likely to miss things that way. That it’ll be good for him to finish out the year with new friends, instead of dropping him into a new classroom again part way through the year.
It might be the logical decision, the pragmatic way to make the best of reality, but he knows Evan’s not happy about it, can’t imagine what Eddie’s feeling. He hasn't heard from Eddie since the warning about Buck. He texts, but gets left on read. Evan's still going over there on Fridays (Eddie's taking over Evan's movie education for the duration — and Evan insists they watch all the PG-13 and R rated movies that Chris isn’t allowed to watch yet).
Tommy's worried. And worse, he's not there in person to be blown off, so he can't see Eddie's face when he's doing it.
Tommy can’t bring Chris home, and introducing Eddie to Jerry’s kids would do more harm than good, but, watching Evan with Jenny and Max, he realized that maybe Eddie could use some help getting out of his head — and Jerry and Brian helped him. Maybe they can help Eddie, too.
Plus, it feels good to do something other than spend his days surrounded by dust and ghosts.
He runs the idea by Evan who just says, “Tell them no underground fight clubs.”
Tommy bites back the automatic response of “the first rule about—,” that threatens to escape. Calls Jerry and Henry, asks them to kidnap Eddie, get him to the gym, get him to work it out. Tells Jerry, “Like you did with me.”
Brian sends him a photo of the four of them, Eddie’s hands raised and wild grin on his face and feels like maybe that’s a start.
His mother turns on the playoffs after dinner, fussing with the old radio that’s still in the living room, probably just for this, before she settles on the couch with an indeterminate piece of knitting to listen to the game — because only radio announcers really know how to call a game, he can remember her saying. He hasn’t watched baseball religiously since 1992 when the Orioles moved into Camden Yard and the entire state of Maryland lived or died by Cal Ripken’s name on the daily lineup card. And, he’d forgotten that baseball had always been her thing.
She leans against one side of the couch and he sits next to her, feet up on the ottoman. He automatically leaves room for Dug to nudge her way in between them, can almost feel where she’d be pressed against him. Misses her, and her particular brand of chaos more than he’d imagined.
He listens to the game with half his attention, scrolls on his phone through a rapid fire series of incoming texts with the other half. The third time his phone buzzes, his mother looks over, asks who’s texting him. “The 118,” he says, then adds, “Evan’s firehouse. They had a barbeque.” Shows her a series of Evan getting schooled by Denny and Mara at some video game, faces animated. Maddie sends one of Evan giving Jee a piggyback ride and Chimney forwards some of Evan sitting cross legged at Bobby and Athena's coffee table, very seriously coloring in a page in Jee's coloring book with her.
“They look nice,” she says, “It’s good that you have people.”
He nods, can’t say he hasn’t wished his life had been different, that his blood had been his family as much as his chosen one but, maybe the fences are starting to be mended. In places.
They both go back to the game, and Tommy dozes off on the couch listening to her mutter about the umpires. It’s so easy here to fall back into old habits, old patterns, but this one he doesn’t mind so much.
Watching the game does make him go off on a rant to Evan the next evening, can feel Evan's amusem*nt like an ambient force through thousands of miles of ether. “I mean, Murderers' Row Yankees were one thing, like, except Babe Ruth, they were all generally normal-sized humans," Waves way Evan's murmured, "who are you calling normal sized?" even though he can’t see him and finishes his thought, "But Soto, Stanton and Judge, like how is anyone supposed to compete? They're just trying to buy themselves a damned pennant."
"So, not a Yankees fan," Evan says when he finally winds down.
"f*cking Yankees," he mutters and Evan laughs at him.
"We should go to a game when you get back." He likes the way Evan keeps making plans for them when he gets home, it feels like there's a reward waiting for him at the end of this, like a promise that one day he will be home. Evan's still talking. “Maddie used to take me sometimes, not to big games — Philly was too far — but to the local games. We’d get crackerjacks, and those sh*tty stadium nachos, spend the afternoon.”
“I know a guy who could get us tickets to the Dodgers next season.”
Evan grins. “Of course you do.” Pauses, cheekily asks, "So what's your opinion on Betts, Freeman and Ohtani?" Tommy really regrets that he can’t throw a pillow at Evan.
When Tommy begins counting his trip in weeks instead of days, Evan starts sending him a daily accounting via photographs — Tommy figures it's Evan’s way of reminding him what he's missing, giving him something to look forward to. And he appreciates it, but he really doesn’t need the reminder. This house, this town, this state haven’t been home in a very long time and though he settles into old routines faster than he’d like, nothing feels quite right. He doesn’t fit here anymore.
