Page 26 of College Town

Lawson stares at his face a moment, the deep, furious grooves along his forehead, bracketing his pursed-up mouth, and he can only marvel. This is the sweet-faced boy he fell so hard and so fast for; whose memory has tainted each and every quasi-romantic entanglement he’s suffered as an adult. And he’s in themob?

He doesn’t know how he feels about that until a sudden, uncontrollable fit of the giggles attacks him lungs-first, and then he’s doubled over, wracked with laughter, choking on it until his eyes water. He can’t see, eyes tearing up, and misses the mark when he tries to lean an elbow on the table edge. He slips, and slaps a hand down to catch himself; hears their glasses jump and rattle, thinks the napkin dispenser tips over, judging by the metallic clatter.

As he chokes back the worst of the guffaws – and that’s what they are; he’s always had a loud, braying, ugly laugh – he hears that Tommy is saying his name, over and over, and has probably been doing so for a while.

“Law. Law. Lawson. Fuck, can you just – listen –Lawson Phillip Granger.”

He sounds so pissy, so much like Lawson’s not-so-dearly-departed grandmother, that it sets Lawson off on another round of breathless laughter.

A napkin appears before his face, and he accepts it with another gusty laugh and uses it to dab at his eyes.

When he’s finally composed himself – mostly – he wipes his eyes once more and glances across the table, still swallowing a last chuckle.

Tommy sits ramrod straight against the back of the booth, arms folded tightly across his chest, hands tucked into his armpits. He used to sit like that as a kid, when Lawson was being exceptionally annoying, and it sends a dart of bittersweet nostalgia through Lawson’s chest, vaporizing the last of his laughter.

Tommy’s face is pinched in a way that would be comical under different circumstances. In the wake of his laughing fit, Lawson feels hollow, and buzzy, and like all the adrenaline has fallen out through the soles of his feet. None of this has been funny, save the fact that he’s here at all, that he’s giving Tommy a chance to tell a story that he can’t, orwon’t, even tell.

Lawson wants to go home. Badly. He flattens his hands against the table edge so they won’t shake.

“You done?” Tommy asks.

“Are you Don Corleone?” Lawson counters.

Tommy takes a deep breath in through his nose, nostrils flaring, eyes glittering…and then the corners of his mouth quirk. Once. Twice. Like he wants to grin…

And then he does grin, slow, and lovely, and softer than Lawson expected. A grin like he used to give, freely and sweetly, when they were teenage idiots holed up in Lawson’s room.

It’s devastating.

“No,” Tommy says, the stiff line of his shoulders easing. “I’m not Don Corleone.” His smile widens a fraction, and Lawson’s heart trips all over itself.

Lawson swallows with difficulty. “Tony Soprano, then,” he says, voice going a little unsteady.

Tommy shakes his head, and when his smile deepens, his eyes narrow, dark slits straight from Lawson’s memory.

Shit. Oh, shit, this was a terrible idea.

Whatever Lawson’s expression does, it causes Tommy’s smile to slip. He clears his throat, and loosens the tight cross of his arms, and grows serious. In a low voice that won’t carry farther than across the table, he says, “My dad was the president of a luxury insurance company. Low profile, catering to the rich and famous. Unlisted, not available to the general public.” He makes ayou knowgesture, but Lawson of course doesn’t know, being neither rich nor famous. “All of his clients were real assholes, some of them dangerous assholes.” He shakes his head. “Dad crossed the wrong person. After he died, Mom freaked. My uncle – Dad’s brother – was his partner in the business, and tried to get her to stay in New York. But she packed us up and moved west, and we ended up here.” He shrugs again, as if he’s actually explainedanything.

Well, it explainssomethings.

He remembers Tommy and Noah’s mother as a small, bird-boned woman with a face so gaunt it prematurely aged her. She had Tommy’s eyes, big and velvet brown, but sad, deeply sad, and nervous, darting all over Lawson and then down the street the few times they met. Fear had limned every inch of her, from the tense set of her shoulders, to the way she kept her hands half-curled, to the way she swept her shining brown hair behind her ears again and again, head turning side to side, always watching, always waiting for something to leap out at her.

It explains Tommy in his baggy sweatshirt that first day in social studies. The guarded look he shot Lawson when he spoke to him for the first time. The way he always wanted to stay over at Lawson’s, but didn’t want Lawson to go to his house.

But it doesn’t explain the move back to New York – he hadn’t even known it was New York they’d moved to, until now. They could have been in fucking Kalamazoo for all Lawson knew.

And, worst, most painful of all, it doesn’t explain why, before the For Sale sign sprouted in the lawn of the Cattaneos’ house, before Lawson peered into the windows and saw the empty rooms, the clean patches on the carpet where the furniture had sat, Tommy pulled back, and pushed him away.“Lawson, I can’t.”

“Why did you leave?” Lawson asks, and hates the shaky, small sound of his voice.

Tommy looks frustrated. He rubs absently at his jaw. Fidgets with the stubble there, that old nervous energy like his mother’s, like he possessed as a boy. “I had just turned eighteen, and the business…my uncle needed my help.”

Lawson feels his brows go up. “Whathelpis an eighteen-year-old high school dropout gonna be to aninsurancefirm?” He wants to snatch the words back when Tommy scowls. Not thehelppart, because no adult goes to his teenage nephew for help running a prestigious company for the rich and famous in need of insurance, but thedrop-outpart. That was nasty.

Not as nasty as rejecting you and leaving forever without an explanation, his own inner teenager reminds him.

“I’m not a drop-out,” Tommy says, jaw getting tight. “I finished in New York.”

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