Page 47 of Break Your Fall

I laugh again, then the line goes quiet, a moment of us listening to each other breathing before I say, “Well, now I have a room to clean, so…”

“Yeah,” Tommy blurts out, then scoffs. “Of course he’d leave it all. Do you want me to come over? I mean, I can help since. . .”

“No, it’s okay, it won’t take me long.” I nod as if he can see me, then I tell him, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” he says with some hesitation, a slight whisper, and I stare down at my phone for several seconds after we hang up.

I get to work on my door, a smile back on my face as I think of placing several of Banks’s photos around the house to further traumatize my mother.

14

Shirts Versus Skins

Thomas

I miss the mice in my bed. There’s no one there to wake them up.

That’s one of my first thoughts when I wake up this morning and bounce-shift on the quiet mattress in the bedroom of the guest house. I chuckle into the pillow before I sigh at the other quiet, reminding me that Idon’tmiss my parents shouting through the walls until they’ve lost their voices.

I look at my phone on the nightstand as it glows with my favorite notification—a text from Reyna. She’s sent me a picture of her kitchen trash can with one of Banks’s photos ripped and scattered on top of the garbage. Valerie found another one.

A smile finds me, and so does the missing. I miss Reyna the most in the morning. When the sun shines on a fresh day and my mind is reset, it still says her name. Her face is the first face I see before my eyes are even open. Her voice is the first voice I hear, soft in my head. Then my eyes open and I picture her here with me, seeing the sun’s rays highlight her sleepy face as she opens her eyes beside me, wishing I could spend this time with her every morning for as long as we’re both still breathing.

My usual waking thoughts of Reyna, on the heels of squeaky box springs, have been stronger than before now that she knows.

I groan into the pillow, then push myself out of bed to face the life I don’t have.

Then, realizing I’d failed to respond, I reopen our messages and put what I can of my wish into words.

Come over?

I obsess over that question mark as I yank up a pair of jeans over my boxers, showing myself as an uncertain idiot, staring down the phone until it glows again.

How’d you know?she’s sent back, with a wink attached, and I breathe through a laugh.

She was already coming.

“Tommy? You up?”

Shit.What does my dad want?

I’m halfway to the living room to find out when I realize I’m still shirtless. I slow to a stop mid-turnaround, but he’s spotted me, and by the way he’s staring, he’s not here to play on my team.

And it’s about time I expose these walls to my athletic physique. I’ve worked hard for it.

“Don’t you have something you can put on?” comes out as expected as I approach the kitchen.

“Shirts versus skins, Dad,” I say as I search through the stock I’ve filled the shelves with for some breakfast.

He snorts as I reach for a bag of bagels, then says, “If your mother hadn’t kept up maintenance on this place, it wouldn’t be so homey.”

The silverware clangs as I open the drawer at the taunt, laced with a hurt he’s trying to hide that I’d rather be out here with myself than in there with him and Mom.

“If you had kept up maintenance on your marriage, it wouldn’t be so loud.” I raise my voice to emphasize my point. “Then maybe home would be homey.”

In lieu of responding, Dad sets my basketball on the bar where I’m standing as I place a butter knife on the bagel bag. “You left this in your bedroom.”

My reflexes slap the ball off and it bounces away across the floor. Dad’s eyes follow where it rolls, then look back at me like he’s found the answer to his game of Clue.

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