First it’s pictures of the house, Evan fixed the back steps that were creaking, changed out the light that they both hated in the living room. He gets photos of Dug, with a ball, upside down asleep, curled into Evan’s side. Of Clementine supervising Evan making dinner from her throne on top of the fridge. He gets snapshots of the firehouse, of Eddie and Hen and Chimney — even Bobby, in a salute from where he was clearly making a meal for the team.
Once he gets a photo of Evan's coffee cup, with Case's scrawl demanding proof of life from Tommy or he's going to take drastic action. / does that mean they’re going to hold your extra shot of espresso hostage? / he asks. Evan sends him / 😱/ in return.
He gets a picture of Jee and Evan with whipped cream on their noses, tilts it to show his sister.
“How many kids don’t y’all have?” His sister asks.
He counts in his head, "Four?" he offers, and finds a picture of Evan and Chris from before everything had fallen apart. "To be clear, all these kids do actually come with their own parents." Leaves out that Chris is maybe not quite like the rest of them.
Lizzie passes his phone back. "Cute kid." Gives him a sly smile. "Cute boyfriend, too." He inexplicably finds himself flushing at the comment. It makes her cackle with laughter.
He feels bad for how long he’s been gone, how much Evan’s had to hold together on his own when he gets a picture of Clementine curled up on his pillow with the comment / I think your cat is blaming me for your absence / … / she keeps getting up and leaving the room every time I walk in / … / hard not to take that personally /.
/ I’m sorry / he sends, / thank you for taking care of the kids. /
/ you don’t have to apologize / Evan replies. / you take care of your family and I can hold down the fort. Clementine can deal. /
Then Evan seems to settle in, starts sending… thirst traps — Tommy’s not sure what else to call them. Evan at the gym at the firehouse, shirt dark with sweat, shoulders on full display. Evan at home, in the backyard with the raised beds behind him, in ratty jeans that hang low on his hips, sweaty from yard work.
Evan in bed, eyes dark and hooded, a quirk of his eyebrow, arm above his head just so.
Tommy wants to lick his tattoos, can taste the memory of his skin.
Evan has sh*tty timing, though — that one came in the middle of the night while Tommy was sleeping.
He misses him, and he misses the sex, honestly. It's not the longest he's ever gone, not by a long shot. And he's slept alone for far longer than he's ever shared a bed with anyone. But, he's gotten used to the warm weight of Evan in bed next to him, the way he snores unless you kick him and force him onto his side. He's gotten used to morning breath kisses, and the slow rocking slide of morning sex, still more asleep than awake when they start, waking up as org*sm builds. Better than any alarm clock he's ever bought.
He's gotten used to the way Evan touches him - casual brush of a hand against his back as he walks behind him in the living room, nudge with his hip and then an apologetic kiss when Evan wants him to move out of the way in the kitchen so that he can finish dinner, hand on his thigh as they read, head on his chest as they work their way through the list of TV Evan's never seen.
He misses — not just Evan's bare stomach, or thigh, or that expanse of chest, although that would be nice too, but the kind of casual affection he hadn't realized he'd gotten used to having until it was 3,000 miles away.
He'd forgotten that condolences don’t end with the funeral and the wake.
His parents had bought the house when he was still too young to remember moving in. His memories of his childhood are colored with an endless series of renovation projects — handing his father nails and screws, learning how to measure twice and cut once. His mother had volunteered at his school and the church. His father had been active in the union. They weren't quite pillars of the community, but they had a community. Or they did when he was younger. His mother’s seems to have narrowed now that he and Lizzie are grown, church and not much else.
The women from church do bring dinners and sit with his mother (which is kind, although he’s banning casseroles from their house for at least a year when he gets home). Their sons and daughters stop by for obligatory visits, to hug Lizzie and awkwardly shake his hand, make polite conversation about where he's been for the last decade or two.
He’s sitting at the table with his mom, while two women he doesn’t know heat up something he probably doesn’t want to eat and she asks, apparently out of nowhere, "You ever think about kids?"
And he can feel his hackles rising, defensive, even though she hasn't really said anything yet. Has to take a breath to calm down, make his voice come out curious instead of combative. "Not really. Why?"
She shrugs, attention nominally on Wheel of Fortune playing on the tv on the counter, "No reason." She nods at his phone. "Just seems like your boyfriend likes them. I wondered—" She stops short and he raises his eyebrows at her in question, and after a moment she continues, "I wondered if you'd bring them here, let me meet them."
He stares at her, too shocked to come up with an answer immediately, and watches her face close, and the way she nods, like that was the answer she'd expected. Has to say. "We haven't talked about it. I don't know." Takes a breath. "But yeah, Mom, if I had kids, if we had kids, we'd bring them here." Can see her start to ask something and adds firmly, "But, we are not there yet, and have not even discussed it. It is not even on the table right now."
She glances at his phone and says, "hmmm." But there's a small relieved smile there.
His father's friends from the union also come by to offer advice (which is actually helpful more often than it isn’t, this isn’t his hometown anymore) and to tell him his father was proud of him (which he doubts, and leaves him angry and sad and unable to voice any of it. Chokes on the snide comments that constantly threaten to escape).
He doesn’t want to talk about it when Evan calls, wants to talk about anything that isn’t this, but he appreciates that Evan always asks. He asks how Chris is doing instead, and listens to Evan talk about the new module Chris just started in social studies, which segues into being worried about Chris and then about Eddie, although Evan says he seems to be doing a little better since Tommy found a safe way for him to hit things. He only feels a little bad that he’s using Evan's worry to distract himself because he’s pretty sure Evan knows what he’s doing and giving him what he can.
He and Lizzie finish the attic and the upstairs bedrooms, and make reasonable work of the living and dining room. He leaves Lizzie to tackle the kitchen to salvage what she wants for her own, while he ventures into the garage.
He comes back inside almost as soon as he'd walked out, and his mother looks up from the crossword puzzle she's doing. "Forget something?"
He gestures in the direction of the garage. "Dad's car? The Mustang? It's still there."
He hadn't forgotten the car exactly — a '67 Mustang he'd always been a little convinced his dad had loved more than either of his kids — but he'd assumed it had been sold at some point.
His mother looks up. "Of course it's still there. Your father loved that car." Wonders if she'd been jealous of it too, or grateful it gave his father something to do after he retired.
He glances towards the hook beside the fridge where the Mustang keys had always hung; it never needed to be said that nobody but his dad was allowed to drive her. They're still there.
His mother follows his gaze, and her mouth twists in something that looks like genuine amusem*nt. "You want to drive it?"
"It still runs?"
She gets up and throws him the keys. "Go find out." He looks at the keys he'd caught by reflex, and thinks about the boxes in the garage that need to be sorted through, and looks up to see the unexpectedly fond look on his mother's face. "Go ahead. You've earned a little fun." He closes his hand around the keys and turns towards the door.
"Be home by dinner," she calls after him, and he smiles at the familiarity of it — what she'd called after him and Lizzie every afternoon when they left to run wild through the neighborhood (well, he had, Lizzie had mostly gone three doors down to Sandra's house).
The Mustang gleams cherry red when he flicks back the cover and when he turns the ignition, it purrs.
And, he’d forgotten how much he likes to drive. He's been in LA too long, with its traffic, and web of never ending highways and surface streets that never go quite where you want and traffic lights that stall everything. LA is where the joy of anyone with a love of fast cars goes to die.
One of the first things he did with his Army money when he finished Basic was buy his own car, because he and his dad didn’t agree on much but buying American and going fast. He couldn’t afford vintage, could barely afford four wheels and air conditioning — but he got some freedom. Still has great memories of driving that car — windows down, the smell of damp earth and growing things, sun on his arm as he flew around, thinking he’d live forever. Untouchable.
When he got stationed in Hawaii, he’d left the car next to his dad’s to drive around when he was on leave. Bought a beater on base from an old guy who was retiring; he’d sold it in turn to a lieutenant when he’d left — it’s probably still there; nothing really ever leaves Hawaii.
Working on their cars with his dad after he got back from Iraq is one of the only things he wants to remember from that period. He’d loved his, but sold it to afford the move to Los Angeles. Doesn’t regret it.
First car he bought when he moved to LA wasn’t falling apart but only just, held together by blood, sweat and copious amounts of duct tape. Eventually traded up to his truck. Told himself he got it to lug sh*t around for the house but honestly? He just couldn’t take sitting on the highway, balancing his clutch in stop-and-go traffic anymore. He and Eddie had bonded early over their trucks; Eddie likes to talk about the modifications he’s made or is planning to make for Chris — wants to pass it on to him when he turns 16.
He drives down the road now — sedately through town until he hits the highway and he can open her up and give her her head — and pictures taking the Mustang home with him to California, cruising along the PCH, windows down, blasting Pearl Jam like he’s 20 again. Pictures Evan in the car next to him, sun flush on his cheeks and curls blown out from the wind. It’s a good image.
"How are you doing, really?" Evan asks later that night, when he's in bed, not so much because he's tired, but because otherwise he has to be in the living room with his mom. They’re doing better, but by the end of the day he just needs to not have to second guess everything he says.
"Tired," he admits. And somehow it's easier to say that over the phone than it would be in person. "Not physically, just—"
"Yeah," Evan agrees, "I get that." There's a lull and he listens to Evan breathe and wishes he was here on the other side of the bed. Is glad Evan’s not here, because he's not sure he could get through this without breaking a little bit if Evan was here watching, and he doesn't want that, not yet, not until he's safe at home. He doesn't mind if Evan sees, just not here.
"Will you miss it?" Evan asks. "The house?"
He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, can still see a faint stain from where the pipes had burst when he was in 5th grade. He remembers helping his dad rip out drywall to fix the damage. "I don't think so," he says finally. "It's been a long time since I've lived here. I don't have good memories of the last time I lived here," After Iraq, after losing Cherry, after his discharge when he was floating aimless, without a purpose for the first time in ten years, no idea what to do with the rest of his life except not be here. “Or the last time I was here.” The fight with his dad. "Will you? When your parents sell their house?"
"No," Evan says promptly. "But that house was never a home."
And he's noticed — you'd have to be blind not to notice — the way neither Evan or Maddie talk about their childhoods, like their lives started when they got to LA. On the rare occasions Evan does talk about his childhood, his stories are always about Maddie. Maddie taught him to ride a bike. Maddie took him out for ice cream after he made the football team. Maddie checked his math homework. Where Tommy’s version would feature his parents; Evan's always star Maddie. He’s met their parents, has heard about Daniel, can guess at the parts Evan’s never told him explicitly.
"I miss," he says and then stalls— 'you', he thinks, but it feels too raw to say, "—home," he finishes awkwardly instead.
"Home misses you, too," Evan says softly.
Evan is not above making use of home — specifically and particularly their bedroom — to distract him. Evan texts, / you alone? /
He's really not thinking when he answers / yes / and that is 100% on him.
He gets a rapid series of filthy images, a long shot down Evan's torso, hand wrapped around his dick. Another, a close up, thumb swiping at the head. Another, clearly after, co*ck lying heavy against his thigh, streak of come across his stomach.
/ I'm in the church parking lot / he tells him, and tries very hard to think cold thoughts. Can’t help but look back at his phone and — want.
/ whoops / ... / call me later? when you're actually alone /
The house is virtually empty now, just the big furniture left that they arranged to donate to the church. He goes over to Lizzie’s to help her prep her house, move in some of his mom’s things, realizes she’s been planning for this for a while — set up a guest room in the basem*nt with an attached bath, a rec room with a wet bar.
Lizzie sees him looking. “Started planning when the kids were little,” she shrugs, “figured they could make use of it until we needed it for something else.”
“Sure,” he says. “And there was no guarantee that I’d come back.”
“And that,” she agrees. “But you did, so help me get all her stuff set up.” It’s forgiveness he’s not sure he’s earned, but he’ll take it nonetheless.
He gets to work.
After that, it all seems to go fast — he drives his mom to Lizzie’s, goes back to an empty house and sends Evan a classic / u up? / text and follows it up with an eggplant emoji and his own thirst trap — maybe not quite as artful as Evan's are, but bare chest and fly of his jeans open. Grins at how fast Evan accepts his FaceTime call.
The guys from the church come the next day with a moving van to pick up the furniture. The realtor friend Lizzie knew shows up with the stager to plan for putting the house on the market. Tommy stays out of their way, hides in the backyard and thinks not for the first time how much Dug would love this yard.
Digs his phone out of his pocket and calls Evan, pressing the phone to his ear. Grins when he picks up,, “Hey, guess what?”
“Chicken butt,” Evan replies automatically.
Tommy has to snort a laugh, “You have been hanging out with Jee too much,” he says. “How would you like some older company?”
“Oh! Do Jenny and Max want to go to the zoo again? Because that would be great, I saw there was a baby giraffe born a few months ago and he’s just coming out of iso — and that’s not what you meant, is it?”
“No,” shakes his head, “not really.”
There’s a pause and then. “Are you—” but Evan doesn’t complete the sentence.
And Tommy wishes he could see his face but, “How would you feel about flying out here and road-tripping home?”
In the end, the car's the only thing he takes back home from his childhood — well, the car and a slightly improved relationship with his sister and mom. He has dinner with them all, one last time before he picks up Evan at the airport. It's nice. Easier than he could have imagined a few weeks ago.
His mother slides him a sly look near the end of the evening. "So, you'll be back with my grandchildren?"
His groan of "MOM," gets drowned out under Sean and Maggie and Mark asking questions, and Lizzie doesn't say anything, but she hides a smirk behind her glass. He raises a pointed eyebrow at her, and she just shrugs and takes another bite of chicken tetrazzini (and seriously, he's hiding every single one of their casserole dishes when he gets home).
He glares at them all impartially. "This is what I get for coming home."
Lizzie grins and reaches across the table to pat his hand. "There there, you get used to it."
“Still don’t have kids, Ma,” he groans. “But yes, I promise, you’ll meet any hypothetical ones that we have. Some day. A long time from now. Maybe.”
Lizzie snorts. He raises an eyebrow at her, and she waggles her fingers at him. "Hand me your phone." Pauses. "Wait, am I going to see something that's going to scar me?"
If she opens up his text chain with Evan, yes, probably. "Depends on what you want to pull up."
She takes it warily when he hands it to her. "Your photo roll."
"No, that'll be fine."
She gives him a marginally dubious look, but thumbs open his photo roll and hands it back to him. "Tell me what you see."
He skims through it. A lot of it lately is photos of things from the house, things he sent to Evan with a story, or to ask if they want them. If he goes further back though, from before all of this — it's Evan, Dug, Clementine, Evan with Jee, Evan with Denny and Mara, Evan with Sarah from next door, Evan with Jenny and Max. Gets her point when he has a moment of regret that he’d have to go back way further to find ones of Evan and Chris, and realizes Chris has never seen his house. Doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction, so he looks up at her. "Your point?"
She snorts, like she knows he’s stalling for time. "You should really think about having the kids conversation."
He chokes on the mouthful of chicken and noodles he’d just swallowed. "The hell, Lizzie?"
She sniffs, nods at his phone, “You can't say it's that outlandish a question."
He picks the part of it that he can cope with. "We're not married."
"Well, no. Not yet." And then she pushes herself up to collect plates from the table, leaves him staring after her while everyone else at the table not so quietly laughs at him. “You don’t have to be married to have kids, you know. This is the twenty-first century.”
And he’s not really sure how he feels, but he knows that Evan was built to love people, to help them be the best versions of themselves. Evan’s never said it outright, but he doesn’t really need to ask to know that Evan wants kids. (he’ll still ask - he’s not stupid). He needs to figure out what he feels about it before he asks though. He files it away to think about later, but can’t quite box it away as easily as he expected.
He drives the Mustang when he goes to pick Evan up at the airport the next day. Evan gives a low whistle when he sees the car. "Well f*ck me."
He grins, impossibly glad to see him. "You talking to me or the car?"
Evan's smile widens and he steps in close, and Tommy feels like he has honest to god butterflies in his stomach. "Both?" Kisses him, and he can tell Evan plans to keep this family friendly, but it's been nearly a month since he dropped Evan at the airport, and it feels like longer, and he doesn't care if they're making a scene at Baltimore Washington International Airport. He tilts Evan's chin and takes the kiss deeper, messier. Hears a wolf whistle on the periphery of his hearing and reluctantly breaks the kiss. Evan licks his lips, and Tommy has to remind himself that (a) they're staying in a hotel tonight because there's no room at Lizzie's, and (b) everyone is expecting them for dinner and traffic is going to suck so they can’t actually go there right now. He takes a breath and pushes Evan back a step. Evan sways towards him slightly. “Later,” he promises.
Evan gives him a hooded look. “Going to hold you to that.” Drops his bag in the back seat of the car. “Wanna show me what your baby can do?”
The next morning they go over to Lizzie’s to say goodbye to his mother, his sister, promise to come back sometime soon, and he’s not even dreading the promise. And then they throw their suitcases in the trunk and Tommy slides into the driver’s seat, looking over at Evan, who’s grinning from ear to ear.
“You ready?” He asks.
“Always,” Evan answers.
He puts the car in reverse, “You and me, we’re gonna get out of town and really let our hair down.”
Evan looked over blankly.
Tommy sighs, “Thelma and Louise?”
Buck shakes his head.
And Tommy can’t with how much he loves this man even if he never understands half of what he says. “We’ll have a better ending, though,” he tells him, “buckle up.”
Epilogue
“They die at the end!” Evan complains several nights later when they’re lounging on a hotel room bed, laptop balanced on a stack of pillows. “Why do you keep making me watch these movies where people die?”
“They fly off into the sunset together,” Tommy argues. “It’s empowering. It’s romantic.”
Evan squints at him dubiously. “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
It takes Tommy a second. “Wait, Princess Bride? You finished it without me?”
Evan shrugs and smirks, looks Tommy up and down and informs him, “Well, there is a shortage of perfect breasts—” and Tommy can’t help himself, he shuts Evan up with a kiss and well, there’s not a lot of coherent conversation the rest of that night. They do rescue the laptop before it falls, though.
